Center For Mind, Brain, And Culture

Moral outrage shapes fundamental aspects of social life and is now widespread in online social networks. How does social media change the expression of moral outrage and its social consequences? Drawing on evidence from neuroeconomics, I will develop a theory that social media platforms amplify moral outrage by exploiting our capacity to learn from social rewards. Data from observational studies of millions of social media posts and behavioral experiments confirm that social rewards amplify moral outrage at the level of individual users. I’ll then present evidence for several troubling consequences of amplified digital outrage: it facilitates the spread of misinformation, exacerbates hate speech and networked harassment, and inflates collective beliefs about intergroup hostility. I’ll conclude with a discussion of the ethical and policy implications of these findings.

Communication is inherently social and requires an efficient exchange of complex cues between individuals. What are the behavioral and neural processes that allow people to understand, couple to, and learn from others in complex, everyday interactions? My research examines the interpersonal dynamics of communication across the lifespan using behavioral, computational, and dual-brain neuroimaging techniques in real-life environments. To understand the real-time dynamics of communication between children and caregivers at the biological level, I have used brain-to-brain coupling as a measure of interpersonal alignment to predict communicative success and learning outcomes. In one study, we found that activation in the infant prefrontal cortex preceded and drove similar activation in the adult brain, a result that advances our understanding of children’s influence over the accommodative behaviors of caregivers. In other work, we have found that both pupillary synchrony and neural synchrony while listening to sto

Universal human rights are defined by international agreements, law, foreign policy, and the concept of inherent human dignity.  However, rights defined on this basis can be readily subverted by overt and covert disagreements and can be treated as distant geopolitical events rather than bearing on individuals’ everyday lives.  A robust case for universal human rights is urgently needed and must meet several disparate requirements: (a) a framework that resolves tautological definitions reached solely by mutual, revocable agreement; (b) a rationale that transcends differences in beliefs, creed and culture; and (c) a personalization that empowers both individuals and governments to further human rights protections.  We propose that human rights in existing agreements comprise five elemental types: (1) agency, autonomy and self-determination; (2) freedom from want; (3) freedom from fear; (4) uniqueness; and (5) unconditionality, including protections for vulnerable populations.  We further propose these rights an

Romantic bonds reinforce our health and well-being while their sudden loss is highly detrimental. To identify the neural and genetic mechanisms that contribute to the positive physiological effects of social bonds, my laboratory has taken advantage of the unique behavioral repertoire of monogamous prairie voles. Unlike laboratory rats and mice, prairie voles form life-long pair bonds and exhibit distress upon partner separation. In this seminar, I will focus on recent work delineating transcriptional signatures of pair bonding and partner loss as an example of how we have leveraged our research on bond formation to understand the neural processes that enable recovery from loss. Ultimately, I anticipate that this work will lead to novel ways in which we can harness the positive biological effects of social bonds and ameliorate the emotional pain and harmful health consequences of loss.

Bree Beal talks about the value he's received from completing the Center for Mind, Brain, and Culture's Certificate Program. 

Aubrey Kelly, Assistant Professor of Psychology at Emory University talks with Dietrich Stout, Assistant Director of the CMBC about her work in https://www.thekellylab.org/http://psychology.emory.edu/home/people/faculty/kelly-aubrey.html 

There is no eating in the archive. This is not only a practical admonition to any would-be researcher but also a methodological challenge, in that there is no eating—or, at least, no food—preserved among the printed records of the early United States. Synthesizing a range of textual artifacts with accounts (both real and imagined) of foods harvested, dishes prepared, and meals consumed, this talk—based on An Archive of Taste: Race and Eating in the Early United States (University of Minnesota Press, 2020)—will reveal how a focus on eating allows us to rethink the nature and significance of aesthetics in early America, as well as of its archive. Klein will tell the story of how eating emerged as an aesthetic activity over the course of the eighteenth century and how it subsequently transformed into a means of expressing both allegiance and resistance to the dominant Enlightenment worldview. Accounts of the enslaved men and women who cooked the meals of the nation’s founders—from Thomas Jefferson’s emancipation

Unpacking the nature of emotions is critical to a scientific understanding of the human condition.  Recent evidence reveals that emotion categories contain considerable neural, physiological and behavioral variation, challenging long-held views of emotions. Consistent with these broad patterns, I will present research highlighting diversity in perceptions of emotion across societies and individuals. This research is informed by the constructionist proposal that culturally learned knowledge may account for the discrete and functional nature of emotions. I will suggest that the functioning of the conceptual system (what we "know" about emotions) serves as a source of both variation and consistency across levels. To illustrate, I will present ongoing research examining synchrony in emotion perception across individuals and outline the future directions of this approach.

Empathy allows us to understand and share one another’s emotional experiences. It allows one to quickly and automatically relate to the emotional states of others, which is essential for the regulation of social interactions and cooperation toward shared goals. Behavioral and neuroimaging findings have led researchers to identify two broad types of empathic reactions. One is emotional empathy, which is characterized by feeling other people’s emotions. The other is cognitive empathy, which is characterized by understanding other people’s thoughts and motivations. Despite the developments in the study of empathy, the vast majority of empathy paradigms focus only on passive observers, carrying out artificial empathy tasks in socially deprived environments.  This approach significantly limits our understanding of interactive aspects of empathy and how empathic responses affect the distress of the sufferer.We recently proposed a brain model that characterizes how empathic reactions alleviate the distress of a targ

