# Presentation: 870381

## Social Neuroscience, Psychophysiology, and Aging

- Robert W. Levenson, Ph.D.
- University of California, Berkeley
- NIA Workshop on Neuroeconomics and Aging
- March 31, 2006

## Emotion: What does it look like?

- Brief, not long
- Shorter duration than moods, emotional traits, emotional pathologies
- Waves, not steady states
- Readily crosses internal/external boundaries
- Stimulation
- Major Impact

**Emotional Response**

**Match to Prototype**

**Antecedent Event**

## Emotion and Other Affective Phenomena: A Matter of Time

- Emotion
- Mood
- Emotional trait
- Emotional plot
- Emotional disorder

- (Based on Ekman, 1986)

- “Sadness”
- “Feeling blue”
- “Melancholy”
- “Mourning”
- “Depression”

- Longerlasting

## The psychophysiological approach:Are emotions organized or chaotic? 

- Accident

**Notes:**
Darwin’s “3rd principle of expression”  1st: Serviceable habits, 2nd: Antithesis
The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals  Quote is on Page 69 of Ekman’s new edition
“That the heart-beats and the rhythm of breathing play a leading role in all emotions whatsoever, is a mater too notorious for proof” (James, 1884, page 192)

Add mention of Rosenberg and Ekman (1994) finding that subjects reported feeling emotion at 4-sec windows of maximal facial activity. Note: maximal facial activity was determined for the sample as a whole. Reports of experience were treated subject by subject (used a CUE method where subject viewed stimulus videotape a second time and stopped it at points where they remembered feeling an emotion on the original viewing (amp and maria’s lover were the films). They then indicated which emotion they remembered feeling. A second analysis did look at each subject’s facial behavior looking at the most intense versus least intense 4-sec period and looking at the intensity of felt emotion. Categorical matches (type of emotion shown and reported) were greatest at high intensity moments. 

For Maria’s lover, 16 of 20 subjects showed a facial expression at same location as most intense emotion report. 7 of 20 showed facial response at the window of their least intense emotion report. 

## Why Is Emotion Important in Aging?

- Emotion plays a major role in the establishment and maintenance of social relationships
- Friendship/Companionship
- Marriage and other intimate relationships
- Care-giving and Care-receiving
- Social ties are closely connected to health and well-being
- Emotion is intimately involved in critical psychological processes that are impacted by age
- Memory
- Learning
- Attention/Perception

- Emotional functioning may be relatively preserved in normal aging
- Versus physical abilities and cognitive skills)
- Skillful emotional regulation may be an important component of  late-life “wisdom”
- Perspective-taking
- Reappraisal
- Moderation
- Emotional dysfunction is a prominent feature of many dementing disorders

**Notes:**
DSM IV—the criteria for most Axis I and Axis II disorders include some quantitative disruption in emotion
Note how sensitive our perceptions are to Quantitative abnormalities

## Studying Emotion and Aging in the Laboratory

- Films

- Marital Interaction

- Directed Facial Actions

## What Happens to Emotion With Age?

- Greater emotional control (Lawton, et al., 1992)
- Same or greater well-being (Stacey & Gatz, 1991)
- Greater emotional understanding (Labouvie-Vief, et al., 1989)
- Greater emotional refinement (poignancy, reminiscence; Molinari & Reichlin, 1996)

- The “classic” view: *Old age is a time of dampened, rigid, and flat emotionality* (Banham, 1951; Jung, 1933; Looft, 1972)

## Sources of Pleasure and Conflict

## Emotional Behaviors:Same Amount Overall, But A Shift in Kind

## Emotional Physiology: Reduced Magnitude

## Summary: Aging and Emotion--Loss, Gain, or Same? 

|  | Self-report:
Retrospective | Self-report:
On-line | Behavior | Cardiovascular Physiology: Pattern | Cardiovascular Physiology:
Magnitude |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Directed Facial Actions | Same | --- | Loss | Same | Loss |
| Relived Emotions | Same | --- | Same | Same | Loss |
| Sad Film | Same | Same | Same | --- | Loss |
| Amusing Film | Loss | Same | Loss | --- | Loss |
| Suppress emotion | Same | --- | Same | --- | Same |
| Marital Interaction | --- | Gain | Gain & Loss | --- | Loss |
| Marital Pleasures | Gain | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| “Average” |  |  |  |  |  |

