宽恕的生理及神经机制研究进展

宽恕作为人类所独有一种美德,对人们来说并不陌生,但对于宽恕的系统研究却仅始于上个世纪80、90年代。本文采用文献法着重从生理心理、神经证据等方面对宽恕认知神经科学方面的研究进行了梳理和整合,最后对该研究领域未来的发展方向进行了展望。     

宽恕与睡眠质量关系的研究进展

近年来,国内外对宽恕的研究逐渐增多,但宽恕与睡眠质量关系的研究较少,本文通过综述现有的一些研究资料,分析二者之间的关系。分析表明,人际侵犯事件是影响宽恕的外部因素,其严重程度直接影响受害者的宽恕水平及睡眠质量;宽恕能够降低受害者的生理唤醒、情绪唤醒、及认知唤醒,从而改善睡眠质量,但之间的相互作用及具体的内在影响机制并不明确。同时,影响宽恕水平的宜人性、外倾等人格特质也会影响睡眠质量。最后分析了目前研究中存在的缺陷,并对宽恕与睡眠质量关系的研究前景进行了展望。     

Mirroring intentional forgetting in a shared-goal learning situation

Background

Intentional forgetting refers to the surprising phenomenon that we can forget previously successfully encoded memories if we are instructed to do so. Here, we show that participants cannot only intentionally forget episodic memories but they can also mirror the “forgetting performance” of an observed model.

Methodology/Principal Findings

In four experiments a participant observed a model who took part in a memory experiment. In Experiment 1 and 2 observers saw a movie about the experiment, whereas in Experiment 3 and 4 the observers and the models took part together in a real laboratory experiment. The observed memory experiment was a directed forgetting experiment where the models learned two lists of items and were instructed either to forget or to remember the first list. In Experiment 1 and 3 observers were instructed to simply observe the experiment (“simple observation” instruction). In Experiment 2 and 4, observers received instructions aimed to induce the same learning goal for the observers and the models (“observation with goal-sharing” instruction). A directed forgetting effect (the reliably lower recall of to-be-forgotten items) emerged only when models received the “observation with goal-sharing” instruction (P<.001 in Experiment 2, and P<.05 in Experiment 4), and it was absent when observers received the “simple observation” instruction (P>.1 in Experiment 1 and 3).

Conclusion

If people observe another person with the same intention to learn, and see that this person is instructed to forget previously studied information, then they will produce the same intentional forgetting effect as the person they observed. This seems to be a an important aspect of human learning: if we can understand the goal of an observed person and this is in line with our behavioural goals then our learning performance will mirror the learning performance of the model.     

宽恕与睡眠质量关系的研究进展

近年来,国内外对宽恕的研究逐渐增多,但宽恕与睡眠质量关系的研究较少,本文通过综述现有的一些研究资料,分析二者之间的关系。分析表明,人际侵犯事件是影响宽恕的外部因素,其严重程度直接影响受害者的宽恕水平及睡眠质量;宽恕能够降低受害者的生理唤醒、情绪唤醒、及认知唤醒,从而改善睡眠质量,但之间的相互作用及具体的内在影响机制并不明确。同时,影响宽恕水平的宜人性、外倾等人格特质也会影响睡眠质量。最后分析了目前研究中存在的缺陷,并对宽恕与睡眠质量关系的研究前景进行了展望。     

Wild justice and fair play: cooperation,forgiveness, and morality in animals

In this paper I argue that we can learn much about ‘wild justice’ and the evolutionary origins of social morality – behaving fairly – by studying social play behavior in group-living animals, and that interdisciplinary cooperation will help immensely. In our efforts to learn more about the evolution of morality we need to broaden our comparative research to include animals other than non-human primates. If one is a good Darwinian, it is premature to claim that only humans can be empathic and moral beings. By asking the question ‘What is it like to be another animal?’ we can discover rules of engagement that guide animals in their social encounters. When I study dogs, for example, I try to be a ‘dogocentrist’ and practice ‘dogomorphism.’ My major arguments center on the following ‘big’ questions: Can animals be moral beings or do they merely act as if they are? What are the evolutionary roots of cooperation, fairness, trust, forgiveness, and morality? What do animals do when they engage in social play? How do animals negotiate agreements to cooperate, to forgive, to behave fairly, to develop trust? Can animals forgive? Why cooperate and play fairly? Why did play evolve as it has? Does ‘being fair’ mean being more fit – do individual variations in play influence an individual's reproductive fitness, are more virtuous individuals more fit than less virtuous individuals? What is the taxonomic distribution of cognitive skills and emotional capacities necessary for individuals to be able to behave fairly, to empathize, to behave morally? Can we use information about moral behavior in animals to help us understand ourselves? I conclude that there is strong selection for cooperative fair play in which individuals establish and maintain a social contract to play because there are mutual benefits when individuals adopt this strategy and group stability may be also be fostered. Numerous mechanisms have evolved to facilitate the initiation and maintenance of social play to keep others engaged, so that agreeing to play fairly and the resulting benefits of doing so can be readily achieved. I also claim that the ability to make accurate predictions about what an individual is likely to do in a given social situation is a useful litmus test for explaining what might be happening in an individual's brain during social encounters, and that intentional or representational explanations are often important for making these predictions.     