Presented by Music Department, Emory University with co-sponsorships by the Center for Mind, Brain, and Culture, Hightower Fund, Department of Philosophy, Department of Film and Media, and the Department of German Studies.In certain languages the words for “history” and “story” are the same, as in French (histoire) or Russian (история). There are of course differences. “History” usually implies an accurate account of past events, a summary of what happened over a period a time, while “story” usually refers to events that may or may not accurately reflect on the past, embellished as necessary by the “storyteller.” But in this distinction race is rarely mentioned. Anyone, irrespective of race, can write histories or tell stories, yet with remarkable consistency in the academic study of music in the U.S., our histories have been written by white persons, usually men, passing from generation to generation with little divergence from the main narratives of “great works” of the “western canon.” And when a nonwhite

Loneliness is everybody’s business. Neither a pathology, nor a rare affliction, it is part of the human condition. Severe and chronic loneliness, however, is a threat to individual and public health and appears to be on the rise. In 2018, U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May said, “Loneliness is one of the greatest public health challenges of our time,” and appointed the country’s first ever Minister for Loneliness. Contemporary scholarship is therefore focusing on loneliness not as merely an individual matter, but as a public health issue that negatively impacts both physical and psychological health, even increasing the risk of mortality. This talk examines what is and is not loneliness, conditions of the “lonely society” and the role of culture in loneliness. Based on my long-term ethnographic studies, I point to how society itself can exacerbate experiences of loneliness. One of the most important messages of this talk, is that the anatomy of loneliness is not the anatomy of a single individual, but of a type

Musicians ubiquitously apply spatial metaphors when describing the stability hierarchy established by tonal syntax: stable tones are considered spatially central and, as gravitational foci, spatially lower. We investigated whether listeners, musicians and non-musicians, indeed associate tonal relationships with visuospatial dimensions, including spatial height, centrality, laterality, and size, and whether such mappings are consistent with tonal discourse. We examined explicit and implicit associations. In the explicit paradigm, participants heard a tonality-establishing prime followed by a probe tone and coupled each probe with a subjectively appropriate location on a two-dimensional grid (Exp. 1) or with one of 7 circles differing in size (Exp. 4). The implicit paradigm used a version of the Implicit Association Test to examine associations of tonal stability with vertical position (Exp. 2), lateral position (Exp. 3) and object size (Exp. 5). Tonal stability was indeed associated with perceived physical spa

Chikako Ozawa de-Silva talks with Dietrich Stout about her research and upcoming book "The  Anatomy of Loneliness"

Stephanie Koziej talks with Dietrich Stout about her work and upcoming gallery show, "Tender Rhythms" Stephanie Koziej, PhD is an award-winning interdisciplinary researcher, artist, educator, curator and activist working on the intersection of the humanities, arts, science and technology. Specialized in theorizing intimate connections through interactive art installations, with the use of brain-computer-interface, sound and visuals. Looking for a new opportunity to continue my research and teach young artists the foundations of critical theory, to subvert problematic ideologies through their own artistic practice. (https://koziejstephanie.com/)

Most of us crave new experiences and sensations. Whether it's our attraction to that new burger place or the latest gadget, newness tugs at us. But what about those who can't seem to get enough? They jump out of planes, climb skyscrapers, and will eat anything (even poisonous pufferfish)… Prompting others to ask 'what's wrong' with them. These are high sensation-seekers and they crave intense experiences, despite physical, or social risk. They don't have a death wish, but seemingly a need for an adrenaline rush, no matter what. In this talk, Dr. Carter explores the lifestyle, psychology, and neuroscience behind adrenaline junkies and daredevils. This tendency, or compulsion, has a role in our culture, but where is the line between healthy and unhealthy thrill-seeking and what can we all learn from thrill seekers? Intro Music: Small Acts of Devotion feat. Ashkay-Naresh

Although most scientists nowadays would not argue that brains of males and females belong to two distinct types, the binary framework still dominates thinking about the relations between sex and the brain. I’ll describe challenges to the binary formulation of these relations and how this formulation has evolved in response to these challenges, with the latest version claiming that brains are typically male or female because brain structure can be used to predict the sex category (female/male) of the brain’s owner. I will also present several lines of evidence revealing that sex category explains only a small part of the variability in human brain structure, and a recent study challenging the masculinization hypothesis. I suggest to replace the binary framework with a new, non-binary, framework, according to which mosaic brains reside in a multi-dimensional space that cannot meaningfully be reduced to a male-female continuum or to a binary variable. This framework may also apply to sex-related variables and ha

According to Elliot Turiel, religious affiliation does not influence the distinction between so-called “moral" and “conventional” norms. By contrast, according to Jonathan Haidt, religious affiliation results in a broadened moral domain: As he puts it, “big gods have big moralities." This talk will present new data showing the limits of both Turiel's and Haidt’s views. The scope of the moral domain is neither fixed nor is simply broadened by religion. A more sophisticated understanding of the relation between religion and morality is thus called for. Intro Music: Small Acts of Devotion feat. Ashkay-Naresh

An emerging body of work in cognitive philosophy and computational neuroscience depicts human brains as prediction machines – multi-level networks that specialize in using generative models to both match and anticipate the evolving stream of sensory information. However, the relationship between these posited cascades of prediction and conscious human experience itself remains unclear. Recent work in computational psychiatry provides important clues. For example, it is thought that malfunctions in hierarchical inference can explain core patterns of alteration seen in autism and schizophrenia, and can shed new light on so-called ‘psychogenic’ symptoms - functional impairments without standard organic causes. Such accounts reveal the deep continuities between perception and hallucination and may help reveal common processing motifs underlying both typical and atypical forms of human experience.VIDEO LINK

Jinho Choi talks with Lynne Nygaard about his research and lab.

Benjamin Wilson talks with Dietrich Stout about his research and lab.