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From scientific literature... to the clinic
We promise to share once a month, a comment on
an article, a book, a congress, or a meeting that struck us,
to offer discussion points to those interested in mirror neuron research
This month's article
Self-compassion and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex activity during sad self-face recognition in depressed adolescents.
G Liu , N Zhang, J Yuan Teoh, C Egan, T A Zeffiro, R J Davidson, K Quevedo.
Psychol Med. 2022 Apr;52(5):864-873
talks about the effect, evaluated with fmri, of seeing one's own emotional face. Seeing one's own sad face has a different effect than seeing someone else's. This study confirms the theoretical framework of Self Mirroring Therapy, which is based on seeing one's own emotional face, which according to the embodied simulation theory of Gallese et al. should have the greatest effectiveness in activating patients' self-empathy. Now this theory has experimental confirmation.
And those from previous months!
below you will find the articles discussed in past months
This month's article is the latest we have published (the first after COVID!).
M Ambrosecchia, MArdizzi, Elisa C Russo,
F Ditaranto, M Speciale, P Vinai, P Todisco,
S Maestro, V Gallese
Front Psychol. 2023; 14: 1197319
It deals with the implicit and explicit recognition of one's own body, again regarding embodied simulation, in patients with anorexia nervosa. In practice, patients were asked to recognize a photo of their own hand (computer-modified to make it less recognizable) among those of other patients. At the explicit level, they could not do it, but they were more frequently able to recognize whether the presented hand was the right or the left when they saw their own hand, as did the control subjects. Obviously, without being aware that it was their own hand.
Just to avoid being monotonous, this month's articles are two, both from Rizzolatti's group. For us only four weeks have passed, but for the researchers at the University of Parma, four years of intense research have gone by and the results are evident! From the timid 1992 article in which mirror neurons did not yet have a name nor many hypotheses about their neurophysiological role, two much more substantial articles have emerged.
The first:
is a theoretical article, in which the possible roles of the mirror system are hypothesized, Representing an action but independently of being conscious of what is happening. In practice, the subject perceives that the other is performing an action and represents in their brain not only the other's motor repertoire, but also predicts their intentionality, memorizing this information to use it at the appropriate time. This hypothesis opens the door to what will be the future developments of research on mirror neurons, empathy, and embodied simulation. The article then hypothesizes affinities between the F5 area of the macaque brain and Broca's area (responsible for language) in humans, and also discusses the hypothetical existence of MN in humans and their role in non-verbal communication, but we will talk about this next month….
while the second
Action Recognition in the Premotor Cortex.
V Gallese 1, L Fadiga, L Fogassi, G Rizzolatti
Brain. 1996 Apr;119 ( Pt 2):593-609
on the same topic is published in Brain, a bible for neurologists. It is curious to note that in the abstract and the first part of the article the term “mirror” associated with the newly discovered class of neurons is written in quotation marks, almost as a precaution, not to go too far in speculating about the role of these brain cells. Only in the discussion is the term mirror neurons written without quotation marks, from then on there will be no more need for brackets, mirror neurons (MN) have gained scientific dignity and their name is one of the most used neuroscientific terms even by non-experts. But what are MN for? The Parma researchers make various hypotheses:
- To prepare a movement, but this hypothesis holds little because they are activated even if the observed movement is not then performed by the monkey
- To represent an action in the brain like a student memorizing the teacher's movements with a musical instrument to then repeat it.
Premotor cortex and the recognition of motor actions
Rizzolatti, L Fadiga, V Gallese, L Fogassi
Cognitive Brain Research 3 (1996) 131- 141
To hear about the function of mirror neurons in humans, we had to wait until 2003 when Vittorio Gallese published this article.
The manifold nature of interpersonal relations: the quest for a common mechanism.
Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci. 2003 Mar 29;358(1431):517-28.
Gallese V.