## Emotional Expertise

**Method***: View video of 10 couples discussing a marital problem for 3 minutes. *
*Answer two questions: *
*(1) Will they still be married five  years later; (2) Rate their marital satisfaction at the time of the taping on a 1-10 scale.*

*Ebling & Levenson (2003)*

**Notes:**
Couple 403(Duke and Duchess of Windsor)
142 125 124  (H-MRI at 3 time points
111 104 104   (H-LW at 3 time points)
108 106 110  (W-MRI at 3 time points)
144 124 144 (W-LW at 3 time points)

## Emotion and Dementia

## Social Neuroscience: Approaches

| Type | Subjects & Paradigms | Behavior
 | Measures | Status |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Activated brains | Normals in single-subject or “single-subject +” paradigms | Highly constrained | fMRI, EEG, ERP, MEG---regions of brain activation | High “cool” factor;
Scientific potential: the “value-added” issue?  |
| Damaged brains | Patients with lesions or neuro-degeneration in single-subject and dyadic paradigms | Relatively unconstrained | Behavior, Subjective Experience, 
Language,
Peripheral physiology | Low “cool” factor;
Scientific potential: high with larger Ns and better methods |

**Psychophysiological**: Same as damaged brains, but using normal participants

**Notes:**
Comment on lesion versus neurodegeneration

## Cingulate (yellow): error monitoring, reward, autonomic responses 
Mirror neurons: imitation, simulation, empathy
Plus: Visual association cortices, hypothalamus, thalamus, brainstem 

**Mirror neurons**: imitation, simulation, empathy
**Plus**: Visual association cortices, hypothalamus, thalamus, brainstem

**Ventromedial prefrontal cortex** (green): social decision-making, planning, inhibition
**Amygdala **(red): fear conditioning, processing emotionally-relevant stimuli including social stimuli; social “judgments”; approach/avoid “decisions”
**Right somatosensory cortex** (blue): decoding complex emotional expressions via “simulation”, empathy
**Insula** (purple): processing bodily signals, self-regulation;

-     **Fusiform face area** (green): face processing

- Bottom line: It’s a fronto-temporal world

- The social brain: the usual anatomical suspects

**Notes:**
Fusiform face area: inferotemporal cortex  (facial identity, emotional expression, social status)
In macaques—cells in amygdala and mesial temporal lobe respond to social stimuli
Visual cells in temporal cortex responsive to gaze direction and face view
Visual association areas (in temporal and occipital lobes)

Amygdala involved in judgments of faces as trustworthy or not
Ventromedial prefrontal cortex involved in acquireing, representing, retrieving the values of our actions by generating or representing somatic states that correspond to anticipated future outcomes of decisions (somatic marker hypothesis)
Insula: lights up with disgusting odors, bad tastes, pain, thirst, body sensations in general

regions of the anterior cingulate that relate to functions with potential importance for social cognition. The first of these is the subgenual cingulate (Region 5), which is critical for autonomic responses (15,16) and involved in reward mechanisms (17). This region, along with a more rostral but still ventral area, is often referred to as the emotional sector of the anterior cingulate (18). The rostral cingulate (Region 6) is active during tasks requiring processing of emotional stimuli (19, 20). The dorsal portion of the anterior cingulate, the so-called “cognitive cingulate” (Region 8), is involved in error monitoring and selecting among competing responses (18,21,22). Thus, the anterior cingulate gyrus appears to play multiple roles in social cognition. 

basal ganglia - A group of nerve cells located at the base of the brain. It is composed of the putamen, caudate, globus pallidus, and substantia nigra. These nerve cells participate in the regulation of motor performance. (Singular form: basal ganglion.)

bulbar region - An area of the brain composed of the cerebellum, medulla and pons. (Basically, the bulbar region is made up of the brain stem minus the midbrain and plus the cerebellum). The bulbar region is responsible for many involuntary functions that keep us alive.

Mirror neurons—in frontal lobes of monkeys—fire when monkey is doing a particular action and also when observing another monkey or experimenter doing that action (basis for empathy, imitation, simulation?)

