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Embodied models suggest that moral judgments are strongly intertwined with first-hand somatic experiences, with some pointing to disgust, and others arguing for a role of pain/harm. Both disgust and pain are unpleasant, arousing experiences, with strong relevance for survival, but with distinctive sensory qualities and neural channels. Hence, it is unclear if moral cognition interacts with sensory-specific properties of one somatic experience or with supramodal dimensions common to both. Across two experiments, participants evaluated ethical dilemmas and subsequently were exposed to disgusting (olfactory) or painful (thermal) stimulations of matched unpleasantness. We found that moral scenarios enhanced physiological and neural activity to subsequent disgust (but not pain), as further supported by an independently-validated whole-brain signature of olfaction. This effect was mediated by activity in the posterior cingulate cortex triggered by dilemma judgments. Our results thus speak in favor of an association between moral cognition and sensory-specific properties of disgust. Sharvit G., Lin E., Vuilleumier P., & Corradi-Dell'Acqua C. (2020) Does inappropriate behaviour hurt or stink? The interplay between neural representations of somatic experiences and moral decisions. Science Advances. 6, eaat4390. doi: 10.1126/sciadv.aat4390

Seminal theories posit that social and physical suffering underlie partly-common representational code. It is unclear, however, if this shared information reflects a modality-specific component of pain, or alternatively a supramodal code for properties common to many aversive experiences (unpleasantness, salience, etc.). To address this issue, we conducted experiments involving social inclusion or exclusion. Following each gaming experience, a painful or disgusting stimulation of comparable unpleasantness were delivered. This design allows to assess whether the effect of social exclusion on subjective pain (as found in the literature) does generalize to other unpleasant painless experiences. Here you can find uploaded the data from the article: Antico L., Guyon A., Mohamed ZK., Corradi-Dell'Acqua C. (2018) "Beyond Unpleasantness. Social exclusion affects the experience of pain, but not of equally-unpleasant disgust", Cognition, 181, 1-11.

— Pain unadeguate treatment is frequent in modern society, with major medical, ethical, and financial implications. In many healthcare environments, pain is quantified prevalently through subjective measures, such as self-reports from patients or health care providers’ personal experience. Recently, automatic diagnostic tools have been developed to detect and quantify pain more “objectively” from facial expressions. However, it is still unclear if these approaches can distinguish pain from other aversive (but painless) states. In the present study, we analyzed the facial responses from a database of video-recorded facial reactions evoked by comparably-upleasant painful and disgusting stimuli. We modeled this information as function of subjective unpleasantness, as well as the specific state evoked by the stimuli (pain vs. disgust). Results show that a machine learning algorithm could predict subjective pain unpleasantness from facial information, but mistakenly detected unpleasant disgust, especially in those models relying in great extent on the brow lowerer. Importantly, pain and disgust could be disentangled using an ad hoc algorithm that rely on combined information from the eyes and the mouth. Overall, the facial expression of pain contains both specific and unpleasantness-related information shared with disgust. Automatic diagnostic tools should be guided to account for this confounding effect. Giada Dirupo, Paolo Garlasco, Cyrielle Chappuis, Gil Sharvit, Corrado Corradi-Dell’Acqua. “State-specific and supramodal components of facial response to pain” IEEE Transactions of Affective Computing

Neuroimaging studies suggest that understanding emotions in others engages brain regions partially common to those associated with more general cognitive Theory-of-Mind (ToM) functions allowing us to infer people’s beliefs or intentions. However, neuropsychological studies on brain-damaged patients reveal dissociations between the ability to understand others’ emotions and ToM. This discrepancy might underlie the fact that neuropsychological investigations often correlate behavioural impairments only to the lesion site, without considering the impact that the insult might have on other interconnected brain structures. Here we took a network-based approach, and investigated whether deficits in understanding people’s emotional and cognitive states relate to damage to similar or differential structures. By combining information from 40 unilateral stroke damaged patients, with normative connectome data from 92 neurotypical individuals, we estimated lesion-induced dysfunctions across the whole brain, and modeled them in relation to patients’ behavior. We found a striking dissociation between networks centered in the insular and prefrontal cortex, whose dysfunctions led to selective impairments in understanding emotions and beliefs respectively. Instead, no evidence was observed for neural structures shared between the two conditions. Overall, our data provide novel evidence of segregation between brain networks subserving social inferential abilities Corradi-Dell’Acqua C., Ronchi R., Thomasson M., Bernati T., Saj A. & Vuilleumier P. "Deficits in cognitive and affective theory of mind relate to dissociated lesion patterns in prefrontal and insular cortex" Cortex

