사회적 상호작용 상황에서 자의식 감정의 뇌 영상 연구를 위한 가상환경 시스템 개발 및 적용

Abstract

Self-conscious emotions are regarded as uniquely social emotions, serving to motivate social behavior, interpersonal etiquette, and personal hygiene, as well as to inhibit transgression of social standards. Self-conscious emotions essentially need social cognitive abilities, such as mental representations of the self, of the other, and of social norms, which play an important role in the relationships of social life. Embarrassment, guilt, shame, and pride are categorized as the self-conscious emotions. Embarrassment plays an important role in the relationships of social life. It is known that patients with schizophrenia with disturbed social interactions have trouble with the recognition and expression of embarrassment. However, the neural bases of embarrassment in socially interactive situations remain unclear in not only normal controls but also patients with schizophrenia. The virtual environment has the advantage of providing real-like environments to users by eliciting a sense of being there, a sense of presence. Furthermore, it has been demonstrated that virtual agents not only transfer social information to users, but are also perceived as social agents, thus exerting a social influence on human interaction, i.e., the virtual reality technology may reflect various events occurring in real social life. Because of these advantages, the virtual reality technology was used recently as a tool to present dynamic stimuli of animated virtual characters and real-like environments in the fields of social and psychological research and social cognitive neuroscience research. In this study, we developed an fMRI experimental environment in which participants shake hands with a virtual agent, to provide a practical and interactive social situation by taking advantage of virtual reality technology, and observed the brain activity patterns associated with the embarrassment evoked by the response of a virtual agent. A secondary aim of the present study is to identify abnormality of neural mechanism of self-conscious emotion, especially embarrassment, in the patients with schizophrenia during social interaction. In experiment 1, I aimed to know how the effect of interactive manner to social cognition using handshake paradigm by a conventional interactive manner and a real interactive manner. In result of questionnaire, the participants felt more presence and social presence with real interactive manner. The mirror neuron system which is the important part of the social cognitive process can lead to the subjective involvement and feeling of presence in an interactive simulation, and these affected to process self-conscious emotions. These results suggest that real interactive manner is appropriate for self-conscious emotion. I observed the brain activity patterns associated with embarrassment in an interactive virtual environment that provided a practical and interactive social situation. The posterior superior temporal sulcus was activated with embarrassment, and the activity associated with embarrassment in the posterior superior temporal sulcus correlated with interaction anxiousness. These findings suggest that the posterior superior temporal sulcus related process of mental representation of the other is important for the recognition of embarrassment. In experiment 2, the patients with schizophrenia showed reduced activation in right posterior superior temporal sulcus, left middle temporal gyrus, left fusiform gyrus, and left hippocampus with embarrassment condition. In addition, there were significant correlations between patient's deactivations in the posterior superior temporal sulcus and their positive symptom severity. These results could suggest that patients with schizophrenia have deficits in interpreting socially incongruent information and the deficit might cause abnormal recognition of self-conscious emotion. The results observed in our study could be helpful in understanding the aberrant characteristics of socially emotional brain of the patients with schizophrenia and could give evidence explaining the distorted belief, such as delusion or paranoid of patients with schizophrenia. An interactive fMRI experimental environment using virtual reality was applied successfully to a functional neuroimaging study related to self-conscious emotions. The experimental paradigm designed in this study may be also useful for understanding the multiple neural systems that are associated with social emotions as a reflection of social interactions in disorders of social interaction, such as autism spectrum disorder, social anxiety disorder, and depression.