Papers by M. Immordino-yang
Frontiers in Education, 2021
Anticipating what adolescents will remember is a common goal in education research, but what tool... more Anticipating what adolescents will remember is a common goal in education research, but what tools allow us to predict adolescents' memory without interrupting the learning process as it naturally occurs? To attempt to identify neurophysiological markers of deep processing that may predict long-term retention, here we conducted an exploratory study by adding a cued recall probe to the last wave of data collection in a longitudinal psychosocial and neuroimaging study of 65 urban adolescents. Five years prior, and again 3 years prior, participants had reacted to the same emotionally evocative true stories during a videotaped interview that allowed us to measure eye-blink rate (EBR), and again during fMRI scanning. We analyzed EBR and neural data from the initial story exposure. We found that memory for a story was predicted by both EBR (a proxy for striatal dopamine) and default mode network neural activity to that story (involved in integrative memory and processing of emotional ...
Personal narratives typically involve a narrator who participates in a sequence of events in the ... more Personal narratives typically involve a narrator who participates in a sequence of events in the past. The narrator is therefore present at two narrative levels: (1) the extradiegetic level, where the act of narration takes place, with the narrator addressing an audience directly; and (2) the diegetic level, where the events in the story take place, with the narrator as a participant (usually the protagonist). Although story understanding is commonly associated with semantics of the diegetic level (i.e., understanding the events that take place within the story), personal narratives may also contain important information at the extradiegetic level that frames the narrated events and is crucial for capturing the narrator’s intent. We present a data-driven modeling approach that learns to identify subjective passages that express mental and emotional states of the narrator, placing them at either the diegetic or extradiegetic level. We describe an experiment where we used narratives f...
npj Science of Learning, 2020
The development of error monitoring is central to learning and academic achievement. However, few... more The development of error monitoring is central to learning and academic achievement. However, few studies exist on the neural correlates of children’s error monitoring, and no studies have examined its susceptibility to educational influences. Pedagogical methods differ on how they teach children to learn from errors. Here, 32 students (aged 8–12 years) from high-quality Swiss traditional or Montessori schools performed a math task with feedback during fMRI. Although the groups’ accuracies were similar, Montessori students skipped fewer trials, responded faster and showed more neural activity in right parietal and frontal regions involved in math processing. While traditionally-schooled students showed greater functional connectivity between the ACC, involved in error monitoring, and hippocampus following correct trials, Montessori students showed greater functional connectivity between the ACC and frontal regions following incorrect trials. The findings suggest that pedagogical exp...
Adolescent Research Review, 2021
Adolescents’ brains undergo development that enables and is enabled by emerging capacities for tr... more Adolescents’ brains undergo development that enables and is enabled by emerging capacities for transcendent thoughts and emotions. These newly emerging psychological capacities form the basis for age-appropriate spiritual development because they push youth to move beyond considering only concrete actions and perceptions to deal with the values and broader meaning that social situations invoke. The current article reviews evidence for brain development relevant to transcendent thought, and argues that the neural underpinnings of these capacities present a useful starting point for studying the possible neural basis of adolescent spiritual development. Reviewing evidence that adolescents grow their brains and selves by actively making meaning in and through supportive social relationships and deeper reflections, the article posits that developmentally appropriate spiritual thinking may also grow the adolescent brain. Situating spirituality at the intersection of biological and psychological homeostasis, the article argues for the interest and benefits of launching a theoretically grounded interdisciplinary research program investigating the neuropsychological basis of adolescent spirituality.
Mind, Brain, and Education, 2020
ABSTRACTThrough performance monitoring individuals detect and learn from unexpected outcomes, ind... more ABSTRACTThrough performance monitoring individuals detect and learn from unexpected outcomes, indexed by post‐error slowing and post‐error improvement in accuracy. Although performance monitoring is essential for academic learning and improves across childhood, its susceptibility to educational influences has not been studied. Here we compared performance monitoring on a flanker task in 234 children aged 4 through 15, from traditional or Montessori classrooms. While traditional classrooms emphasize that students learn from teachers' feedback, Montessori classrooms encourage students to work independently with materials specially designed to support learners discovering errors for themselves. We found that Montessori students paused longer post‐error in early childhood and, by adolescence, were more likely to self‐correct. We also found that a developmental shift from longer to shorter pauses post‐error being associated with self‐correction happened younger in the Montessori grou...
Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 2018
Witnessing exemplary actions triggers admiration, a positive emotion that can pertain to concrete... more Witnessing exemplary actions triggers admiration, a positive emotion that can pertain to concrete skills, or move the onlooker beyond physical characteristics to appreciate the abstract, moral implications. Participants reacted to narratives depicting skilled or virtuous protagonists first during a videotaped interview then during functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). We analyzed participants' gaze aversion (an indicator of disengaging from the immediate environment) and cognitive construals (mentions of concrete characteristics vs abstract beliefs and values) during the interview, and relations to individuals' subsequent neural activations. When participants averted their gaze, they were more likely to mention abstract construals, and both behaviors were more likely when reacting to virtue. Gaze aversion to virtue narratives predicted greater subsequent activation for those narratives in dorsal posterior cingulate cortex (dPCC), involved in visual attention control. The inferior-posterior posteromedial cortices (ipPMC), a default mode network hub involved in abstract thought, activated only to virtue, and activity level reflected individuals' tendency to abstract construals. Critically, dPCC and ipPMC activity sequentially mediated the relationship between individuals' gaze and abstract construal tendencies. No such relationships existed for reactions to skill, despite participants reporting equivalently strong positive emotion. In appreciating virtue, dPCC may support individuals in transcending the viewable context, facilitating ipPMC activity and moral construals.
Educational Psychologist, 2019
for-integrated-social-emotional-and-academic-development/. The authors thank D. Oyserman, D. Dani... more for-integrated-social-emotional-and-academic-development/. The authors thank D. Oyserman, D. Daniel and A. Blodgett for discussions.
Human brain mapping, 2018
Adolescents' exposure to community violence is a significant public health issue in urban set... more Adolescents' exposure to community violence is a significant public health issue in urban settings and has been associated with poorer cognitive performance and increased risk for psychiatric illnesses, including PTSD. However, no study to date has investigated the neural correlates of community violence exposure in adolescents. Sixty-five healthy adolescents (age = 14-18 years; 36 females, 29 males) from moderate- to high-crime neighborhoods in Los Angeles reported their violence exposure, parents' education level, and free/reduced school lunch status (socio-economic status, SES), and underwent structural neuroimaging and intelligence testing. Violence exposure negatively correlated with measures of SES, IQ, and gray matter volume. Above and beyond the effect of SES, violence exposure negatively correlated with IQ and with gray matter volume in the left inferior frontal gyrus and anterior cingulate cortex, regions involved in high-level cognitive functions and autonomic mod...
Current Opinion in Psychology, 2017
Social neuroscience has documented cultural differences in emotional brain functioning. Most rece... more Social neuroscience has documented cultural differences in emotional brain functioning. Most recently, these differences have been extended to include cultural effects on the real-time neural correlates of social-emotional feelings. Here we review these findings and use them to illustrate a biopsychosocial framework for studying acculturated social-affective functioning and development. We argue that understanding cultural differences in emotion neurobiology requires probing their social origins and connection with individuals' subjective, lived experiences. We suggest that an interdisciplinary, developmental perspective would advance scientific understanding by enabling the invention of protocols aligning neurobiological measures with techniques for documenting cultural contexts, social relationships and subjective experiences. Such work would also facilitate insights in applied fields struggling to accommodate cultural variation, such as psychiatry and education. Highlights: • The neural correlates of social-emotional feelings are influenced by culture • Cultural neural effects are independent from psychophysiological processing • Social learning likely shapes how people become aware of (feel) their emotions • Cultural norms for behavioral expressiveness may shape the neural feeling process • Interdisciplinary, developmental work can probe these findings' origins/applications
Current Opinion in Psychology, 2017
We review recent findings related to the neurobiology of infant attachment, emphasizing the role ... more We review recent findings related to the neurobiology of infant attachment, emphasizing the role of parenting quality in attachment formation and emotional development. Current findings suggest that the development of brain structures important for emotional expression and regulation (amygdala, prefrontal cortex, hippocampus) is deeply associated with the quality of care received in infancy, with sensitive caregiving providing regulation vital for programming these structures, ultimately shaping the development of emotion into adulthood. Evidence indicates that without sensitive caregiving, infants fail to develop mechanisms needed for later-life emotion and emotion regulation. Research suggests that a sensitive period exists in early life for parental shaping of emotional development, although further cross-species research is needed to discern its age limits, and thus inform interventions.
