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.

	Lieberman, Berkman, & Wager reply to Vul et al on Voodoo Correlations.
	Automaticity and control research.
	Chronic grief associated with reward responses in brain.
	The neural and chemical bases of fairness.
	Affect Labeling disrupts amygdala activity to affective stimuli, click here for more.
	Brain Scans Reveal Why Meditation Works, click here.
	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.
	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.
	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.
	Lab members Naomi Eisenberger and Molly Crockett win the Charles E. and Sue K. Young Awards for academic excellence.
	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.
	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.
	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.