"This new volume brings together a range of empirical and theoretical views from both developmental psychology and developmental neuroscience, and cover a core set of questions and topics that concern the development of the social mind. The basic topics about the origins, development, and biological bases of the human social mind include, but are not limited to, face and voice recognition, attachment to others, reasoning and cognitive bias, group dynamics, theory of mind, moral evaluation, prosocial behavior, and social decision-making. Contributors from evolutionary psychology, developmental psychology, neuroscience, and behavioral economics will inform the included topics"--
In recent decades, empathy research has blossomed into a vibrant and multidisciplinary field of study. This text collects cross-disciplinary, cutting-edge work on human empathy from the perspectives of social, cognitive, developmental and clinical psychology and cognitive/affective neuroscience
Over the past decade, an explosion of empirical research in a variety of fields has allowed us to understand human moral sensibility as a sophisticated integration of cognitive, emotional, and motivational mechanisms shaped through evolution, development, and culture. Evolutionary biologists have shown that moral cognition evolved to aid cooperation; developmental psychologists have demonstrated that the elements that underpin morality are in place much earlier than we thought; and social neuroscientists have begun to map brain circuits implicated in moral decision making. This volume offers an overview of current research on the moral brain, examining the topic from disciplinary perspectives that range from anthropology and neurophilosophy to justice and law. The contributors address the evolution of morality, considering precursors of human morality in other species as well as uniquely human adaptations. They examine motivations for morality, exploring the roles of passion, extreme sacrifice, and cooperation. They go on to consider the development of morality, from infancy to adolescence; findings on neurobiological mechanisms of moral cognition; psychopathic immorality; and the implications for justice and law of a more biological understanding of morality. These new findings may challenge our intuitions about society and justice, but they may also lead to more a humane and flexible legal system. ContributorsScott Atran, Abigail A. Baird, Nicolas Baumard, Sarah Brosnan, Jason M. Cowell, Molly J. Crockett, Ricardo de Oliveira-Souza, Andrew W. Delton, Mark R. Dadds, Jean Decety, Jeremy Ginges, Andrea L. Glenn, Joshua D. Greene, J. Kiley Hamlin, David J. Hawes, Jillian Jordan, Max M. Krasnow, Ayelet Lahat, Jorge Moll, Caroline Moul, Thomas Nadelhoffer, Alexander Peysakhovich, Laurent Prétôt, Jesse Prinz, David G. Rand, Rheanna J. Remmel, Emma Roellke, Regina A. Rini, Joshua Rottman, Mark Sheskin, Thalia Wheatley, L
AbstractEmpathy and sympathy play crucial roles in much of human social interaction and are necessary components for healthy coexistence. Sympathy is thought to be a proxy for motivating prosocial behavior and providing the affective and motivational base for moral development. The purpose of the present study was to use functional MRI to characterize developmental changes in brain activation in the neural circuits underpinning empathy and sympathy. Fifty‐seven individuals, whose age ranged from 7 to 40 years old, were presented with short animated visual stimuli depicting painful and non‐painful situations. These situations involved either a person whose pain was accidentally caused or a person whose pain was intentionally inflicted by another individual to elicit empathic (feeling as the other) or sympathetic (feeling concern for the other) emotions, respectively. Results demonstrate monotonic age‐related changes in the amygdala, supplementary motor area, and posterior insula when participants were exposed to painful situations that were accidentally caused. When participants observed painful situations intentionally inflicted by another individual, age‐related changes were detected in the dorsolateral prefrontal and ventromedial prefrontal cortex, with a gradual shift in that latter region from its medial to its lateral portion. This pattern of activation reflects a change from a visceral emotional response critical for the analysis of the affective significance of stimuli to a more evaluative function. Further, these data provide evidence for partially distinct neural mechanisms subserving empathy and sympathy, and demonstrate the usefulness of a developmental neurobiological approach to the new emerging area of moral neuroscience.
AbstractMiddle childhood seems to be crucial for the emergence of a moral identity, that is, an evaluative stance of how important it is for someone's sense of self to be moral. This study investigates the effects of moral identity on the neural processing of moral content in 10‐year‐old children. Participants were presented with scenes portraying prosocial and antisocial behavior, while electroencephalographic responses were collected. Analyses of event‐related potentials (ERPs) showed that, for children with a strong moral identity, antisocial scenes elicited a greater early posterior negativity (EPN) as compared to prosocial scenes. Thus, for children with a strong moral identity, antisocial scenes capture more attentional resources than prosocial ones in early processing stages. In contrast to previous findings with adults, the implicit moral self‐concept was not related to any ERP differences. Overall, the results show that, even in its developmental emergence, moral identity relates to the neurocognitive processing of third‐party moral content. Together, the study supports the social‐cognitive model of the development of moral identity, according to which moral identity is based on a chronical activation of moral schemas that guide a person's perception of the social world.