American Educational Research Journal, 2017
Social-affective neuroscience is revealing that human brain development is inherently social—our ... more Social-affective neuroscience is revealing that human brain development is inherently social—our very nature is organized by nurture. To explore the implications for human development and education, we present a series of interdisciplinary studies documenting individual and cultural variability in the neurobiological correlates of emotional feelings. From these studies, we derive educational research hypotheses and a theoretical framework that facilitates integrating sociocultural and neurobiological levels of analysis. Our overarching aim is to begin to conceptualize a role for neurobiological evidence in educational studies of sociality, emotion, culture, and identity. Overcoming the historical distance between educational and neuroscientific research on social-affective development would enable a more complete science of human experience and enhance appreciation of cultural learning, benefiting both fields.
Culture and Brain, 2017
Expressiveness (behavioral expression of emotion) is shaped by culture and by biological predispo... more Expressiveness (behavioral expression of emotion) is shaped by culture and by biological predispositions, such as cardiac vagal tone (CVT). However, it is unclear whether these factors interact or contribute additively, as no studies have simultaneously investigated the effects of both. Here we conducted a secondary analysis of data on emotional expressiveness to video clips depicting accidental painful injuries. Data were from a cross-cultural study of Chinese and American participants, including a bicultural group of East-Asian Americans (AA). We had previously reported that expressiveness was higher for the American than for the Chinese group (Immordino-Yang, Yang and Damasio, 2016). The current analyses included a subset of participants for whom we collected baseline electrocardiograms to establish CVT. Groups did not differ in CVT, and the effect of CVT on expressiveness did not differ across groups. Controlling for CVT, the previously reported cultural effect on expressiveness held. Controlling for group differences in expressiveness, participants with higher CVT were less expressive (calmer). These effects held controlling for participants' reported feeling strength to the videos, suggesting that they reflect expressiveness rather than differences in strength of emotional experience. In a follow-up analysis of the bicultural AA group, higher CVT was associated with reports of stronger East-Asian ethnic identity. Our results suggest that cultural group and CVT contribute additively to emotional expressiveness, and that CVT, which is associated with emotion regulation capacity, may
Human Brain Mapping, 2017
Drawing from a common lexicon of semantic units, humans fashion narratives whose meaning transcen... more Drawing from a common lexicon of semantic units, humans fashion narratives whose meaning transcends that of their individual utterances. However, while brain regions that represent lower‐level semantic units, such as words and sentences, have been identified, questions remain about the neural representation of narrative comprehension, which involves inferring cumulative meaning. To address these questions, we exposed English, Mandarin, and Farsi native speakers to native language translations of the same stories during fMRI scanning. Using a new technique in natural language processing, we calculated the distributed representations of these stories (capturing the meaning of the stories in high‐dimensional semantic space), and demonstrate that using these representations we can identify the specific story a participant was reading from the neural data. Notably, this was possible even when the distributed representations were calculated using stories in a different language than the p...
Frontiers in neuroanatomy, 2017
Emotions depend upon the integrated activity of neural networks that modulate arousal, autonomic ... more Emotions depend upon the integrated activity of neural networks that modulate arousal, autonomic function, motor control, and somatosensation. Brainstem nodes play critical roles in each of these networks, but prior studies of the neuroanatomic basis of emotion, particularly in the human neuropsychological literature, have mostly focused on the contributions of cortical rather than subcortical structures. Given the size and complexity of brainstem circuits, elucidating their structural and functional properties involves technical challenges. However, recent advances in neuroimaging have begun to accelerate research into the brainstem's role in emotion. In this review, we provide a conceptual framework for neuroscience, psychology and behavioral science researchers to study brainstem involvement in human emotions. The "emotional brainstem" is comprised of three major networks - Ascending, Descending and Modulatory. The Ascending network is composed chiefly of the spinot...
Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 2016
Evidence from education, psychology, and neuroscience suggests that investing in the development ... more Evidence from education, psychology, and neuroscience suggests that investing in the development of the social–emotional imagination is essential to cultivating giftedness in adolescents. Nurturing these capacities may be especially effective for promoting giftedness in students who are likely to lose interest and ambition over time. Giftedness is frequently equated with high general intelligence as measured by IQ tests, but this narrow conceptualization does not adequately capture students’ abilities to utilize their talents strategically to fully realize their future possible selves. The brain's default mode network is thought to play an important role in supporting imaginative thinking about the self and others across time. Because this network's functioning is temporarily attenuated when individuals engage in task‐ and action‐oriented focus (mindsets thought to engage the brain's executive attention network), we suggest that consistently focusing students on tasks re...
Policy Insights from the Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 2016
Education research—for example, on character, stereotype threat, and identity-based motivation—de... more Education research—for example, on character, stereotype threat, and identity-based motivation—demonstrates that social and emotional factors influence students’ cognitive abilities and academic achievement. In parallel, recent advances in social-affective and cultural neuroscience reveal the social nature of human brain development and neural processing. Neuroscience can inform educational practice and policy by uncovering the mechanisms that may produce the observed social and emotional effects on learning. One major advance shows how the brain’s Default Mode Network supports social-emotional feelings and broader thought patterns associated with self-processing, identity, meaning-making, and future-oriented thought. This article introduces policy makers to this research and its implications for educational decision making.
Emotion, 2016
The brain's mapping of bodily responses during emotion contributes to emotional experiences, or f... more The brain's mapping of bodily responses during emotion contributes to emotional experiences, or feelings. Culture influences emotional expressiveness, i.e. the magnitude of individuals' bodily responses during emotion. So, are cultural influences on behavioral expressiveness associated with differences in how individuals experience emotion? Chinese and American young adults reported how strongly admiration and compassion-inducing stories made them feel, first in a private interview and then during fMRI. As expected, Americans were more expressive in the interview. While expressiveness did not predict stronger reported feelings or neural responses during fMRI, in both cultural groups more expressive people showed tighter trial-by-trial correlations between their experienced strength of emotion and activations in visceral-somatosensory cortex, even after controlling for individuals' overall strength of reactions (neural and felt). Moreover, expressiveness mediated a previously described cultural effect in which activations in visceralsomatosensory cortex correlated with feeling strength among Americans but not among Chinese. Post-hoc supplementary analyses revealed that more expressive individuals reached peak activation of visceral-somatosensory cortex later in the emotion process and took longer to decide how strongly they felt. The results together suggest that differences in expressiveness correspond to differences in how somatosensory mechanisms contribute to constructing conscious feelings. By influencing expressiveness, culture may therefore influence how individuals know how strongly they feel, what conscious feelings are based on, or possibly what strong versus weak emotions "feel like."
Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991), Feb 7, 2016
Narratives are an important component of culture and play a central role in transmitting social v... more Narratives are an important component of culture and play a central role in transmitting social values. Little is known, however, about how the brain of a listener/reader processes narratives. A receiver's response to narration is influenced by the narrator's framing and appeal to values. Narratives that appeal to "protected values," including core personal, national, or religious values, may be particularly effective at influencing receivers. Protected values resist compromise and are tied with identity, affective value, moral decision-making, and other aspects of social cognition. Here, we investigated the neural mechanisms underlying reactions to protected values in narratives. During fMRI scanning, we presented 78 American, Chinese, and Iranian participants with real-life stories distilled from a corpus of over 20 million weblogs. Reading these stories engaged the posterior medial, medial prefrontal, and temporo-parietal cortices. When participants believed tha...
Development and Psychopathology, 2015
Youth exposed to family aggression may become more aggressive themselves, but the mechanisms of i... more Youth exposed to family aggression may become more aggressive themselves, but the mechanisms of intergenerational transmission are understudied. In a longitudinal study, we found that adolescents’ reduced neural activation when rating their parents’ emotions, assessed via magnetic resonance imaging, mediated the association between parents’ past aggression and adolescents’ subsequent aggressive behavior toward parents. A subsample of 21 youth, drawn from the larger study, underwent magnetic resonance imaging scanning proximate to the second of two assessments of the family environment. At Time 1 (when youth were on average 15.51 years old) we measured parents’ aggressive marital and parent–child conflict behaviors, and at Time 2 (≈2 years later), we measured youth aggression directed toward parents. Youth from more aggressive families showed relatively less activation to parent stimuli in brain areas associated with salience and socioemotional processing, including the insula and li...
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 2014
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Papers by M. Immordino-yang