Content area
Full text
Brain Struct Funct (2010) 214:579591 DOI 10.1007/s00429-010-0251-3
SPECIAL ISSUE
The role of anterior insular cortex in social emotions
Claus Lamm Tania Singer
Received: 16 December 2009 / Accepted: 27 March 2010 / Published online: 29 April 2010 Springer-Verlag 2010
Abstract Functional neuroimaging investigations in the elds of social neuroscience and neuroeconomics indicate that the anterior insular cortex (AI) is consistently involved in empathy, compassion, and interpersonal phenomena such as fairness and cooperation. These ndings suggest that AI plays an important role in social emotions, hereby dened as affective states that arise when we interact with other people and that depend on the social context. After we link the role of AI in social emotions to interoceptive awareness and the representation of current global emotional states, we will present a model suggesting that AI is not only involved in representing current states, but also in predicting emotional states relevant to the self and others. This model also proposes that AI enables us to learn about emotional states as well as about the uncertainty attached to events, and implies that AI plays a dominant role in decision making in complex and uncertain environments. Our review further highlights that dorsal and ventro-central, as well as anterior and posterior subdivisions of AI potentially subserve different functions and guide different aspects of behavioral regulation. We conclude with a section summarizing different routes to understanding other peoples actions, feelings and thoughts, emphasizing the notion that the predominant role of AI involves understanding others feeling and bodily states rather than their action intentions or abstract beliefs.
Keywords Insular cortex Emotions Social
Empathy Compassion Fairness Uncertainty
Anterior insula and social emotions: an overview
The aim of this paper is to highlight the role of the anterior insular cortex (AI) in social emotions, hereby dened as affective states that are not only related to the self, but depend on the social context and arise when we interact with other people. Numerous functional neuro-imaging and neuropsychological investigations suggest that AI plays a prominent role in emotional processing. For example, a recent meta-analysis of 162 functional neuroimaging studies of emotion shows that dorsal and ventral subdivisions of the AI arealong with the amygdala and the ventral striatumamong the most consistently activated regions in studies of emotion...