Jennifer Gutsell
Department of Psychology
“Resonating with allies and competitors: A motivational approach to how the brain processes other’s inner states”
How does our perception of the people around us affect our empathy for them? How often do members of society discuss events in terms of “us” and “them”? Are there neural networks responsible for our perception of differences with individuals who are not in groups we identify with? Dr. Gutsell’s work examines how prejudice and social group membership affects the neural mechanisms underlying our perception and understanding of the other’s actions, intentions and emotions.
People say that to gain a true understanding of another, one needs to put oneself into another’s shoes and try to see the world through his or her eyes. The assumption here is that understanding comes from using one’s own references and one’s own body to simulate the experiences of the other. In recent years, neuroscience has supported these folk psychology notions of how we understand each other: Similar neural circuits are activated during the experience and the observation of actions and emotions, and such neural resonance is said to support action understanding, basic empathy, and interpersonal coordination.
In this talk, I presented a motivational approach to neural resonance and looked at how various factors that might increase or decrease motivational relevance of another person affects neural resonance. I presented research that uses the suppression of electroencephalographic (EEG) oscillations in the mu frequency band during action and emotion expression observation as an index of neural resonance. First, a review of studies suggests an in-group bias
in neural resonance recorded over sensory motor areas: People show mu-suppression in response to the actions of in-group members, but they do not show mu-suppression in response to the actions of ethnic out-group members, and this bias in neural resonance is aggravated with increasing prejudice and for disliked out-groups. I presented a series of studies that explore facilitating and hampering conditions for cross- group neural resonance, focusing on the role that motivational relevance plays in determining with whom to resonate and with whom not to. How much people resonate with out- group members is malleable and appears to depend on the motivational significance of the target person and the behavior in question.