Cognitive neuroscience

Manos Tsakiris: Professor of Psychology at the Royal Holloway, University of London

Below is a transcript of the Q&A session

I am wondering about the research agenda that you and the centre have, is it really about emotions, or is it about how groups interpret their emotions or they physiological states?

I think if I could, and the intention is to do both. In political psychology and political science there is some research that tries to think about how specific emotions link to specific political behaviours; what happens when citizens feel afraid, or what happens when they feel angry, how this might bias their political behaviours. What I would like to do is to flesh this out a little bit more carefully and understand what the underlying physiology is, and understand whether there is the scope for the physiological dysregulation to be labelled as different emotions that could in turn lead to different political outcomes. This is one angle. The direction would be to think about how you can go from bottom up, from physiological states and how these are mentalized to political behaviour and vice versa, how political actors, that could be politicians, peer groups, institutions, how these may prescribe emotions that would end up having specific neurophysiological signatures that would make people experience emotions and also have the corresponding physiological signatures if these are available. But in addition to this work that is of my primary interest to think about more of the social affective neuroscience of politics, I also want to bring people in who might be coming from different perspectives, there is scope for doing some natural language processing analysis and how emotions are disseminated in social media, how they are described and discussed in different kind of discourses, whether that has to do with institutional documents of the European Union, or the Senate in the US and so on. It is a fuzzy situation, because the science of emotion is not as clear-cut as we would like to think, there is still very much ongoing debates about what emotions are and it is quite difficult to position ourselves and say, this is a definitive answer that emotions are either some kind of universal mechanism or some kind of social construction. I think we are trying to bridge the gap between the two, think about the mechanism that enables us to experience emotions that will be expressed in different ways in different contexts. 

Why is there a dichotomy between dominance and trustworthiness?

This is dominated by the seminal work of Alexander Todorov on the face and how we perceive it, and how first impressions are formed which might be wrong and quite often they are wrong which are actually used as some kind of a heuristic signal to decide whether somebody is a friend or a foe. The faces that are rated high in trustworthiness, we would be more affiliative towards them, we would consider them as friends, and the faces that are high in dominance would be considered as foes. The two dimensions seem to be negatively correlated.

You mentioned potential generational differences. Is this culture that is modulating this, or is it personal history, and not so much age, because different people have different experiences with technology, etc. What is your inclination here?

Yeah, if you look at research and generations, there are two different ways in which you can think of it. During one’s life, as you pass from childhood to adolescence to mature age, independently of when you were born, all people in childhood or adolescence would experience more or less the same kind of changes in the brains and so on. Adolescents are more risk-taking, they are more influenced by peers, and this is not what I am talking about, I think there are some kind of cultural effects of how a generation is living in the world right now. When I was drawing on the difference between ‘digital natives’ and ‘digital immigrants’, I think that the kind of visual culture that we were exposed, and I think of myself as someone who is a ‘digital immigrant’, was very different from the culture that ‘digital natives’ are growing up in. I think that a 16-year-old in 1960 would probably be showing the same kind of pattern as a 16-year-old right now in this kind of experiment that we did. I think that ‘digital natives’ have different kind of awareness about the visual world, probably have been exposed to many different images of human suffering in different contexts that probably people of an older generation didn’t, and you can think about the kind of graphic imagery that from a very young age nowadays kids see. As I said, these are just speculations because it maybe the case that it has to do with emotional regulation capacities that we know are different in different age stages depending on the development of the brain and so on. For me it is an open question, so I don’t have an answer, I just found it interesting, so I wanted to mention that we do find this difference between the ages, which we also found, if I remember it correctly, when we looked at whether people are more likely to say that the Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) face is real or fake, and I think we also find an age difference there.  

You talked about the effect of images, what about the effect of external auditory stimuli?

That’s a good question and we haven’t looked at that, nor did we look at videos which, for example, is one of the main ways that nowadays you actually see and consume news. There are many challenges when you try to use highly ecological material, like the one we used that were photojournalistic images, rather than relying on established databases of images used in psychological experiments. And we were very careful not to go into the direction of videos because that is even more complex than using images, I think with the auditory stimuli by themselves, I don’t know how informative they are in relaying information about social political events, but coupled with images, I think it would be an interesting research question to explore which we haven’t.

Just following from the point regarding the new or the younger generation, while every generation has always said the preceding generation is getting worse, etc., I do honestly believe that with the access to information and the amount of constant stimulation that we are put to, there is a breaking point where teens today are constantly in a state of allostasis at a point which we never seen in history. And as a result of that, looking at other studies, do you think that based on what you were telling us, along with the amount of fake news it is not so much that they do not recognize them as fake news but they are actually willing to accept the lies? When you consider it along looking at gestalt psychology so rather than how we are reacting to single articles, how they look at multiple articles and then respond to that overall considering gestalt, and one reason I bring that point up is that when they were looking at modern cases while we have always seen cases of people who, say rape victims, or recently, people who projected a series of events where they said they were discriminated for being homosexual or transgender and they never have been. When they went and talked to these people about why did you lie, they justified it by saying, “I wasn’t lying, I was manifesting a reality, I was portraying a true reality through an act”, which is basically still a lie, but they didn’t see it like that because they were saying that there were lies which led to the outcome of the bigger picture of being truth.

I think it’s very difficult, and I really feel because I’ve been reading a little bit of history the last couple of years that we were in lockdown. And the question is what is the right kind of distance that we need to take to actually come to a verdict about what has been happening in different generations. I think that I cannot tell whether the current generations of young people are more willing to accept lies for truth or not, my worry is that we are entering a situation where the default is to question everything, and even though that from the science point of view is probably good, because that is what you are told to do as a scientist – to have doubts, question and try to find the truth, I am just wondering what maybe the impact on the human relationships is? If a priori here is that something is either a manifestation of something else, or that something is more probable to be staged or faked, or manufactured than real, we will find it very difficult to maintain close social relationships and that’s my worry. What could be the impact on social relationships, as you rightly said, on dysregulation, dyshomeostatis?

A deep dive into the topic:
Zmigrod, L. (2022). A psychology of ideology: Unpacking the psychological structure of ideological thinking. Perspectives on Psychological Science. [link]

Zmigrod, L., Eisenberg, I. W., Bissett, P. G., Robbins, T. W., & Poldrack, R. A. (2021). The cognitive and perceptual correlates of ideological attitudes: a data-driven approach. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 376(1822), 20200424. [pdf]

Zmigrod, L., & Tsakiris, M. (2021). Computational and neurocognitive approaches to the political brain: key insights and future avenues for political neuroscience. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 376(1822), 20200130. [pdf]