INFORMAL CAREGIVER IDENTITY: VOLUNTARY JOB FIT, TEAMWORK, AND TOOLS

According to the Family Caregiver Alliance, an informal or family caregiver is “an unpaid individual . . . involved in assisting others with activities of daily living and/or medical tasks.” As informal caregiving in the United States has increased, research on the topic has been published in a myriad of disciplines (e.g., sociology, nursing, social work, and medicine). The literature has defined informal caregivers (ICGs), described their role and its impacts, detailed the costs and benefits of informal caregiving, and evaluated interventions to assist ICGs. Scholars have also investigated more natural, less experimental use of informational and support resources for ICGs than, for example, interventions via informational websites or support groups, but they have not thoroughly explored their effects. This study used semistructured interviews with ICGs catering to care recipients (CRs) with various conditions and characteristics (e.g., ages) to explore ICGs’ authentic use of caregiving-related resources for providing care and for coping with the often complex and fluctuating demands of their role. Using a theoretical sample of 25 ICGs, this grounded theory study yielded a number of findings. Study participants’ comments revealed that they conceived of informal caregiving as more akin to a volunteer job than to a career. Because the study sample contained primary, secondary, and other nonprimary caregivers, I observed that the participant’s position in the caregiving project team, in conjunction with overall team functioning, influenced their caregiving experience. The proportion of helpful resources relative to unhelpful resources, however, was not related to whether or not ICGs identified positive aspects of the job. The quality of relationships with other members of the formal and informal caregiving team proved to have more influence on whether or not ICGs identified any positive aspects of the job. In addition, the Internet proved to be a largely beneficial caregiving tool for those who used it. Although the Internet was most often used to seek information, it helped ICGs cope by enabling them to build personal coping resources and by offering social support by connecting users to similar others. These findings suggest the need for early identification of prospective caregiving team members to (1) optimize the calibration of caregiver abilities and (2) establish a division of labor to diminish the caregiving workload while building greater appreciation among team members for the contributions and capacities of the others

Folk Explanations of Behavior: A Specialized Use of a Domain-General Mechanism

People typically explain others’ behaviors by attributing them to the beliefs and motives of an unobservable mind. Although such attributional inferences are critical for understanding the social world, it is unclear whether they rely on processes distinct from those used to understand the nonsocial world. In the present study, we used functional MRI to identify brain regions associated with making attributions about social and nonsocial situations. Attributions in both domains activated a common set of brain regions, and individual differences in the domain-specific recruitment of one of these regions—the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (DMPFC)—correlated with attributional accuracy in each domain. Overall, however, the DMPFC showed greater activation for attributions about social than about nonsocial situations, and this selective response to the social domain was greatest in participants who reported the highest levels of social expertise. We conclude that folk explanations of behavior are an expert use of a domain-general cognitive ability

Validating the Why/How contrast for functional MRI studies of Theory of Mind

The ability to impute mental states to others, or Theory of Mind (ToM), has been the subject of hundreds of neuroimaging studies. Although reviews and meta-analyses of these studies have concluded that ToM recruits a coherent brain network, mounting evidence suggests that this network is an abstraction based on pooling data from numerous studies, most of which use different behavioral tasks to investigate ToM. Problematically, this means that no single behavioral task can be used to reliably measure ToM Network function as currently conceived. To make ToM Network function scientifically tractable, we need standardized tasks capable of reliably measuring specific aspects of its functioning. Here, our goal is to validate the Why/How Task for this purpose. Several prior studies have found that when compared to answering how-questions about another person's behavior, answering why-questions about that same behavior activates a network that is anatomically consistent with meta-analytic definitions of the ToM Network. In the version of the Why/How Task presented here, participants answer yes/no Why (e.g., Is the person helping someone?) and How (e.g., Is the person lifting something?) questions about pretested photographs of naturalistic human behaviors. Across three fMRI studies, we show that the task elicits reliable performance measurements and modulates a left-lateralized network that is consistently localized across studies. While this network is convergent with meta-analyses of ToM studies, it is largely distinct from the network identified by the widely used False-Belief Localizer, the most common ToM task. Our new task is publicly available, and can be used as an efficient functional localizer to provide reliable identification of single-subject responses in most regions of the network. Our results validate the Why/How Task, both as a standardized protocol capable of producing maximally comparable data across studies, and as a flexible foundation for programmatic research on the neurobiological foundations of a basic manifestation of human ToM

The Neuroscience of Understanding the Emotions of Others

We cannot help but impute emotions to the behaviors of others, and constantly infer not only what others are feeling, but also why they feel that way. The comprehension of other people’s emotional states is computationally complex and difficult, requiring the flexible, context-sensitive deployment of cognitive operations that encompass rapid orienting to, and recognition of, emotionally salient cues; classification of emotions into culturally-learned categories; and using an abstract theory of mind to reason about what caused the emotion, what future actions the person might be planning, and what we should do next in response. This review summarizes what neuroscience data − primarily functional neuroimaging data − has so far taught us about the cognitive architecture enabling emotion understanding in its various forms

The Neural Basis of Conceptualizing the Same Action at Different Levels of Abstraction