Putamen—part of the basal ganglia—acts with caudate to influence motor activity

Kluver-Bucy Syndrome (associated with bilateral temporal lobe damage) is a very rare cerebral neurological disorder. Major symptoms may include an urge to put all kinds of objects into the mouth (hyperphagia—uncontrolled eating and weight gain probably related to desire for oral stimulation, not hunger), hyperphagia ( memory loss, extreme sexual behavior, placidity/emotional blunting, and visual agnosia (psychic blindness-inability to recognize objects) and distractibility 

## Frontotemporal Lobar Degeneration (FTLD)

- Characteristics
- Degenerative
- 15% of all dementias (often misdiagnosed)
- Onset before age 65
- Rapid progression
- Clear-cut anatomical markers
- Involvement of brain areas important for emotion (e.g., amygdala, insula, temporal pole)
- Changes in emotion, personality, socio-emotional behavior precede gross cognitive changes

- FTLD

- Normal

**Notes:**
Coronal slices showing amygdala area

Areas involved include: amydala, insula, temporal pole
Sprenglemeyer—role of insula in disgust recognition in Huntington’s
Jose’s areas: amygdala, orbitofrontal cortex, ventromedial cortex, anterior cingulate, somatosensory cortex

Towards the end of the last century there was a renewed interest in the neural basis of emotions and social behaviour, concentrating primarily on the limbic system.  Phylogenetic studies, supported by anatomical evidence, suggest that the limbic system can be divided into two paralimbic divisions (Mega et al., 1997).  One of these, the paleocortical division, appears to have begun its development in the orbitofrontal region of the olfactory paleocortex and spread, in both phylogenetic and anatomical terms, through the insula, the temporal pole and amygdala.  Through mammalian evolution this paleocortical system has become specialized for appetite drives, social awareness, mood, visceral integration, and implicit processing.
To date, studies of human emotional processing and social behaviour have concentrated on the orbitofrontal cortex and the amygdala and have neglected the role of the anterior temporal cortex, possibly because discrete lesions of the anterior temporal pole are rarely due to tumours and almost never strokes.

From Jose’s orals: 
Two final areas that are believed to also play a role in emotions are the anterior cingulate cortex and the somatosensory cortex.  These have been less studied in relation to emotion, but a few studies have shown their relevance.  Devinsky et al. (1995) reviews the literature on the anterior cingulate and reports that electrical stimulation of the anterior cingulate leads to an emotional response.  The main functions of the anterior cingulate are considered to be in the realms of initiation, motivation and managing between cognition and emotion.  In fact, Bush et al. (2000) has shown that the anterior cingulate gets activated during an emotional counting stroop task (e.g.; count how many words there are: die die die), but that it actually showed deactivation during a cognitive counting stroop task  (e.g.; count how many words there are: two two two).  
	Research on the involvement of somatosensory cortex in emotion comes from Ralph Adolphs and his colleagues who have demonstrated impairment in recognition of facial expressions in patients with focal lesions in the inferior somatosensory cortex (Adolphs, 1998).  Another study demonstrated a correlation between impaired recognition of facial expressions and impairment in touch sensation (Adolphs, 2000).  They conclude that the somatosensory cortex is important in emotions because individuals may come to recognize the emotions of others by going through the motions of experiencing them (either covertly or overtly).  They do point out that because these inferences are based on patient lesion work, it is hard to localize exactly the area that may be involved.

## Change in Brain Morphology

- Time 1

- Time 2 (15 months later)

- Frontotemporal Lobar Degeneration

- Primary Progressive Aphasia

**Notes:**
Raw T1-weighted images of patient 3 (PPA) 
Coronal slice at level of the amygdala
Second set of images are derived from voxel-based morphometry. This is a different case (#1 PPA) showing left hemisphere (red are areas with significantly less volume than group of controls—plotted on standard brain.

## Loss of empathy in frontotemporal dementia

## Loss of Empathy and Emotional Understanding (Werner et al., under review)

- Loss of Empathy and Emotional Understanding (Werner et al., under review)

- *

- No differences in physiological response to films

**Notes:**
All are tested at p<.10 due to small sample size. SBP < .05

No differences between groups in activity during unanticipated startle
No differences between groups in detecting character’s emotion during positive films.

