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Scholarly Works (6 results)

  • Thesis
  • Peer Reviewed
UC Berkeley Electronic Theses and Dissertations (2013)

Theoretical and empirical work suggest that the vagus nerve supports social behavior, promoting communication, social engagement, coping or self-soothing in social situations, and the initiation of socially supportive behavior (e.g. Porges, 2003). Guided by this thinking, I predict that the experience of compassion in response to the suffering of others is associated with greater vagus nerve activation. I test this hypothesis across four studies in which participants witnessed others suffer while I recorded physiological measures including a non-invasive index of vagal activity called respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA), heart rate, respiration, and skin conductance. Participants exhibited greater RSA activity during the compassion induction compared to a neutral control (Study 1), another positive emotion (Study 2), and a prosocial emotion that lacked the presence of suffering (Study 3). Increases in RSA activity during the experience of compassion were accompanied by decreases in heart rate and occasionally by increases in respiration, but not changes in skin conductance. In Study 4, RSA activity during the compassion induction correlated positively with continuous self-reports of compassion and perceptions of participants' compassion by coders. This work suggests that compassion engages the vagus nerve, facilitating this prosocial response to others' suffering.

    Cover page: Vagal Reactivity and Compassionate Responses to the Suffering of Others
    • Article
    • Peer Reviewed
    Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, Volume 42 (2020)
    An elaborate repertoire of emotions is one feature that dis-tinguishes humans from animals. Language offers a criticalform of emotion expression. However, it is unclear whetherthe meaning of an emotion word remains stable, and what fac-tors may underlie changes in emotion meaning. We hypothe-size that emotion word meanings have changed over time andthat the prototypicality of an emotion term drives this changebeyond general factors such as word frequency. We developa vector-space representation of emotion and show that thismodel replicates empirical findings on prototypicality judg-ments and basic categories of emotion. We provide evidencethat more prototypical emotion words have undergone lesschange in meaning than peripheral emotion words over the pastcentury, and that this trend holds within each family of emo-tion. Our work extends synchronic theories of emotion to itsdiachronic development and offers a computational character-ization of emotion semantics in natural language use.
      Cover page: Prototype theory and emotion semantic changeCreative Commons 'BY' version 4.0 license
      • Article
      • Peer Reviewed
      Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, Volume 44 (2022)
      Although language is critical to supporting morality within society, it is not clear how moral language itself evolved. We investigate the evolution of moral semantics, hypothesizing that words evolved to take on moral meanings from concrete experiences through metaphorization. We test this hypothesis by analyzing moral semantic change in words from the Moral Foundations Dictionary and the Historical Thesaurus of English over the past hundreds of years. In contrast with the observation that words become concrete over time, we demonstrate that moral words in the English lexicon undergo concrete-to-abstract shifts, reflecting systematic metaphorical mappings to the moral domain. Our results provide large-scale evidence for the role of metaphor in the historical development of the English moral lexicon.
        Cover page: Evolution of moral semantics through metaphorizationCreative Commons 'BY' version 4.0 license
        • Article
        • Peer Reviewed
        UC San Diego Previously Published Works (2015)
        Compassion is an affective response to another's suffering and a catalyst of prosocial behavior. In the present studies, we explore the peripheral physiological changes associated with the experience of compassion. Guided by long-standing theoretical claims, we propose that compassion is associated with activation in the parasympathetic autonomic nervous system through the vagus nerve. Across 4 studies, participants witnessed others suffer while we recorded physiological measures, including heart rate, respiration, skin conductance, and a measure of vagal activity called respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA). Participants exhibited greater RSA during the compassion induction compared with a neutral control (Study 1), another positive emotion (Study 2), and a prosocial emotion lacking appraisals of another person's suffering (Study 3). Greater RSA during the experience of compassion compared with the neutral or control emotion was often accompanied by lower heart rate and respiration but no difference in skin conductance. In Study 4, increases in RSA during compassion positively predicted an established composite of compassion-related words, continuous self-reports of compassion, and nonverbal displays of compassion. Compassion, a core affective component of empathy and prosociality, is associated with heightened parasympathetic activity.
          Cover page: Affective and Physiological Responses to the Suffering of Others: Compassion and Vagal Activity
          • Article
          • Peer Reviewed
          UC Berkeley Previously Published Works (2015)
          Low socioeconomic status (SES) during childhood confers risk for adverse health in adulthood. Accumulating evidence suggests that this may be due, in part, to the association between lower childhood SES and higher levels of pro-inflammatory cytokines. Drawing from literature showing that low childhood SES predicts exaggerated physiological reactivity to stressors and that lower SES is associated with a more communal, socially attuned orientation, we hypothesized that inflammatory reactivity would be more greatly affected by cues of social support among individuals whose childhood SES was low than among those whose childhood SES was high. In two studies, we found that individuals with lower subjective childhood SES exhibited greater reductions in pro-inflammatory cytokine reactivity to a stressor in the presence of a supportive figure (relative to conditions with an unsupportive or neutral figure). These effects were independent of current SES. This work helps illuminate SES-based differences in inflammatory reactivity to stressors, particularly among individuals whose childhood SES was low.
            Cover page: Socioeconomic Status and Social Support
            • Article
            • Peer Reviewed
            UC Berkeley Previously Published Works (2015)
            In response to social-evaluative threat induced in the laboratory, lower (compared to higher) subjective social class of a participant predicts greater increases in the inflammatory cytokine interleukin-6 (IL-6). In spite of the interpersonal nature of social-evaluation, little work has explored whether characteristics of the evaluator shape physiological responses in this context. In the current study, in a sample of 190 college students (male=66), we explored whether one's subjective social class interacts with the perceived social class of an evaluator to predict changes in Oral Mucosal Transudate (OMT) IL-6 in response to the Trier Social Stress Test (TSST). Participants were randomly assigned to be the speaker or the evaluator. Extending past work, we found that while speakers low in subjective social class consistently respond with strong increases in IL-6 regardless of their perception of their evaluator's social class, speakers high in subjective social class responded with greater increases in IL-6 when their evaluator was perceived as high social class compared to when they were perceived as low social class. This finding highlights the importance of perceptions of the evaluator in informing inflammatory responses to a social-evaluative task.
              Cover page: The role of interpersonal processes in shaping inflammatory responses to social-evaluative threat.
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