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Brain scans link concern for justice with reason, not emotion

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Re: Brain scans link concern for justice with reason, not emotion

#21

Post by fluidcruft »

judk wrote: post #18
amirmc wrote: post #3

"During the behavior-evaluation exercise, people with high justice sensitivity showed more activity than average participants in parts of the brain associated with higher-order cognition. Brain areas commonly linked with emotional processing were not affected. The conclusion was clear, Decety said: “Individuals who are sensitive to justice and fairness do not seem to be emotionally driven. Rather, they are cognitivel…

fMRI psych studies were debunked by the dead fish paper years ago. (In short: investigators misreport the measurement apparatus's random noise as significant results.) Why does the neuro community still publish fMRI psych papers? Is it is a case homeopahy where the quacks are the ones doing the peer rebiews and the entire specialty is a most cause?

The dead fish was attention whoring bullshit. I'm willing to bet you actually have no clue.

Re: Brain scans link concern for justice with reason, not emotion

#22

Post by [deleted] »

judk wrote: post #18
amirmc wrote: post #3

"During the behavior-evaluation exercise, people with high justice sensitivity showed more activity than average participants in parts of the brain associated with higher-order cognition. Brain areas commonly linked with emotional processing were not affected. The conclusion was clear, Decety said: “Individuals who are sensitive to justice and fairness do not seem to be emotionally driven. Rather, they are cognitivel…

fMRI psych studies were debunked by the dead fish paper years ago. (In short: investigators misreport the measurement apparatus's random noise as significant results.) Why does the neuro community still publish fMRI psych papers? Is it is a case homeopahy where the quacks are the ones doing the peer rebiews and the entire specialty is a most cause?

[deleted]

Re: Brain scans link concern for justice with reason, not emotion

#23

Post by nealabq »

judk wrote: post #18
amirmc wrote: post #3

"During the behavior-evaluation exercise, people with high justice sensitivity showed more activity than average participants in parts of the brain associated with higher-order cognition. Brain areas commonly linked with emotional processing were not affected. The conclusion was clear, Decety said: “Individuals who are sensitive to justice and fairness do not seem to be emotionally driven. Rather, they are cognitivel…

fMRI psych studies were debunked by the dead fish paper years ago. (In short: investigators misreport the measurement apparatus's random noise as significant results.) Why does the neuro community still publish fMRI psych papers? Is it is a case homeopahy where the quacks are the ones doing the peer rebiews and the entire specialty is a most cause?

I assume this is the dead fish paper: http://prefrontal.org/blog/2009/09/the-story-behind-the-atla...

[edit] The above is a link to a blog post. Is this the paper: http://prefrontal.org/files/posters/Bennett-Salmon-2009.pdf

Re: Brain scans link concern for justice with reason, not emotion

#24

Post by fluidcruft »

kolbe wrote: post #11
amirmc wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll try breaking it down, along with the questions that came to mind as I read it. ... people with high justice sensitivity showed more activity than average participants in parts of the brain associated with higher-order cognition. What is the activity being measured relative to? One of the issues with any brain imaging study is the baseline condition you make comparisons with. To state that you saw more activity i…

Is this baseline you speak of a personal baseline for each participant in the study? Or is it like a canonical brain state that all other brains are compared to? And pardon my leap of logic here (I'm not a neuroscientist), but why would a personal baseline affect the results? A personal baseline, intuitively, would not add to the goal of the study and could negate results that they're looking for. That is, a logical…

What you observe in fMRI are always changes, not absolute measurements. So you end up comparing differences between changes.

Suppose you measure the height of two mountains their bases, but you want to make inferences about which mountain has the greatest elevation. To do that you have to compare the relative heights of the bases where the measurements were made.

Re: Brain scans link concern for justice with reason, not emotion

#25

Post by judk »

zacinbusiness wrote: post #16
crusso wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand your fears. Look at how lie detector (polygraph) tests are still used and how the public generally assumes that they're a reliable indication of veracity. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polygraph#Validity As with many technologies, though, you can't be a Luddite and slow progress because the general population might misunderstand it.

My grandfather, who was chief detective for the PD in the town in which I grew up, broke my childhood heart when he explained to me how unreliable polygraph tests are. I had seen so many thriller films and detective films that relied on polygraphs, and then one day he said something to the effect of "Those are all B.S., we see guys every day that can fake their way through a lie detector and smile while he's doing it…

It's politically sensitive to admit, but the most-legitimate value of polygraph is in scaring people into telling the truth (which cannve verified in other ways). It has many other problems, though, like scaring innocent people into flade confessions, or scaring people into divulging their legitimately private info.