The Cognitive Control of Memory: Age Differences in the Neural Correlates of Successful Remembering and Intentional Forgetting

Successful memory encoding depends on the ability to intentionally encode relevant information (via differential encoding) and intentionally forget that which is irrelevant (via inhibition). Both cognitive processes have been shown to decline in aging and are theorized to underlie age-related deficits in the cognitive control of memory. The current study uses the Directed Forgetting paradigm in conjunction with fMRI to investigate age-related differences in both cognitive processes, with the specific aim of elucidating neural evidence supporting these theorized deficits. Results indicate relatively preserved differential encoding, with age differences consistent with previous models of age-related compensation (i.e., increased frontal and bilateral recruitment). Older adults did display noticeable differences in the recruitment of brain regions related to intentional forgetting, specifically exhibiting reduced activity in the right superior prefrontal cortex, a region shown to be critical to inhibitory processing. However, older adults exhibited increased reliance on processing in right inferior parietal lobe associated with successful forgetting. Activity in this region was negatively correlated with activity in the medial temporal lobe, suggesting a shift in the locus of inhibition compared to the frontally mediated inhibition observed in younger adults. Finally, while previous studies found intentional and incidental forgetting to be dissociable in younger adults, this differentiation appears to be reduced in older adults. The current results are the first to provide neural evidence for an age-related reduction in processes that support intentional forgetting.     

A Normative Theory of Forgetting: Lessons from the Fruit Fly

Recent experiments revealed that the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster has a dedicated mechanism for forgetting: blocking the G-protein Rac leads to slower and activating Rac to faster forgetting. This active form of forgetting lacks a satisfactory functional explanation. We investigated optimal decision making for an agent adapting to a stochastic environment where a stimulus may switch between being indicative of reward or punishment. Like Drosophila, an optimal agent shows forgetting with a rate that is linked to the time scale of changes in the environment. Moreover, to reduce the odds of missing future reward, an optimal agent may trade the risk of immediate pain for information gain and thus forget faster after aversive conditioning. A simple neuronal network reproduces these features. Our theory shows that forgetting in Drosophila appears as an optimal adaptive behavior in a changing environment. This is in line with the view that forgetting is adaptive rather than a consequence of limitations of the memory system.     

Being held accountable: why attributing responsibility matters

Debates over reconciliation, atonement, forgiveness, and forgetting involve political and personal elements, with substantial investments and commitments. I contrast two perspectives: one stresses unconditional forgiveness independent of atonement; the other reflects on the importance of moral responsibility for the formation of the person. Being held accountable, for Ricoeur, matters for the development of the self. For Derrida, forgiveness is a defining aspect of being human, becoming debased when seen as a legal form of justice. I use philosophical arguments and ethnographic writings from Papua New Guinea, Cyprus, and the Holocaust to examine reconciliation and irreconciliation as strategies for either reaffirming or reimagining a common world.     

Helpful amnesia: Neuroscience unravels the role of forgetting as a prerequisite for establishing new long‐term memories

As neuroscience has been analysing the mechanisms behind long‐term memory, it demonstrated that forgetting is crucial for being able to remember.

“To be able to forget means sanity,” explained American writer Jack London (The Star Rover) referring to our sometimes infuriating inability to recall past events. In fact, being able to remember everything ever said and done might drive even the strongest mind insane. It is through forgetting and letting go of memories that the brain is able to acquire fresh impressions and new experience to move on, instead of being mired in the past.The importance of forgetting also fits well into and has inspired research to understand the molecular and cognitive basis of long‐term memory and how all the components and processes fit together. This puzzle of what is being remembered and why has been a long‐standing challenge for neuroscience; while progress has been made identifying more of the mechanisms and some of the existential drivers of memory formation, it is only recently that work has begun analyzing how these interact in animal models, often focusing on how the brain “decides” which things to remember and which things to send into oblivion.

