Studying the Brain: Apply It

  • Understand how loss of function in different brain areas can help us study the brain
  • Describe the ways that brains can be imaged or scanned

 

Theme A: Psychological science relies on empirical evidence and adapts as new data develop.Read the following abstract from Lane Beckes, James A. Coan, and Karen Hasselmo’s 2012 study, “Familiarity promotes the blurring of self and other in the neural representation of threat.”[1]

Neurobiological investigations of empathy often support an embodied simulation account. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we monitored statistical associations between brain activations indicating self-focused threat to those indicating threats to a familiar friend or an unfamiliar stranger. Results in regions such as the anterior insula, putamen and supramarginal gyrus indicate that self-focused threat activations are robustly correlated with friend-focused threat activations but not stranger-focused threat activations. These results suggest that one of the defining features of human social bonding may be increasing levels of overlap between neural representations of self and other. This article presents a novel and important methodological approach to fMRI empathy studies, which informs how differences in brain activation can be detected in such studies and how covariate approaches can provide novel and important information regarding the brain and empathy.

Did you recognize any of the concepts discussed in this module thus far? How would you summarize this work in just one sentence? To help you digest some of this complex language, paste this paragraph into an Artificial Intelligence tool such as ChatGPT and ask for a one-sentence summary.

As you can see, there is a limitless amount of information that could be studied on the brain. Neuroscience is a relatively new field, but the more research that is done, the more it appears that much of human behavior and mental processes—the key interests for psychological study—are intimately intertwined with activity in the brain.

 


  1. Beckes, L., Coan, J. A., & Hasselmo, K. (2013). Familiarity promotes the blurring of self and other in the neural representation of threat. Social cognitive and affective neuroscience, 8(6), 670–677. https://doi.org/10.1093/scan/nss046