Re: Brain scans link concern for justice with reason, not emotion

#27

Post by amirmc »

kolbe wrote: post #11
amirmc wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll try breaking it down, along with the questions that came to mind as I read it. ... people with high justice sensitivity showed more activity than average participants in parts of the brain associated with higher-order cognition. What is the activity being measured relative to? One of the issues with any brain imaging study is the baseline condition you make comparisons with. To state that you saw more activity i…

Is this baseline you speak of a personal baseline for each participant in the study? Or is it like a canonical brain state that all other brains are compared to? And pardon my leap of logic here (I'm not a neuroscientist), but why would a personal baseline affect the results? A personal baseline, intuitively, would not add to the goal of the study and could negate results that they're looking for. That is, a logical…

The sibling comment is correct, in that you're always measuring differences. The 'baseline' isn't a canonical one but specific to your experimental design (and research question).

For example, if I were interested in which regions respond to pain and pleasure I have several ways I could design a study. I could have a 'pain' condition (drink something bitter), and a 'pleasure' condition (drink something sweet) and then just do comparisons between them (pain - pleasure, and the inverse). However, I could also include a 'neutral' condition (drink plain water) and now I can compare the emotional conditions against the 'neutral' one and extract the regions that are generally involved in emotion.

Also, your comment highlights another problem when research work is badly disseminated. The concept of logic is not being examined whatsoever, yet you've taken 'cognitively driven' (already a false statement) to mean 'logical'.

Re: Brain scans link concern for justice with reason, not emotion

#28

Post by amirmc »

judk wrote: post #18
amirmc wrote: post #3

"During the behavior-evaluation exercise, people with high justice sensitivity showed more activity than average participants in parts of the brain associated with higher-order cognition. Brain areas commonly linked with emotional processing were not affected. The conclusion was clear, Decety said: “Individuals who are sensitive to justice and fairness do not seem to be emotionally driven. Rather, they are cognitivel…

fMRI psych studies were debunked by the dead fish paper years ago. (In short: investigators misreport the measurement apparatus's random noise as significant results.) Why does the neuro community still publish fMRI psych papers? Is it is a case homeopahy where the quacks are the ones doing the peer rebiews and the entire specialty is a most cause?

fMRI is a tool. Just like every other tool it can be wielded skilfully or incompetently and in the case of fMRI you must do your stats properly (c.f. the Multiple Comparisons problem [1]). There's nothing out there that 'debunks' fMRI as a tool.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_comparisons_problem

Edit: Indeed fMRI allows us to do things we had no hope of doing before, e.g. communication with those who are otherwise in permanent vegetative states [2,3] (that guy was my co-supervisor).

[2] http://www.sciencemag.org/content/313/5792/1402.abstract

[3] http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8497148.stm

Re: Brain scans link concern for justice with reason, not emotion

#29

Post by kenferry »

judk wrote: post #18
amirmc wrote: post #3

"During the behavior-evaluation exercise, people with high justice sensitivity showed more activity than average participants in parts of the brain associated with higher-order cognition. Brain areas commonly linked with emotional processing were not affected. The conclusion was clear, Decety said: “Individuals who are sensitive to justice and fairness do not seem to be emotionally driven. Rather, they are cognitivel…

fMRI psych studies were debunked by the dead fish paper years ago. (In short: investigators misreport the measurement apparatus's random noise as significant results.) Why does the neuro community still publish fMRI psych papers? Is it is a case homeopahy where the quacks are the ones doing the peer rebiews and the entire specialty is a most cause?

What the salmon study did was make some points about statistics in a funny way, but the authors were not trying to discredit fMRI as a whole.

If you look at most studies that came out before it did, they were already using statistical approaches that were robust to this sort of problem.

These include Bonferroni correction, cluster correction for spatial distributions, and Monte Carlo simulations and permutation testing.

These techniques analyze what you would expect to happen if there were no signal but a lot of random noise. You can then look for signals that are still significantly stronger than predicted by the null hypothesis. This is what most fMRI studies do, and this is not done (intentionally) in the dead salmon study. If you use 'em, you find nothing in the salmon.

Re: Brain scans link concern for justice with reason, not emotion

#30

Post by kyro »

spydum wrote: post #5

For some reason fMRI terrifies me in the sense that it will be misused to predict human behavior. The idea that we can effectively read your brain leads to the assumption that we can understand the behaviors, and I think that is false.

Take a look at the field of neuromarketing.
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