Embracing integration and complexity: placing emotion within a science of brain and behaviour

ABSTRACT

The present paper addresses conceptual issues that are central to emotion research. What is emotion? What are its defining characteristics? The field struggles with questions like these almost constantly. I argue that definitions, and deciding what is the proper status of emotion, are not a requirement for scientific progress – in fact, they can hinder it. Therefore, “emotion” researchers should strive to develop a science of complex behaviours, and worry less about their exact nature. But for interesting behaviours, is most of the explaining that is needed present at the level of isolated systems (perception, cognition, etc.) or at the level of interactions between them? I suggest that the level of interactions is where most of the work is needed. Accordingly, I advocate that it is important to embrace integration, and not to strive to necessarily disentangle the multiple contributions underlying behaviours. More generally, it is argued that we need to revise models of causation adopted when reasoning about the mind and brain. Instead, a “complex systems” approach is required where the interactions between multiple components lead to system-level – emergent – properties that cannot be isolated or attributed to more elementary parts.     

Alterations in error-related brain activity and post-error behavior over time

This study examines the relation between the error-related negativity (ERN) and post-error behavior over time in healthy young adults (N=61). Event-related brain potentials were collected during two sessions of an identical flanker task. Results indicated changes in ERN and post-error accuracy were related across task sessions, with more negative ERN associated with greater improvements in post-error accuracy. This relationship was independent of any cross-sectional relationships between overall task performance, individual difference factors, including personality and self-efficacy, and indices of self-regulatory action monitoring. These results indicate that the relation between ERN and post-error accuracy remains intact and consistent regardless of variation in this set of individual difference factors previously associated with both of these indices of self-regulatory action monitoring, providing support for the strength, robustness, and persistence of this relationship in the process of adaptively controlling behavior to enhance task performance.     

AGREEING TO DISAGREE: Indigenous Pluralism from Human Rights to Bioethics

David Hollenbach, working within the context of human rights theory, has developed the notion of "indigenous pluralism" as a means of coping with the problems that arise when different religious traditions hold distinct or incompatible interpretations of human rights. It will be argued that indigenous pluralism is a theoretically and practically useful concept for bioethics as well and hence should be incorporated into bioethical methodology and processes of bioethical policy formation. Subsequently, the notion of indigenous pluralism will be discussed in relation to determinations of death as a means of illustrating this concept's applicability to bioethical inquiry.     

Creative thinking and brain network development in schoolchildren

Fostering creative minds has always been a premise to ensure adaptation to new challenges of human civilization. While some alternative educational settings (i.e., Montessori) were shown to nurture creative skills, it is unknown how they impact underlying brain mechanisms across the school years. This study assessed creative thinking and resting-state functional connectivity via fMRI in 75 children (4–18 y.o.) enrolled either in Montessori or traditional schools. We found that pedagogy significantly influenced creative performance and underlying brain networks. Replicating past work, Montessori-schooled children showed higher scores on creative thinking tests. Using static functional connectivity analysis, we found that Montessori-schooled children showed decreased within-network functional connectivity of the salience network. Moreover, using dynamic functional connectivity, we found that traditionally-schooled children spent more time in a brain state characterized by high intra-default mode network connectivity. These findings suggest that pedagogy may influence brain networks relevant to creative thinking—particularly the default and salience networks. Further research is needed, like a longitudinal study, to verify these results given the implications for educational practitioners. A video abstract of this article can be viewed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xWV_5o8wB5g .

Research Highlights

• Most executive jobs are prospected to be obsolete within several decades, so creative skills are seen as essential for the near future.
• School experience has been shown to play a role in creativity development, however, the underlying brain mechanisms remained under-investigated yet.
• Seventy-five 4–18 years-old children, from Montessori or traditional schools, performed a creativity task at the behavioral level, and a 6-min resting-state MR scan.
• We uniquely report preliminary evidence for the impact of pedagogy on functional brain networks.