Social cognition: from empathy to pragmatic ability Chairperson Francesca M. Bosco Center for Cognitive Science, Department of Psychology, University and Polytechnic of Turin, Neuroscience Institute of Turin, Italy francesca.bosco@unito.it Discussant Ilaria Gabbatore Center for Cognitive Science, Department of Psychology, University and Polytechnic of Turin, Italy ilaria.gabbatore@unito.it Speakers Claus Lamm Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience (SCAN) Unit, Department of Basic Psychological Research and Research Methods, Faculty of Psychology, University of Vienna, Austria claus.lamm@univie.ac.at Rosalba Morese Center for Cognitive Science, Department of Psychology, University and Polytechnic of Turin, Italy rosalba.morese@unito.it Giorgia Silani Cognitive Neuroscience Sector, International School for Advanced Studies, ISAS-SISSA, Italy giorgia.silani@sissa.it Soile Loukusa Faculty of Humanities, Logopedics, Child Language Research Centre, University of Oulu Finland, soile.loukusa@oulu.fi Social cognition refers to the ability of make sense of the In particular, the first contribution reviews fMRI world through processing signals generated by members evidence showing that empathy for another person pain of the same species (Frith, C. 2008. Social Cognition. recruits the same neural networks involved in the first Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: person experience o pain, testifying that empathy is a Biological Sciences, 363(1499), 2033-2039.). A very sort of “embodied simulation” of the affective state of basic component of social cognition is empathy, that the other person. Still focusing on the neural correlates is the ability to experience the emotional states of involved, the contribution that follows investigates the another’s person. A more sophisticated aspect of social role that different forms of social support, physical and cognition is the capacity to understand affective and cognitive, play in modulating a specific experience of emotional aspects in themselves and other individuals. pain that is social exclusion. The third contribution Finally, pragmatics is an articulated cognitive ability describes how empathic judgments of another person’s allowing people to go further a signal, i.e. the literal emotions changes across life span, from adolescents to meaning of utterance, in order to understand the elderly people and how the maturation and decay of others’ communicative intention. functional brain networks contribute to explain such modification. Finally, last contribution investigates the Aim of the present symposium is to analyse different aspects of social cognition, analysing such aspects from role that theory of mind and inferential ability play in different perspective: starting from the neural networks explaining communicative pragmatic difficulty of children with autism spectrum disorders. involved during the empathic experience of pain or during the experience of social exclusion, to the development of more complex forms of social and communicative interactions in typical and atypical development. 19 The neurophysiological basis of empathy experimental group received physical or cognitive Claus Lamm support while control group do not received any kind of social support. (C) Social exclusion II: each group was scanned for the second time during the exclusion In my talk, I will review fMRI evidence consistently experience provided in the Cyberball game. We then showing that empathy (for pain) recruits neural networks compared physical and cognitive groups to control group overlapping with the first-hand experience of pain. More using the contrast social exclusion I vs. social exclusion specifically, anterior insular (AI) and midcingulate II. FMRI results show that during social exclusion (II) cortex (MCC) were involved in both directly physical support decrease the activation of Anterior experienced pain, and in empathy for pain. Since this Insula (AI), usually associated with visceral pain and suggests that empathy recruits similar neural negative affective experience, and that cognitive support mechanisms as the first-hand experience of the emotion decrease the activation of AI and Temporal Parietal one is showing empathy for, this finding has been Junction (TPJ), area usually involved in the interpreted to indicate that empathy relies on "shared representation of mental states of other individuals. representations" and the engagement of functionally equivalent processes between self and other-related experiences. However, similarity of neural activations alone is insufficient to indicate equivalence of Empathy and self-other distinction over the life-span: representations. To obtain more conclusive evidence on behavioral and neurophysiological evidences whether empathy indeed recruits functionally similar Giorgia Silani neural processes, we therefore performed a series of behavioral, ERP and fMRI studies aiming to show that experimentally changing the first-hand experience of Successful social interactions require the capacity of pain (by means of placebo analgesia) also changes understanding affective and emotional states of others. empathy for pain, and that this is supported by similar Humans tend to understand the states of others in neural networks. Our data show that placebo analgesia relation to their own, but such a self-projection reduces empathy for pain, and that this is accompanied mechanism can result in biased social judgments if with matching ERP and activation changes in the confusion between self and others subsists. Recently, we "shared" empathy for pain network identified previously. showed that empathic judgments of another person’s This provides more direct evidence that empathy emotions are indeed systematically biased towards the engages functionally equivalent processes as first-hand participant’s own current emotions if they are emotion experiences, supporting claims that empathy incongruent to those of the other person; and that the relies on some sort of "embodied simulation" of the size of the bias is associated with variations in neural affective state of others. activity of dedicated brain regions (Silani G., et a. 2013. Supramarginal gyrus is crucial to overcome emotional egocentricity bias in social judgments. Journal of Neuroscience. 25; 33(39)). In this presentation, I will Social support and social exclusion: an fMRI study describe how egocentrically biased judgments change Rosalba Morese across the life span, showing that the presence of the bias follows a quadratic curve with increasing age. Adolescents and elderly people are in fact less able to This study aims to investigate the role of social support disengage from their own emotional perspective in modulating the neural correlates involved in social compared to mid-aged participants, resulting in more exclusion. We focused on two different forms of biased judgments of other’s affective state, because supports: physical and cognitive. By physical support we shifted towards their own emotions. The findings refer to physical contact, e.g. provided by a friend; by are discussed in light of the maturation and decay of cognitive support we refer to the communication of specific functional networks in the brain. useful information about social exclusion experience, e.g. “I’m sorry you has been excluded” proffered by a friend. 61 women divided in three group - cognitive support (N= 19), physical support (N=20) and control Contextual and social inference abilities in children group (N=22) - participated to the study. Experimental with high-functioning autism spectrum disorder and fMRI session was composed by 3 phases. (A) Social their typically developing controls exclusion I: each group was scanned while playing the Soile Loukusa, Leena Mäkinen, Eeva Leinonen, Hanna virtual Cyberball game. During Cyberball two (virtual) Ebeling & Irma Moilanen persons play with a ball, and they keep out of the game the experimental subject. (B) Social support: The ability to make pragmatic inferences is required in order to understand the speaker’s intended meaning in communicative situations. Even if it is well known that 20 children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have difficulties with pragmatic inference, researchers do not entirely agree on the prevalence of these difficulties. The aim of this study was to investigate how children with ASD and matched controls answer contextually and socially challenging questions which vary in terms of their cognitive demands. Sixteen Finnish high-functioning children with ASD (mean age 7;7 years) and 16 typically developing age- matched control children participated in this study. Children with ASD were diagnosed by a child neurologist or a child psychiatrist at Oulu University Hospital in Finland. Diagnoses were based on investigations carried out by a multiprofessional team according to ICD-10 criteria. In this study the children were asked test questions which were planned to measure context utilization, social language use and understanding of intentions, thoughts and feelings. The material contained 39 questions and they aimed to study how children managed to derive inferential conclusions. The results indicated that children with ASD have difficulties with many of the contextually and socially complex questions. In this study, the difficulties with contextual inference in children with ASD were not evident only in questions requiring theory of mind (ToM) but they also had difficulties with contextually challenging questions without demands for ToM processing. This study suggests that the pragmatic inference difficulties of the children with ASD are based on multidimensional cognitive problems. 21