Consider the case where you are gone on a trip to a foreign land where u know no one. One fine morning you go to the local market and in the rush of the market someone steals your wallet/purse. You have no money, no passport and no one to contact. You don't know who to approach for help. You don't know the language and you want to contact someone for directions who would you approach to ask for help and who you would like to avoid. Would you approach someone who looks untrustworthy or would you avoid that person??
I recently gave a presentation on a topic related to this. It was based on the 2011 cerebral cortex paper "Endogenous testosterone modulates prefrontal-amygdala connectivity during social emotional behavior.". Its an open access paper and you should give it a read. The paper contributes to the prevailing ideas of influence of neuro peptides on social behavior (the prominent being the effect of oxytocin on trust). The current paper discusses role of endogenous testosterone in approach/avoidance behavior and how it modulates the connectivity between amygdala and prefrontal cortex. Steroid hormone testosterone has been shown to play important role in the regulation of social emotional behavior. Studies have implicated testosterone in reduced human trust as well as in reduced lying, aggressive behavior. Past studies suggest that we can make trustworthiness judgments from faces in less than 100ms and that peptides like oxytocin and testosterone modulate our judgments. Trustworthiness judgments are suggested to be a prerequisite to approach/avoidance behavior. While the paper does present interesting results that might contribute to understanding human social behavior, the paper does lack some of the rigorous statistical standards. For example, all brain maps (brain images) are not at corrected thresholds. Much has already been written about the necessity of corrected threshold (see Craig Bennett's salmon paper). Although the results say a corrected threshold of FWE p<0.05, the analysis is not whole brain but for selective regions. The instructions provided to the participants was also not very clear. The paper relies on the idea that happy faces promote approach automatically. The participants were not told to specifically approach or avoid a face but an irrelevant top down task of approaching or avoiding happy faces (and vice versa for angry faces). This might explain the activation of VLPFC/FP in the results. Also, the use of salivary testosterone may not be a great predictor of testosterone in the brain. The specific use of male participants has been accepted as a limitation. Overall a paper with limitations and less rigorous statistical measures. Find my presentation here.
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About meI am a neuroscientist working on social cognition. (I was told not to be fancy.) Archives
June 2016
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