SAD FILM: A boy is dropped off by his mother to live with a father he doesn’t know and he is crying. 

## Emotional Understanding: Neural Substrates

|  | Right Amyg-dala | Left Amyg-dala | Right Tem-poral | Left Tem-poral |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Recog-nize Positive emotion | .75* | NS | NS | NS |
| Recog-nize Negative emotion | .80* | NS | NS | NS |

**FTLD Patient’s Recognition of Emotions in Photos: **
**Correlations with Brain Volumes**

- *  _p_ < .05

-  (Rosen et al, 2002)

**Notes:**
Films:

Correlatoins from left to right   .241 .045 .750 .46

Understanding task is Florida Affect Battery faces
Film task is sad film
Brain loss in FTLD
Volumetric analysis of gray matter loss in regions of interest from structural MRI images
Volume measurements of the left and right frontal and temporal brain regions were performed by manually tracing the boundaries of each region of interest on computerized coronal T1-weighted magnetic resonance images. The amount of grey matter in each region was quantified, and total intercranial volume (the sum of all tissue and fluid volumes inside the skull) was used to correct for differences in head size. Volumes for each region (i.e., left frontal, left temporal, right frontal, and right temporal) were converted to standardized scores that were used in our subsequent analyses.

Performance on film character recognition task:

Negative emotion:

Right amygdala .50
Left amygdala   -.35

## Loss of self in frontotemporal dementia

## Loss of self-conscious emotion (the secondary startle reaction)

- Frontotemporal Dementia

- Normal Young Adults

**Notes:**
Rates of each emotional facial behavior were calculated (i.e., total emotion displayed per second) for each time window to capture primary and secondary startle responding.  During the primary startle window, we averaged the negative emotions (i.e., fear, surprise, sadness, disgust, anger) to assess whether responding was intact.  During the secondary startle window, we used embarrassment codes as our index of self-conscious emotional responding. Embarrassment has a distinct behavioral display (e.g., gaze aversion, smiling and laughter, smile suppression, blushing, face-touches) that can be reliably coded (Keltner & Buswell, 1997).  Thus, similar to the measures of physiological responding described above, we ended up with a single behavioral score for each participant during the primary and secondary startle windows 

## Primary and Secondary Startle Reactions (Smith et al., under review)

- No physiological or behavioral differences during primary startle

- *

- N=53 (30 FTLD, 23 Age-matched controls)

**Notes:**
Rates of each emotional facial behavior were calculated (i.e., total emotion displayed per second) for each time window to capture primary and secondary startle responding.  During the primary startle window, we averaged the negative emotions (i.e., fear, surprise, sadness, disgust, anger) to assess whether responding was intact.  During the secondary startle window, we used embarrassment codes as our index of self-conscious emotional responding. Embarrassment has a distinct behavioral display (e.g., gaze aversion, smiling and laughter, smile suppression, blushing, face-touches) that can be reliably coded (Keltner & Buswell, 1997).  Thus, similar to the measures of physiological responding described above, we ended up with a single behavioral score for each participant during the primary and secondary startle windows 

## Changing personality in frontotemporal dementia

## Change in PersonalityInterpersonal Adjective Scales 

- Premorbid

- Now

- Submissive

- Dominant

- Warm

- Cold

- Submissive

- Dominant

- Warm

- Cold

- Rankin, K. P., Kramer, J. H., Mychack, P., & Miller, B. L. (2003). Double dissociation of social functioning in frontotemporal dementia. *Neurology, 60*(2), 266-271.

**Notes:**
Wiggins' Interpersonal Adjective Scales (IAS; Wiggins, 1995) 
Rating by spouse or caregiver

## Problems with emotion regulation in frontotemporal dementia

## Instructed Regulation versus Spontaneous Regulation:Can-do Is Not Do-do

- Failure to down-regulate when warned

## Different dementias—Different effects on emotion

## Dissociation of Social and Cognitive Function

- Alzheimer’s Disease

## Emotion and Aging: Summary

- Emotions are central to human functioning throughout the lifespan
- Emotional functioning is generally preserved in normal aging
- Emotional functioning is severely altered in certain dementias (FTLD, ALS) and relatively preserved in others (early stages of AD)