In which he linked the activity of the mirror system to human relationships and empathy. The signature of a single author at the bottom of a scientific article is not a common event in our times, because scientific research today is not the work of a solitary scientist locked in his laboratory, but the result of collaboration between researchers with different skills working on a common project. For this reason, the single signature is a rare and not accidental event. It often means that the author wants to emphasize the authorship of a hypothesis (or that no one else wanted to sign it). I don't know which of these two hypotheses applies to this study, but the hypothesis was truly brilliant and the article fascinating; in a few words, the author argues that each of us, when we see another human being express an emotion, reproduces it by contracting the muscles of our own face in order to simulate it, and that we perceive the emotion by feeling it within ourselves as if the two people become, so to speak, one for a moment, sharing that specific emotion in their own body. This interaction is automatic, unconscious, pre-reflective, and independent of the individual's will. I am particularly fond of this article because together with Dr. Maurizio Speciale we studied it at length and it represented the primum movens for devising Self mirroring therapy, which exploits precisely this mechanism of simulating perceived emotions to help patients recognize their own emotions.
In a moment of deep narcissism, we decided to choose our own article:
Explicit and Implicit Responses of Seeing
Own vs. Others’ Emotions:
An Electromyographic Study on the Neurophysiological and Cognitive Basis of the
Self-Mirroring Technique
not because we think it is the best we have read in recent weeks, but because it is one of the few that study the functioning of the neurobiological substrate on which a psychotherapeutic intervention operates. All of us cognitivists use the ABC, or laddering, but their use is largely empirical, without caring to study what effect our intervention has on the subject's brain; at most, we are interested in the effect on the mind, but for psychotherapy the brain remains largely a black box. One can hide behind the fact that what interests us is the functioning of the brain software (the mind) and that we care little about the hardware that supports it, but if we want to compare ourselves with pharmacotherapy, for which the action on the hardware is central, it does not seem possible to avoid this issue. SMT starts precisely from the hardware, from the functioning of mirror neurons, to offer a new psychotherapeutic technique. In the study presented in this article, a group of university students were shown scenes from films that elicited intense emotions, and their faces were video-recorded while these emotions were displayed.
Subsequently, they were shown images of their own emotional faces and those of the other participants, testing with electromyography (EMG) whether viewing their own emotional face—the intervention at the basis of SMT—induced a different contraction of their facial muscles compared to viewing the emotional faces of others. This hypothesis was confirmed: viewing one's own emotional face has a greater effect on one's own facial muscles than viewing the emotional face of other individuals showing the same emotion. These data provide neurophysiological experimental support for the activity of SMT.
Understandinging Motor Events: A Neurophysiological Study
G di Pellegrino, L Fadiga, L Fogassi, V Gallese,
G Rizzolatti
It was 1992 but it seems like a century ago, a group of researchers at the University of Parma discovered that some neurons in a part of the macaque's cerebral cortex are activated not only when the monkey moves its hand, but also when it sees the experimenter in front of it move their hand. This finding was very strange because until then it was thought that the brain was made up of two distinct types of cells: motor neurons, that is, those that allow us to move our muscles, and sensory neurons that allow us, through the five senses, to know the reality around us. The system was thought of as a two-lane highway with no "lane changes," half the brain received information and half moved our muscles. That's how I had studied it in anatomy textbooks. The pathways were clear, without confusion: there and back. On one side, sensory neurons took information from the outside and brought it to the brain (for example, those that allow us to see, going from the eyes to the brain), on the other, motor neurons told our muscles how to move. The news was strange and was published in this article of only 4 pages, published in Experimental Brain Research. The term Mirror Neurons had not yet been coined, it is never mentioned in the article, but in the final part the authors begin to hypothesize that these neurons could be important in the social life of macaques, or try to explain some behaviors of patients with lesions in that area of the brain. A great discovery that went almost unnoticed, as if the experimenters themselves were not so convinced and were afraid to go too far in their theoretical considerations, an excellent example for anyone doing research! It took four years to publish another article that began to mention the Mirror Neuron mechanism... but that's another story