Embodied models of social cognition argue that others’ emotional states are processed by re‐enacting a representation of the same state in the observer, along with associated somatic and physiological responses. In this framework, previous studies tested whether a strong sensitivity to interoceptive signals (i.e., inputs arising from within one’s body) facilitates the understanding of others’ affect, leading to mixed results. Such heterogeneity in the literature could reflect methodological differences in paradigms employed, with some requiring only a superficial assessment (e.g., quantifying the unpleasantness of someone’s experience without inferring the specific state), and others probing for a more detailed analysis (understanding others’ precise condition). Here, we engaged fifty young women in a study where they evaluated others’ naturalistic facial reactions to painful and disgusting stimuli of comparable unpleasantness. Separately, we measured their interoceptive abilities through a well-known heartbeat detection task. We found that individuals that were more accurate in tracking their heartbeats across time were also more prone to judge facial expressions as more unpleasant (superficial assessment). However, when specifically asked to discriminate between comparably-unpleasant pain and disgust (fine-grain assessment), participants’ performance was not influenced by their interoceptive abilities. Though our study was confined to a female sample, our results extend our knowledge on the role of interoception in understanding others’ affect, which influences only the superficial evaluation of general features such as unpleasantness (common between pain and disgust), without extending to the appraisal of a precise state. This finding supports multi-componential models of social cognition, suggesting that only part of our ability to assess others’ affect is mediated by a representation of one’s Embodied models of social cognition argue that others’ emotional states are processed by re‐enacting a representation of the same state in the observer, along with associated somatic and physiological responses. In this framework, previous studies tested whether a strong sensitivity to interoceptive signals (i.e., inputs arising from within one’s body) facilitates the understanding of others’ affect, leading to mixed results. Such heterogeneity in the literature could reflect methodological differences in paradigms employed, with some probing classification of a precise condition, and others requiring the assessment of supra-ordinal dimensions orthogonal to many states. Here, we engaged fifty young women in a study where they evaluated others’ naturalistic facial reactions to painful and disgusting stimuli of comparable unpleasantness. Separately, we measured their interoceptive abilities through a well-known heartbeat counting task. We found that individuals that were more accurate in tracking their heartbeats across time were also more prone to judge facial expressions as more unpleasant (supra-ordinal assessment). However, when specifically asked to discriminate between comparably-unpleasant pain and disgust (state-specific assessment), participants’ performance was not influenced by their interoceptive abilities. Although confined to a female sample, this study extends our knowledge on the role of interoception in the understanding of others, which influences only the evaluation of general features such as unpleasantness (common between pain and disgust), without extending to the appraisal of a precise state. This finding supports multi-componential models of social cognition, suggesting that only part of our ability to assess others’ affect is mediated by a representation of one’s affective/somatic responses. Dirupo G., Corradi-Dell'Acqua C., Kashef M., Debbané M., & Badoud D. (2020) The role of interoception in understanding others' affect. Dissociation between superficial and detailed appraisal of facial expressions. Cortex, 130, 16-31. doi: 10.1016/j.cortex.2020.05.010

Healthcare providers often underestimate patients’ pain, sometimes even when aware of their reports. This could be the effect of experience reducing sensitivity to others pain, or distrust towards patients’ self-evaluations. Across multiple experiments (375 participants), we tested whether senior medical students differed from younger colleagues and lay controls in the way they assess people’s pain and take into consideration their feedback. We found that medical training affected the sensitivity to pain faces, an effect shown by the lower ratings and highlighted by a decrease in neural response of the insula and cingulate cortex. Instead, distrust towards the expressions’ authenticity affected the processing of feedbacks, by decreasing activity in the ventral striatum whenever patients’ self-reports matched participants’ evaluations, and by promoting strong reliance on the opinion of other doctors. Overall, our study underscores the multiple processes which might influence the evaluation of others’ pain at the early stages of medical career. This provide data and analysis code for the manuscript: Dirupo, G., Totaro, S., Richard, J., & Corradi-Dell'Acqua, C. (2020). Medical education and distrust modulate the response of insular-cingulate network and ventral striatum in pain diagnosis. eLife Sciences. doi: 10.7554/eLife.63272 - Preprint @ PsyArXiv: doi: 10.31234/osf.io/uz9rd Group-Level brain activity associated with the Experiment are available at https://neurovault.org/collections/9006/

In the last two years, governments of many countries imposed heavy social restrictions to contain the spread of the COVID-19 virus, with consequent increase of bad mood, distress, or depression for the people involved. Few studies investigated the impact of these restrictive measures on individual social proficiency, and specifically the processing of emotional facial information, leading to mixed results. The present research aimed at investigating systematically whether, and to which extent, social isolation influences the processing of facial expressions. To this end, we manipulated the social exclusion experimentally through the well-known Cyberball game (within-subject factor), and we exploited the occurrence of the lockdown for the Swiss COVID-19 first wave by recruiting participants before and after being restricted at home (grouping factor). We then tested whether either form of social segregation influenced the processing of pain, disgust or neutral expressions, across multiple tasks probing access to different components of affective facial responses (state-specific, shared across states). We found that the lockdown (but not game-induced exclusion) affected negatively the processing of pain-specific information, without influencing other components of the affective facial response related to disgust or broad unpleasantness. In addition, participants recruited after the confinement reported lower scores in both empathy questionnaires and affective assessments of Cyberball co-players. These results suggest that social isolation affected negatively individual sensitivity to other people’s affect and, with specific reference to the processing of facial expressions, the processing of pain-diagnostic information.

Supplemental material, sj-docx-1-qjp-10.1177_17470218221094772 for Far from the eyes, far from the heart: COVID-19 confinement dampened sensitivity to painful facial features by Lia Antico and Corrado Corradi-Dell’Acqua in Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology

Embodied models suggest that moral judgments are strongly intertwined with first-hand somatic experiences, with some pointing to disgust, and others arguing for a role of pain/harm. Both disgust and pain are unpleasant, arousing experiences, with strong relevance for survival, but with distinctive sensory qualities and neural channels. Hence, it is unclear whether moral cognition interacts with sensory-specific properties of one somatic experience or with supramodal dimensions common to both. Across two experiments, participants evaluated ethical dilemmas and subsequently were exposed to disgusting (olfactory) or painful (thermal) stimulations of matched unpleasantness. We found that moral scenarios enhanced physiological and neural activity to subsequent disgust (but not pain), as further supported by an independently validated whole-brain signature of olfaction. This effect was mediated by activity in the posterior cingulate cortex triggered by dilemma judgments. Our results thus speak in favor of an association between moral cognition and sensory-specific properties of disgust., Science Advances, 6 (42), ISSN:2375-2548