Research Area:
Sharing Emotions
When we share stories with others, we want to be understood. Emotional connections are part of that understanding.
My Role
Together with a post-doc co-investigator, we designed a study combining our interests in empathy, compassion training, and storytelling. I developed the original screening survey, story listening and story retelling tasks, designed the technical parameters of the neuroimaging setup, recruited participants, collected data during in-person lab sessions, analyzed behavioral and neuroimaging data, wrote a draft paper, and presented the results at conferences.
Tools and Techniques:
Qualtrics, fNIRS software, Python, R, descriptive statistics, t-tests, Pearson correlation, linear regression
Does synchrony between the brains of storytellers and listeners predict emotional understanding?
Research Question
Background
Neural synchrony is correlated with a listener’s memory of an autobiographical story — or, their factual accuracy. In addition to understanding and remembering stories, listeners also connect with the storyteller’s emotions. We hypothesized that storyteller-listener neural synchrony in regions of the brain involved in taking the perspective of others predicts listeners’ empathic accuracy — or, their ability to understand the emotions of others.
Greater storyteller-listener neural synchrony correlates with greater factual accuracy
Greater storyteller-listener neural synchrony correlates with greater empathic accuracy
Hypotheses
Methods
One woman, our storyteller, told an autobiographical story while we measured her brain activity. We recruited women (N = 77), and divided them into two groups — one group (N = 36) received a compassion-based treatment before completing any tasks; the other group (N = 35) completed a control task. This two-group design allowed my collaborators to address hypotheses about compassion training and synchrony. For my research, I examined results only for the control group.
Each participant individually listened to the storyteller’s story, while also having their brain activity recorded (Story Listening Task). After listening to the story once, each participant heard the story for a second time while continuously rating the storyteller’s emotional state (Emotion Rating Task). Following these tasks, each listener recorded themselves retelling the story in the first person, as though the events happened to them (Story Retelling Task).
Project Flow
The similarity in brain activity (neural synchrony) between the storyteller and listener gave us a measure of shared perspective taking during a novel, uninstructed story experience.
Purpose of the Task
Correlating each listener’s continuous rating of emotions with the storyteller’s self-reported emotions gave us a measure of empathic accuracy, or the degree to which the listener correctly identified the storyteller’s emotional states. We also collected neural synchrony data in this task.
Finally, we compared each listener’s retold version of the story with the storyteller’s original story. The number of facts correctly included in the retold story gave us a measure of factual accuracy, indicating whether the listener remembered the details of the story.
Analysis
We measure neural synchrony as the correlation in brain activity between the storyteller and each of her listeners — this is a pairwise intersubject correlation. Empathic accuracy and factual accuracy, our two dependent variables, were also calculated as Pearson correlations between data from the storyteller and each listener. We predicted empathic accuracy and factual accuracy through linear regression models for each of 12 brain regions.
For the 35 women in the control group, greater neural synchrony between the storyteller and each listener predicts greater empathic accuracy when the listener rated the storyteller’s emotional states. We see this in two adjacent regions of the brain — the left temporal region and left temporoparietal junction — which have previously been associated with taking the perspective of others. This finding suggests that neural similarity can predict emotional understanding between communicators and that this synchrony may represent similar efforts to understand the perspective of the communication partner.
Results
The control group (orange) shows a positive correlation between neural synchrony and empathic accuracy, while both the storyteller and her listeners are engaged in rating her emotional state. For a discussion of the significance of the compassion condition, please check out our upcoming paper.