Why do some individuals engage in high-risk mobilization in support of foreign militant groups, willingly sacrificing their possessions and even their lives as "martyrs", when there is no imminent threat to the community within which they live or strong ties to the communities for which they sacrifice? We develop a new theory of high-risk mobilization rooted in the use of narratives that explains high-risk mobilization and identify the revolutionary use of multiple martyrdom narratives among modern Islamic militant groups, especially a heroic narrative specifically tailored to Western audiences, that can explain the group's broad appeal beyond traditional pools of recruits. We demonstrate the existence of the heroic narrative in the video propaganda of ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra and apply our framework of narratives of martyrdom to the universe of ISIS recruitment videos. We conclude by discussing implications for scholarship on mobilization and counter-radicalization/recruitment policy.
AbstractSurvival is dependent on sociality within groups which ensure sustenance and protection. From an early age, children show a natural tendency to sort people into groups and discriminate among them. The computations guiding evaluation of third‐party behaviors are complex, requiring integration of intent, consequences, and knowledge of group affiliation. This study examined how perceiving third‐party morally laden behavior influences children's likelihood to exhibit or reduce group bias. Following a minimal group paradigm assignment, young children (4–7 years) performed a moral evaluation task where group affiliations and moral actions were systematically juxtaposed, so that they were exposed to disproportionately antisocial in‐group and prosocial out‐group scenarios. Electroencephalography was recorded, and group preference was assessed with a resource allocation game before and after the EEG session. Across all children, evaluations of others' moral actions arose from early and automatic processing (~150 ms), followed by later interactive processing of affiliation and moral valence (~500 ms). Importantly, individual differences in bias manifestation and attitude change were predicted by children's neural responses. Children with high baseline bias selectively exhibited a rapid detection (~200 ms) of scenarios inconsistent with their bias (in‐group harm and out‐group help). Changes in bias corresponded to distinct patterns in longer latency neural processing. These new developmental neuroscience findings elucidate the multifaceted processing involved in moral evaluation of others' actions, their group affiliations, the nature of the integration of both into full judgments, and the relation of individual differences in neural responses to social decision‐making in childhood.
AbstractThis developmental neuroscience study examined the electrophysiological responses (EEG and ERPs) associated with perspective taking and empathic concern in preschool children, as well as their relation to parental empathy dispositions and children's own prosocial behavior. Consistent with a body of previous studies using stimuli depicting somatic pain in both children and adults, larger early (~200 ms) ERPs were identified when perceiving painful versus neutral stimuli. In the slow wave window (~800 ms), a significant interaction of empathy condition and stimulus type was driven by a greater difference between painful and neutral images in the empathic concern condition. Across early development, children exhibited enhanced N2 to pain when engaging in empathic concern. Greater pain‐elicited N2 responses in the cognitive empathy condition also related to parent dispositional empathy. Children's own prosocial behavior was predicted by several individual differences in neural function, including larger early LPP responses during cognitive empathy and greater differentiation in late LPP and slow wave responses to empathic concern versus affective perspective taking. Left frontal activation (greater alpha suppression) while engaging in affective perspective taking was also related to higher levels of parent cognitive empathy. Together, this multilevel analysis demonstrates the important distinction between facets of empathy in children; the value of examining neurobehavioral processes in development. It provides provoking links between children's neural functioning and parental dispositions in early development.
This study presents an identity-centered narrative theory of high-risk political activism to explain how narratives engage with social identities, and how variation in narratives can be strategically deployed by political actors to engage different mobilization pools. Narratives are stories that persuade through identification with plot and characters, with mobilization bringing expressive payoffs. Narratives tailored to identities maximizes their recruitment potential. Our empirical case is the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria's Western-directed video recruitment campaign. We argue that ISIS's use of tailored narratives explains its success in mobilizing diverse social identities within the community of Muslims living in the West. We present evidence for the theory from an online survey experiment with 139 US and Canadian Muslims and analyses of narratives in 16 ISIS propaganda videos and motives in 148 US ISIS perpetrators. The paper helps explain how appeals targeting identities can mobilize, including under circumstances of widespread social disapproval.