Affiliative Experience Shows Unique Brain Signature

Comments

Attachment as a prerequisite for human connection
Demetrios

10/25/2012 11:39:32 AM

 I stumbled in my understanding in the premise set forth in this experiment - that attachment is required to feel an emotion such as guilt or compassion. It seems that a lot of very self-sacrificing people out there experience compassion for those whom they've never met - volunteer work, charities, etc. - sometimes even extending to enemies or otherwise hostile people. Similarly, guilt might be experienced by a person who commits what some call a 'victimless crime' - cheating on a test or something like that. I was curious if those situations would register different brain activity in a similar experiment. I'm very interested in scientific research in this area, particularly ideas like compassion and empathy which we often ascribe to higher-level reasoning but seem to have profound effects on the more 'primitive' brain regions. A very interesting article, thanks for writing it :-)