Event overview
Goldsmiths Psychology welcomes Dr Dan Campbell-Meiklejohn, University of Sussex, to present his work on Regulated Emotions: social biases, serotonin, and interoception.
Abstract: Sometimes our research life can take us in surprisingly different directions, and this is one of those times.
The first half of the talk will highlight a set of studies that explore bias in the way we value other people’s lives.
If asked, most of us would sign a petition declaring that all lives have equal value but the reality of our world is that some lives are more likely to be saved than others. For example, we tend to show greater interest in news about the lives of people nearby and might feel less compassion toward the 10,000th victim of a tragedy than the first ten.
Here, I take the perspective that the subjective value of a life can be measured in the emotional response to learning that the life is at risk, or it is gone. I will introduce “The Headlines Task” in which participants are presented with real headlines of risk to life by different causes, in different numbers, and in different countries.
Across five experiments, we measured: (a) self-reported willingness to pay to save lives; (b) the response in sympathetic arousal to learning that lives were at risk; (c) interest in whether they lived or died (information seeking, in British and Italian samples); and (d) neural responses to learning that people died in networks known to respond to vicarious pain.
We looked at whether all these measures were impacted by whether life was in one’s home country (compared to abroad), and how the response scaled with the number of people affected. Improved knowledge of bias surrounding the risk to life is sought to inform policymakers, humanitarian organizations, public health, and academics to better understand the affective determinants of public support for saving lives.
In the first half, we will discuss how emotional responses seem to be selectively inhibited for some lives at risk. In the second half of the talk, I will focus on one of the key feeders to emotions, interoception, and how it might be regulated.
Despite two decades of advances in interoception measurement, there is very little understood about interoception’s pharmacology. Recently, we published a landmark study that demonstrated how just a single dose of a serotonin reuptake inhibitor reduces interoceptive processing in the brain, both overall and in proportion to the level of anxiety being experienced by the individual. This points to serotonin as a key regulator of this pathway and interoception as a potential mechanism of serotonin treatments of anxiety.
Dr Dan Campbell-Meiklejohn is senior lecturer at the University of Sussex, and Director of the Social Motivation Lab there. He completed his DPhil in Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford and a BSc in Psychology at the University of British Columbia. He has made contributions primarily in the fields of psychopharmacology, decision-making, and the neural basis of social learning and social conformity.
Click here to join the seminar on Teams
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 28 Nov 2024 | 4:00pm - 5:00pm |
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