Latest
Lab News
Lieberman wins APA Early Career Award. (pdf)
New York Times article on rationalization in amnesics and monkeys. (pdf)
Jennifer Pfeifer wins Charles E. and Sue K. Young Award. (pdf)
Naomi Eisenberger wins Chancellor's Award for Postdoctoral Research. (pdf)
Oscar winning writer/director Stephen Gaghan stops by the lab. (html)
Newsweek article on Social Neuroscience. (html
or pdf)
APA Monitor article: Talking the pain away. (html
or pdf)
New York Times article by Dan Goleman on Social Neuroscience. (html
or pdf)
Click on images to read more.
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(June 2008)
Chronic grief associated with reward responses in brain. |
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(June 2008, Science)
Neurochemistry of Fairness. |
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(April 2008, Psychological Science and May
2006, Science)
The neural bases of fairness in the ultimatum game. |
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(June
2007)
Affect Labeling disrupts amygdala activity to affective stimuli,
click here for more. |
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(June
2007)
Brain Scans Reveal Why Meditation Works, click
here. |
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(June
2006, SCAN)
First issue of Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience is now online.
Free access for all. For table of contents, click
here. For press release, click here. |
| (December
2005, NeuroImage)
This issue of NeuroImage contains a section devoted to social cognitive neuroscience
papers and was edited by Dr. Lieberman. Click on the cover image to go to
the NeuroImage table of contents. |
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(October
2004, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology)
Functional MRI was used to examine the neural correlates of
self-knowledge that are automatically accessible versus self-knowledge
that is only effortfully retrieved. Individuals who were either
experienced actors or athletes judged the self-descriptiveness
of trait words that each related to either acting or athletics,
but not both. When providing self-knowledge judgments in their
area of expertise, a wide network of automatic emotional processing
regions were involved, whereas when providing self-knowledge
judgments in the other area for which they lacked expertise,
these regions were not involved and instead regions supporting
effortul thought and episodic memory were involved. |
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(Summer
2005, UCLA College Report)
Lab members Naomi Eisenberger and Molly Crockett win the Charles E. and Sue
K. Young Awards for academic excellence. |
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(May
2005, Nature Neuroscience)
Functional MRI was used to examine the nature of amygdala sensitivity to
race. Both African–American and Caucasian–American individuals
showed greater amygdala activity to African–American targets than
to Caucasian–American targets, suggesting that race–related
amygdala activity may result from cultural learning rather than from the
novelty of other races. Additionally, verbal
encoding of African–American targets produced significantly less amygdala
activity than perceptual encoding of African–American targets. |
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(October 2003,
Science)
A neuroimaging study examined the neural correlates of social exclusion
and tested the hypothesis that the brain bases of social pain are similar
to those of physical pain. Participants were scanned while playing a virtual
ball-tossing game in which they were ultimately excluded. Paralleling results
from physical pain studies, anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) was more active
during exclusion than inclusion and correlated positively with self-reported
distress. Right ventral prefrontal cortex (RVPFC) was active during exclusion
and correlated negatively with self-reported distress. ACC changes mediated
the RVPFC-distress correlation suggesting RVPFC regulates the distress of
social exclusion by disrupting ACC activity. |
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(February
2004, NeuroImage)
The neurocognitive pathways by which placebo effects operate are poorly
understood. Positron emission tomography (PET) imaging was used to assess
the brain response of patients with chronic abdominal pain (irritable bowel
syndrome; IBS) to induced intestinal discomfort both prior to and after
a three-week placebo regimen. A daily symptom diary was used to measure
symptom improvement. Increases in right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex
(RVLPFC) activity from pre- to post-placebo predicted self-reported symptom
improvement, and this relationship was mediated by changes in dorsal anterior
cingulate (dACC), typically associated with pain unpleasantness. These results
are consistent with disruption theory (Lieberman, 2003) which proposes that
activation of prefrontal regions associated with thinking about negative
affect can diminish dACC and amygdala reactivity to negative affect stimuli.
This is the first study to identify a neural pathway from a region of the
brain associated with placebos and affective thought to a region closely
linked to the placebo-related outcome of diminished pain unpleasantness. |