Uncovering new information about how the brain processes the positive emotions of other people and understanding the impact of these perceptions on social decisions is the goal of a research project led by the University of Coimbra (UC).
With this research, scientists hope to learn more about the biological mechanisms underlying empathy for the positive emotions of others, which unlike negative emotions have received little attention from the scientific community. The perception of positive emotions on others is particularly impaired in psychiatric disorders, which means that this study may contribute for the future development of pharmacological approaches to these conditions.
The ARROW project: Neural Correlate for the Perception of Others Reward will run until 2028. It is funded with more than €150,000 (€156,778.56, to be precise) by the ERA Post-doctoral Fellowships instrument, under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Post-doctoral Fellowships Actions, which funds postdoctoral projects with the aim of supporting the careers and employability of doctoral researchers and, at the same time, promoting international mobility, since the ARROW project will be developed in Portugal and France. It will be led by Flavia Ricciardi, a researcher at the Center for Neuroscience and Cell Biology at UC (CNC-UC) and the Centre for Innovative Biomedicine and Biotechnology (CiBB), and supervised by Cristina Márquez, a researcher at CNC-UC and CiBB, who specializes in social behavior.
Although the brain's processing of other people's emotions — that is, how we perceive what others are feeling — is essential for social interaction and empathy, the brain mechanisms that trigger these actions remain unknown, particularly regarding positive emotions. “We know that various animals perceive, share, and act under the influence of their peers' affective states, a phenomenon like human empathy which we call emotional contagion. Positive emotions have received little attention from the scientific community, despite their high relevance to our well-being,” explains Flavia Ricciardi.
Searching for new information about how the brain processes positive emotions from others and uses it to act in social context, the CNC-UC Social Behavior Neural Circuits research group, led by Cristina Márquez, has preliminary data about the functioning of the ventral tegmental area in rats — a region of the brain essential for reward and emotion circuits. “Data collected in the laboratory indicates that this area responds not only to one's own reward, but also to the reward of others, which may mean that we use the same brain circuits for our reward system and for perceiving the reward of others” explains Flavia Ricciardi.
Based on information previously collected in projects coordinated by Cristina Márquez, the ARROW project aims to “elucidate how the brain processes positive affective states of others and how this information is used to guide prosocial decision-making — that is, decisions that benefit other people,” says the researcher. Flavia Ricciardi adds that “research will be developed on a robust animal model that allows us to uncover biological mechanisms close to human reality”.
“Unraveling the mechanisms that underlie this social phenomenon is a fundamental step in the development of new pharmacological interventions in clinical conditions such as depression, autism spectrum disorder, or social anxiety,” adds the researcher. For example, “identifying atypical neural connections may be indicative of greater difficulty in developing social skills” and, as such, “better understanding of these brain circuits and behavior may help us in the future to address these difficulties.”
Given the complexity and detail of these emotional and cognitive processes, the research team will use an in vivo electrophysiology technique, which allows the activity of single neurons to be recorded. This allows the understanding of the activity of individual neurons in the reward system when we experience our own and others positive emotions — that is, what signals are emitted when we are faced with rewards and the rewards experienced by others. The interaction of the reward system with the anterior cingulate cortex, another region of the brain involved in functions such as emotional contagion and social behavior, will also be studied.
In addition to the researcher Cristina Márquez, the ARROW project will also collaborate with Alexandre Charlet, a researcher at the Institute for Cellular and Integrative Neurosciences from the University of Strasbourg, where part of this research will take place, particularly for the use of in vitro electrophysiology combined with optogenetics, a robust technique used in neuroscience to manipulate neuron activity in real time.
