Designing Collective Artist Residencies

Starting with an argument for a humanistic approach to climate change, this paper discusses the concept of the ‘Collective Artist Residency’ as a practicable means for engaging with complex socio-ecological issues that require collective answers. Through our analysis of the research project ‘Imaginative Disruptions,’ we propose that there is a need for creative spaces that include artists and non-artists alike, and which engender aimless play, inquisitive making and dialogic contemplation in the face of issues which are too painful, overwhelming and complex to rationally comprehend. We further argue that such residencies can generate comfortable, and even light-hearted, spaces in which people can be uncomfortable together. In other words, environments that feel safe and caring but that also encourage us to challenge status quos and experiment with alternatives via emotional, aesthetic, cognitive, somatic and social processing. The paper closes with five (suggested) guiding principles for designing a Collective Art Residency that supports groups of people to co-reflect upon their fragility whilst re-imagining present and future possibilities for being in the world: deeply participatory, balanced between comfortable / uncomfortable emotions, highly experiential, cross-sectoral and intergenerational, place-based.

Domain General Processes for Interactive Touch

The nexus model of social processing proposes that the right temporal parietal junction (rTPJ) serves as a neural hub for cognitive social functions. We test the hypothesis that the rTPJ is a domain general region including somatosensory social functions. Neuroimaging findings and cross-brain coherence for right- and left-hand handclasps with real vs. simulated hands were consistent with the domain general model.

Complementary hemispheric lateralization of language and social processing in the human brain

Humans have a unique ability to use language for social communication. The neural architecture for language comprehension and production may have emerged in the brain areas that were originally involved in social cognition. Here we directly tested the fundamental link between language and social processing using functional MRI data from over 1000 human subjects. Cortical activations in language and social tasks showed a striking similarity with a complementary hemispheric lateralization; within core language areas, the activations were left-lateralized in the language task and right-lateralized in the social task. Outside these areas, the activations were left-lateralized in both tasks, perhaps indicating multimodal integration of social and communicative information. Our findings could have important implications in understanding neurocognitive mechanisms of social disorders such as autism.

Neural Tracking in Infants – an Analytical Tool for Multisensory Social Processing in Development

Humans are born into a social environment and from early on possess a range of abilities to detect and respond to social cues. In the past decade, there has been a rapidly increasing interest in investigating the neural responses underlying such early social processes under naturalistic conditions. However, the investigation of neural responses to continuous dynamic input poses the challenge of how to link neural responses back to continuous sensory input. In the present tutorial, we provide a step-by-step introduction to one approach to tackle this issue, namely the use of linear models to investigate neural tracking responses in electroencephalographic (EEG) data. While neural tracking has gained increasing popularity in adult cognitive neuroscience over the past decade, its application to infant EEG is still rare and comes with its own challenges. After introducing the concept of neural tracking, we discuss and compare the use of forward vs. backward models and individual vs. generic models using an example data set of infant EEG data. Each section comprises a theoretical introduction as well as a concrete example using MATLAB code. We argue that neural tracking provides a promising way to investigate early (social) processing in an ecologically valid setting.

Surgical Masks Impair People's Ability To Accurately Classify Emotional Expressions, Except For Anger

Background Recently, the need to continuously wear surgical masks in everyday life has drawn the attention of neuroscientists and psychologists to the negative effects of face covering on social processing. A very recent but not very homogeneous literature has highlighted large costs in the ability to recognize emotions. Methods Here it was investigated how surgical masks covering impaired the recognition of facial mimicry in a large group of 220 undergraduate Italian students. Sex differences in emotion recognition were also observed in 2 subgroups of 94 age-matched participants. Subjects were presented with 112 pictures displaying the faces of 8 actors (4 women and 4 men) wearing or not wearing real facemasks, and expressing 7 emotional states (neutrality, surprise, happiness, sadness, disgust, anger and fear). The task consisted in categorizing the emotion while indicating the recognizability degree with a 3-point Likert scale. Scores underwent repeated measures ANOVAs. Results Overall, face masking reduced emotion recognition by 31%. All emotions were affected by mask covering except for anger. Face covering was most detrimental for sadness and disgust, both relying on mouth and nose inspection. Women showed a better performance for subtle expressions such as surprise and sadness, both in masked and natural conditions, and men for fear recognition (in natural but especially masked conditions). Conclusions Anger display was unaffected by masking, since corrugated forehead and frowning eyebrows were clearly exposed. Unlike digitally created masks, real masks were able to show inhalation-related sucking associated with startle reaction (in surprise, and especially fear expressions), thus providing further cues for emotion recognition.