People can conceptualize the same action (e.g., "riding a bike") at different levels of abstraction (LOA), where higher LOAs specify the abstract motives that explain why the action is performed (e.g., "getting exercise"), while lower LOAs specify the concrete steps that indicate how the action is performed (e.g., "gripping handlebars"). Prior neuroimaging studies have shown that why and how questions about actions differentially activate two cortical networks associated with mental-state reasoning and action representation, respectively; however, it remains unknown whether this is due to the differential demands of the questions per se or to the shifts in LOA those questions produce. We conducted functional MRI while participants judged pairs of action phrases that varied in LOA and that could be framed either as a why question (Why ride a bike? Get exercise.) or a how question (How to get exercise? Ride a bike.). Question framing (why vs. how) had no effect on activity in regions of the two networks. Instead, these regions uniquely tracked parametric variation in LOA, both across and within trials. This suggests that the human capacity to understand actions at different levels of abstraction is based in the relative activity of two cortical networks

The Neural Basis of Understanding the Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals

Humans cannot help but attribute human emotions to non-human animals. Although such attributions are often regarded as gratuitous anthropomorphisms and held apart from the attributions humans make about each other’s internal states, they may be the product of a general mechanism for flexibly interpreting adaptive behavior. To examine this, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in humans to compare the neural mechanisms associated with attributing emotions to humans and non-human animal behavior. Although undergoing fMRI, participants first passively observed the facial displays of human, non-human primate and domestic dogs, and subsequently judged the acceptability of emotional (e.g. ‘annoyed’) and facial descriptions (e.g. ‘baring teeth’) for the same images. For all targets, emotion attributions selectively activated regions in prefrontal and anterior temporal cortices associated with causal explanation in prior studies. These regions were similarly activated by both human and non-human targets even during the passive observation task; moreover, the degree of neural similarity was dependent on participants’ self-reported beliefs in the mental capacities of non-human animals. These results encourage a non-anthropocentric view of emotion understanding, one that treats the idea that animals have emotions as no more gratuitous than the idea that humans other than ourselves do

Amygdala lesions do not compromise the cortical network for false-belief reasoning

The amygdala plays an integral role in human social cognition and behavior, with clear links to emotion recognition, trust judgments, anthropomorphization, and psychiatric disorders ranging from social phobia to autism. A central feature of human social cognition is a theory-of-mind (ToM) that enables the representation other people's mental states as distinct from one's own. Numerous neuroimaging studies of the best studied use of ToM—false-belief reasoning—suggest that it relies on a specific cortical network; moreover, the amygdala is structurally and functionally connected with many components of this cortical network. It remains unknown whether the cortical implementation of any form of ToM depends on amygdala function. Here we investigated this question directly by conducting functional MRI on two patients with rare bilateral amygdala lesions while they performed a neuroimaging protocol standardized for measuring cortical activity associated with false-belief reasoning. We compared patient responses with those of two healthy comparison groups that included 480 adults. Based on both univariate and multivariate comparisons, neither patient showed any evidence of atypical cortical activity or any evidence of atypical behavioral performance; moreover, this pattern of typical cortical and behavioral response was replicated for both patients in a follow-up session. These findings argue that the amygdala is not necessary for the cortical implementation of ToM in adulthood and suggest a reevaluation of the role of the amygdala and its cortical interactions in human social cognition

Reverse-correlating mental representations of sex-typed bodies: the effect of number of trials on image quality

Sex categorization is a critical process in social perception. While psychologists have long theorized that perceivers have distinct mental representations of men and women that help them to achieve efficient sex categorizations, researchers have only recently begun using reverse-correlation to visualize the content of these mental representations. The present research addresses two issues concerning this relatively new methodological tool. First, previous studies of reverse-correlation have focused almost exclusively on perceivers' mental representations of faces. Our study demonstrates that this technique can also be used to visualize mental representations of sex-typed bodies. Second, most studies of reverse-correlation have employed a relatively large number of trials (1000+) to capture perceivers' mental representations of a given category. Our study demonstrated that, at least for sex-typed representations of bodies, high quality reverse-correlation images can be obtained with as few as 100 trials. Overall, our findings enhance knowledge of reverse-correlation methodology in general and sex categorization in particular, providing new information for researchers interested in using this technique to understand the complex processes underlying social perception

Evidence that the Evoked Response of Dorsomedial Prefrontal Cortex to Fixation Baseline Periods Facilitates Future Social (But not Nonsocial) Inferential (But not non-Inferential) Judgments

People draw inferences about each other with great efficiency. Such inferences are typically executed in order to refer transient observed behaviors ( e.g.,“smiling”) to relatively more permanent unobservable states (e.g.,“friendly”). A large body of evidence has delineated a set of brain regions that are reliably correlated with the performance of such mental state inferences: the mentalizing system. Intriguingly, this system shows considerable anatomical overlap with the default mode network, so-called because it is exhibits strong, integrated activity when people are at rest, for instance, duration fixation baseline periods. Here, we used fMRI to test the hypothesis that activity of the mentalizing system during these fixation periods prior to social inferential judgments would increase the efficiency of such judgments. 21 healthy adults underwent event-related fMRI while executing three types of judgments: social inferential (evaluating a mental description of a photographed behavior); social non-inferential (evaluating a motor description of a photographed behavior); or non-social (evaluating an arithmetical expression). Social inferential judgments robustly activated the mentalizing system, and many of the same areas were robustly de-activated by the non-social task when compared to the fixation baseline periods in between each trial. A parametric analysis of response time revealed that increased activity during these pre-trial periods in one of these regions, dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, was associated with faster response times to accurate social (but not non-social) inferential (but not non-inferential) judgments. This provides the best support yet for a functional link between default activity of the mentalizing system and the execution of social inferences