Neural Basis of Social Emotions Across Cultures

This project investigates the psychological and neurobiological processes that undergird the private experiences (feelings) of social emotions. We aim to understand how these processes vary across individuals in relation to the complex interactions between one’s biological predispositions and lived sociocultural experiences. We also aim to understand how they develop during mid-adolescence, a critical period of psychosocial and neurological maturation. Taking an interdisciplinary approach that integrates neuroscientific and ethnographic methodologies, we have studied these processes in adults across the life span, cross-culturally in matched samples of young adults (college students) in Beijing and in Los Angeles, and longitudinally in adolescents from East Asian or Latino immigrant families living in low-SES urban Los Angeles communities.

Part of this work is funded by a CAREER award to Dr. Mary Helen Immordino-Yang from the National Science Foundation.

Collaborators/Co-Authors

Reihane Boghrati, Larissa A. Borofsky, Julia Bossmann, Joan Y. Chiao, Antonio Damasio, Hanna Damasio, Morteza Dehghani, Brian L. Edlow, Alan P. Fiske, Sarah I. Gimbel, Andrew S. Gordon, Joe Hoover, Matthew Jordan, Jonas T. Kaplan, Kingson Man, Andrea McColl, Gabriela Pavarini, Kenji Sagae, Darby E. Saxbe, Birte Schiffhauer, Simone Schnall, Vanessa Singh, Ashish Vaswani, Anand Venkatraman, Xiao-Fei Yang.

Selected Publications: Articles

Venkatraman, A., Edlow, B. & Immordino-Yang, M.H. (2019) The brainstem in emotion: A review. Frontiers in Neuroanatomy, 11(15), 69-80. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnana.2017.00015

    Figures reprinted in: Goel, V. (in press, 2020) Reason and Less. MIT Press.

Yang, X.-F., Pavarini, G., Schnall, S. & Immordino-Yang, M.H. (2018) Looking up to virtue: Averting gaze facilitates moral construals via posteromedial activations. Social Cognitive Affective Neuroscience, 13(11), 1131-1139. https://doi.org/10.1093/scan/nsy081

Dehghani, M., Boghrati, R., Man, K., Hoover, J., Gimbel, S., Vaswani, A., Immordino-Yang, M.H., Gordon, A., Damasio, A.R., Kaplan, J. (2017) Decoding the neural representation of story meanings across languages. Human Brain Mapping, 38(12), 6096-6106. https://doi.org/10.1002/hbm.23814

Immordino-Yang, M.H. & Yang, X.-F. (2017, invited submission) Cultural differences in the neural correlates of social-emotional feelings: An interdisciplinary, developmental perspective. Current Opinion in Psychology, Special Issue on Emotion edited by L. Feldman Barrett and B. Mesquita, 17, 34-40. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2017.06.008

Venkatraman, A., Edlow, B. & Immordino-Yang, M.H. (2017) The brainstem in emotion: A review. Frontiers in Neuroanatomy, https://doi.org/10.3389/fnana.2017.00015.

Yang, X.-F., Immordino-Yang, M.H. (2017). Culture and cardiac vagal tone independently influence emotional expressiveness. Culture and Brain, 5(1), 36-49. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40167-017-0048-9

Immordino-Yang, M.H., Yang, X. & Damasio, H. (2016) Cultural modes of expressing emotions influence how emotions are experienced. Emotion, 16(7), 1033-1039. https://doi.org/10.1037/emo0000201

Kaplan, J., Gimbel, S., Dehghani, M., Immordino-Yang, M.H., Segae, K., Damasio, H., Gordon, A., & Damasio, A. (2016). Processing narratives concerning protected values: A cross-cultural investigation of neural correlates. Cerebral Cortex, 27(2), 1428–1438. https://doi.org/10.1093/cercor/bhv325

Immordino-Yang, M.H., Yang, X. & Damasio, H. (2014) Correlations between social-emotional feelings and anterior insula activity are independent from visceral states but influenced by culture. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. 8:728. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2014.00728

    NOTE: From approximately 3 weeks after its release, this article has ranked in the top 5% of all published articles for attention received.  In November, 2015 this article was named a “tier-climbing” selection and a focused review paper was invited. Front. Hum. Neuro. is now the number-one most cited psychology journal in the world.

Immordino-Yang, M.H. (2013, invited submission). Studying the Effects of Culture by Integrating Neuroscientific with Ethnographic Approaches. Psychological Inquiry: An International Journal for the Advancement of Psychological Theory, 24(1), 42-46. https://doi.org/10.1080/1047840X.2013.770278

Immordino-Yang, M.H. & Singh, V. (2013). Hippocampal contributions to the processing of social emotions. Human Brain Mapping, 34(4), 945-955. https://doi.org/10.1002/hbm.21485

Yang, X., Bossman, J., Schiffhauer, B., Jordan, M., Immordino-Yang, M.H. (2013). Intrinsic default mode network connectivity predicts spontaneous verbal descriptions of autobiographical memories during social processing. Frontiers in Psychology, 3:592. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00592

Saxbe, D., Yang, X., Borofsky, L., Immordino-Yang, M. H. (2013). The embodiment of emotion: Language use during the feeling of social emotions predicts cortical somatosensory activity. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 8(7), 806-812. https://doi.org/10.1093/scan/nss075

Immordino-Yang, M.H. (2011, invited submission). Me, my “self” and you: Neuropsychological relations between social emotion, self awareness, and morality. Emotion Review, 3(3), 313-315. https://doi.org/10.1177/1754073911402391

Immordino-Yang, M.H., Chiao, J.Y., Fiske, A.P. (2010). Neural re-use in the social and emotional brain. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 33(4), 275-276. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X10001020

Immordino-Yang, M. H. (2010, invited submission). Toward a microdevelopmental, interdisciplinary approach to social emotion. Emotion Review, 2(3), 217-220. https://doi.org/10.1177/1754073910361985

Immordino-Yang, M.H., McColl, A., Damasio, H., Damasio, A. (2009). Neural correlates of admiration and compassion. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 106(19), 8021-8026. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0810363106

    NOTE: This paper received the 2010 Cozzarelli Prize from the PNAS editorial board.

    Commentary: Haidt, J. & Morris, J. (2009). Finding the self in self-transcendent emotions. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 106(19), 7687-7688.

For additional publications, visit the full list.

Funders

National Science Foundation

The Institute for New Economic Thinking

Foundation for Psychocultural Research

Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency