C7
Failures of social self-control
The overarching goal of the CRC is to elucidate the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying volitional control over our actions and emotions. Humans are a particularly social species and much of our actions are directly related to other people around us and - as with self-control in general - often times, self-control in social situations fails. The aim of project C7 is to elucidate such “social self-control failures”. What are the mechanisms that enable successful social self-control? And are these any different from the mechanisms that enable self-control in general? The social neuroscience literature suggests that simulation mechanisms are critical for social behaviour. The ability to simulate another person’s emotions, desires, intentions and goals yields a proximate understanding of the other’s state and allows adapting behaviour accordingly. These simulation processes have been investigated as empathy (sharing others’ affect), and perspective-taking (reasoning about others’ mental states). The CRC project A6 has investigated a comparable, but self-related simulation process, the ability to anticipate one’s own future emotions, which is associated with improved self-control. In addition, episodic prospection, the capacity to mentally simulate future events, has also been linked to better self-control. In all cases, the core of simulation processes – the proximate representation of a temporally or socially distant state – may support overcoming current urges at the benefit of long-term (social) goals. While empathy and emotion anticipation involve activity in the salience network, perspective-taking and episodic prospection activate regions in the default mode network. Building on this work, the main objectives of the project proposed here are (1) to predict both, social and non-social self-control failures, and (2) probe the specificity of the simulation mechanisms that can support overcoming self-control failures on a neural level. To this end, we plan a combined neuroimaging and ecological momentary assessment (EMA) study. We will assess the capacities to simulate others’ and own future affective and cognitive states with established experimental paradigms and associate the behavioural and neuroimaging data from these tasks with social and non-social self-control failures measured in people’s everyday life. We will also induce social and non-social self-control failures in the lab to test whether neural activation related to implementing self-control is (partly) shared with simulation related neural activity. Finally, using multivariate pattern analysis-based cross-task prediction could yield strong evidence for common processes among self- and other-related affective and cognitive simulation processes, that is, if it is the same simulation processes that transport you in your future or another person’s brain. The project is closely linked to the other CRC projects focusing on self-control processes, A6 in particular, and to the projects using ecological momentary assessment, here especially C1.
Project Members
Principal Investigator
Prof. Dr. Philipp Kanske
Professor for Clinical Psychology and Behavioral Neuroscience
Phone: +49 (0)351 463-42225
E-Mail:
Dr. Emanuel Jauk
Postdoctoral researcher
Phone: +49 (0)351 463-36953
Email:
Staff
Alexander Giesche
Doctoral researcher
Phone: +49 (0)351 - 463 42274
E- Mail:
Lara Maliske Doctoral researcher Phone: +49 (0)351463 42464 E-Mail:
Dr. Michael Höfler
Statistician
Phone: +49 351 463 36921
E-Mail:
Collaborators
Prof. Dr. Anita Tusche
+1 613 533-2351
Dr. Benoit Roland
+49 341 9940-114
Project-related Publications
Jauk, E., & Kanske, P. (2019). Perspective change and personality state variability: An argument for the role of self-awareness and an outlook on bidirectionality (Commentary on Wundrack et al., 2018). J Intell, 7, 10
https://doi.org/10.3390/jintelligence7020010
Kanske, P. (2018). The social mind: Disentangling affective and cognitive routes to understanding others. Interdisc Sci Rev, 43, 115-124
https://doi.org/10.1080/03080188.2018.1453243
Kanske, P., Böckler, A., Trautwein, F. M., & Singer, T. (2015). Dissecting the social brain: Introducing the EmpaToM to reveal distinct neural networks and brain–behaviour relations for empathy and Theory of Mind. Neuroimage, 122, 6-19
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2015.07.082
Kanske, P., Böckler, A., Trautwein, F. M., Parianen Lesemann, F. H., & Singer, T. (2016). Are strong empathizers better mentalizers? Evidence for independence and interaction between the routes of social cognition. Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci, 11, 1383-1392
https://doi.org/10.1093/scan/nsw052
Lehmann, K., Maliske, L., Böckler, A., & Kanske, P. (2019). Social impairments in mental disorders: Recent developments in studying the mechanisms of interactive behaviour. Clin Psychol Europe, 1, e33143.
https://doi.org/10.32872/cpe.v1i2.33143
Reiter, A. M., Kanske, P., Eppinger, B., & Li, S. C. (2017). The aging of the social mind-differential effects on components of social understanding. Sci Rep, 7, 11046.
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-10669-4
Stietz, J., Jauk, E., Krach, S., & Kanske, P. (2019). Dissociating empathy from perspective taking: Evidence from intra-and inter-individual differences research. Front Psychiatry, 10.
https://doi.org/ 10.3389/fpsyt.2019.00126
Tusche, A., Böckler, A., Kanske, P., Trautwein, F. M., & Singer, T. (2016). Decoding the charitable brain: Empathy, perspective taking, and attention shifts differentially predict altruistic giving. J Neurosci, 36, 4719-4732.
https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.3392-15.2016
Trautwein, F. M., Singer, T., & Kanske, P. (2016). Stimulus-driven reorienting impairs executive control of attention: Evidence for a common bottleneck in anterior insula. Cereb Cortex, 26, 4136-4147.
https://doi.org/10.1093/cercor/bhw225
Winter, K., Spengler, S., Bermpohl, F., Singer, T., & Kanske, P. (2017). Social cognition in aggressive offenders: Impaired empathy, but intact theory of mind. Sci Rep, 7, 670.
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-00745-0