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      A lesion model of envy and Schadenfreude: legal, deservingness and moral dimensions as revealed by neurodegeneration

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          Abstract

          Moral emotions have been assessed with correlational imaging techniques and framed as monolithic domains. Hernando et al. present a novel task indexing dimensions of schadenfreude and envy: deservingness, morality, and legality. An increase in both schadenfreude and envy accompanies atrophy of social cognition networks in patients with behavioural variant FTD.

          Abstract

          The study of moral emotions (i.e. Schadenfreude and envy) is critical to understand the ecological complexity of everyday interactions between cognitive, affective, and social cognition processes. Most previous studies in this area have used correlational imaging techniques and framed Schadenfreude and envy as unified and monolithic emotional domains. Here, we profit from a relevant neurodegeneration model to disentangle the brain regions engaged in three dimensions of Schadenfreude and envy: deservingness, morality, and legality. We tested a group of patients with behavioural variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD), patients with Alzheimer’s disease, as a contrastive neurodegeneration model, and healthy controls on a novel task highlighting each of these dimensions in scenarios eliciting Schadenfreude and envy. Compared with the Alzheimer’s disease and control groups, patients with bvFTD obtained significantly higher scores on all dimensions for both emotions. Correlational analyses revealed an association between envy and Schadenfreude scores and greater deficits in social cognition, inhibitory control, and behaviour disturbances in bvFTD patients. Brain anatomy findings (restricted to bvFTD and controls) confirmed the partially dissociable nature of the moral emotions’ experiences and highlighted the importance of socio-moral brain areas in processing those emotions. In all subjects, an association emerged between Schadenfreude and the ventral striatum, and between envy and the anterior cingulate cortex. In addition, the results supported an association between scores for moral and legal transgression and the morphology of areas implicated in emotional appraisal, including the amygdala and the parahippocampus. By contrast, bvFTD patients exhibited a negative association between increased Schadenfreude and envy across dimensions and critical regions supporting social-value rewards and social-moral processes (dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, angular gyrus and precuneus). Together, this study provides lesion-based evidence for the multidimensional nature of the emotional experiences of envy and Schadenfreude. Our results offer new insights into the mechanisms subsuming complex emotions and moral cognition in neurodegeneration. Moreover, this study presents the exacerbation of envy and Schadenfreude as a new potential hallmark of bvFTD that could impact in diagnosis and progression.

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          The brain basis of emotion: a meta-analytic review.

          Researchers have wondered how the brain creates emotions since the early days of psychological science. With a surge of studies in affective neuroscience in recent decades, scientists are poised to answer this question. In this target article, we present a meta-analytic summary of the neuroimaging literature on human emotion. We compare the locationist approach (i.e., the hypothesis that discrete emotion categories consistently and specifically correspond to distinct brain regions) with the psychological constructionist approach (i.e., the hypothesis that discrete emotion categories are constructed of more general brain networks not specific to those categories) to better understand the brain basis of emotion. We review both locationist and psychological constructionist hypotheses of brain-emotion correspondence and report meta-analytic findings bearing on these hypotheses. Overall, we found little evidence that discrete emotion categories can be consistently and specifically localized to distinct brain regions. Instead, we found evidence that is consistent with a psychological constructionist approach to the mind: A set of interacting brain regions commonly involved in basic psychological operations of both an emotional and non-emotional nature are active during emotion experience and perception across a range of discrete emotion categories.
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            Comprehending envy.

            The authors reviewed the psychological research on envy. The authors examined definitional challenges associated with studying envy, such as the important distinction between envy proper (which contains hostile feelings) and benign envy (which is free of hostile feelings). The authors concluded that envy is reasonably defined as an unpleasant, often painful emotion characterized by feelings of inferiority, hostility, and resentment caused by an awareness of a desired attribute enjoyed by another person or group of persons. The authors examined questions such as why people envy, why envy contains hostile feelings, and why it has a tendency to transmute itself. Finally, the authors considered the role of envy in helping understand other research domains and discussed ways in which people cope with the emotion. (c) 2007 APA, all rights reserved.
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              Using human brain lesions to infer function: a relic from a past era in the fMRI age?

              Recent technological advances, such as functional imaging techniques, allow neuroscientists to measure and localize brain activity in healthy individuals. These techniques avoid many of the limitations of the traditional method for inferring brain function, which relies on examining patients with brain lesions. This has fueled the zeitgeist that the classical lesion method is an inferior and perhaps obsolescent technique. However, although the lesion method has important weaknesses, we argue that it complements the newer activation methods (and their weaknesses). Furthermore, recent developments can address many of the criticisms of the lesion method. Patients with brain lesions provide a unique window into brain function, and this approach will fill an important niche in future research.
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                Author and article information

                Journal
                Brain
                Brain
                brainj
                Brain
                Oxford University Press
                0006-8950
                1460-2156
                December 2017
                02 November 2017
                02 November 2017
                : 140
                : 12
                : 3357-3377
                Affiliations
                [1 ]Centro de Memoria y Cognición. Intellectus-Hospital Universitario San Ignacio, Bogotá Colombia
                [2 ]Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, Departments of Physiology, Psychiatry and Aging Institute Bogotá, Colombia
                [3 ]Laboratory of Experimental Psychology and Neuroscience (LPEN), Institute of Cognitive and Translational Neuroscience (INCyT), INECO Foundation, Favaloro University, Buenos Aires, Argentina
                [4 ]National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET), Buenos Aires, Argentina
                [5 ]Grupo de Investigación en Cerebro y Cognición Social, Bogotá, Colombia
                [6 ]Universidad de los Andes, Bogotá, Colombia
                [7 ]Departament de Psiquiatria i Medicina Legal, Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain
                [8 ]Departamento de Neurologia, Faculdade de Medicina, Universidade de Sao Paulo (FMUSP), Sao Paulo, Brazil
                [9 ]Universidad Torcuato di Tella, Laboratorio de Neurociencias, Buenos Aires, Argentina
                [10 ]Faculty of Education, National University of Cuyo (UNCuyo), Mendoza, Argentina
                [11 ]Universidad Autónoma del Caribe, Barranquilla, Colombia
                [12 ]Center for Social and Cognitive Neuroscience (CSCN), School of Psychology, Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez, Santiago de Chile, Chile
                [13 ]Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders, Sydney, Australia
                Author notes
                Correspondence to: Agustín Ibanez Laboratory of Experimental Psychology and Neuroscience (LPEN), Institute of Cognitive and Translational Neuroscience (INCyT), Institute of Cognitive Neurology (INECO) and CONICET, Pacheco de Melo 1860, Buenos Aires, Argentina, Postal Code 1126 E-mail: aibanez@ 123456ineco.org.ar
                Correspondence may also be addressed to: Hernando Santamaría-García E-mail: nanosanta@ 123456gmail.com
                Article
                awx269
                10.1093/brain/awx269
                5841144
                29112719
                de804386-f9bd-4f75-a763-9990d6087ae4
                © The Authors 2017. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Entomological Society of America.

                This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. For commercial re-use, please contact journals.permissions@oup.com

                History
                : 21 April 2017
                : 10 August 2017
                : 21 August 2017
                Page count
                Pages: 21
                Funding
                Funded by: CONICET 10.13039/501100002923
                Award ID: CONICYT/FONDAP 15150012
                Categories
                Original Articles
                Editor's Choice

                Neurosciences
                dementia,social cognition,brain atrophy,frontotemporal dementia
                Neurosciences
                dementia, social cognition, brain atrophy, frontotemporal dementia

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