This puzzle of what is being remembered and why has been a long‐standing challenge for neuroscience…

As a result, the field now sees collaboration across disciplines, driven by the realization that different parts and processes all play a part in memory formation and long‐term consolidation. This has led to one tangible if still tentative conclusion about long‐term memory, namely that forgetting occurs through loss of retrieval capability rather than erasure. It would appear to confirm the observation attributed to German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche that “the existence of forgetting has never been proved: we only know that some things do not come to our mind when we want them to.”

The existence of forgetting has never been proved: we only know that some things do not come to our mind when we want them to.

     

Falling towards forgetfulness: synaptic decay prevents spontaneous recovery of memory

Long after a new language has been learned and forgotten, relearning a few words seems to trigger the recall of other words. This "free-lunch learning" (FLL) effect has been demonstrated both in humans and in neural network models. Specifically, previous work proved that linear networks that learn a set of associations, then partially forget them all, and finally relearn some of the associations, show improved performance on the remaining (i.e., nonrelearned) associations. Here, we prove that relearning forgotten associations decreases performance on nonrelearned associations; an effect we call negative free-lunch learning. The difference between free-lunch learning and the negative free-lunch learning presented here is due to the particular method used to induce forgetting. Specifically, if forgetting is induced by isotropic drifting of weight vectors (i.e., by adding isotropic noise), then free-lunch learning is observed. However, as proved here, if forgetting is induced by weight values that simply decay or fall towards zero, then negative free-lunch learning is observed. From a biological perspective, and assuming that nervous systems are analogous to the networks used here, this suggests that evolution may have selected physiological mechanisms that involve forgetting using a form of synaptic drift rather than synaptic decay, because synaptic drift, but not synaptic decay, yields free-lunch learning.     

The neural substrates of memory suppression: a FMRI exploration of directed forgetting

The directed forgetting paradigm is frequently used to determine the ability to voluntarily suppress information. However, little is known about brain areas associated with information to forget. The present study used functional magnetic resonance imaging to determine brain activity during the encoding and retrieval phases of an item-method directed forgetting recognition task with neutral verbal material in order to apprehend all processing stages that information to forget and to remember undergoes. We hypothesized that regions supporting few selective processes, namely recollection and familiarity memory processes, working memory, inhibitory and selection processes should be differentially activated during the processing of to-be-remembered and to-be-forgotten items. Successful encoding and retrieval of items to remember engaged the entorhinal cortex, the hippocampus, the anterior medial prefrontal cortex, the left inferior parietal cortex, the posterior cingulate cortex and the precuneus; this set of regions is well known to support deep and associative encoding and retrieval processes in episodic memory. For items to forget, encoding was associated with higher activation in the right middle frontal and posterior parietal cortex, regions known to intervene in attentional control. Items to forget but nevertheless correctly recognized at retrieval yielded activation in the dorsomedial thalamus, associated with familiarity-based memory processes and in the posterior intraparietal sulcus and the anterior cingulate cortex, involved in attentional processes.     

Directed Forgetting of Negative Self-Referential Information Is Difficult: An fMRI Study

A large body of evidence suggested that both emotion and self-referential processing can enhance memory. However, it remains unclear how these two factors influence directed forgetting. This study speculates that directed forgetting of negative self-referential memory is more difficult than forgetting of other-referential memory. To verify this speculation, we combined the directed forgetting paradigm with the self-reference task. The behavioral result suggested that although both self-referential and other-referential information can be directly forgotten, less self-referential information can be forgotten than other-referential information. At the neural level, the forget instruction strongly activated the frontal cortex, suggesting that directed forgetting is not memory decay but an active process. In addition, compared with the negative other-referential information, forgetting of the negative self-referential information were associated with a more widespread activation, including the orbital frontal gyrus (BA47), the inferior frontal gyrus (BA45, BA44), and the middle frontal gyrus. Our results suggest that forgetting of the self-referential information seems to be a more demanding and difficult process.     

遗忘的神经机制及其与神经系统疾病的相关性

遗忘是记忆系统的重要组成部分.一方面,生理条件下,正常的遗忘有助于维持大脑记忆系统稳态;另一方面,异常的遗忘与多种病理条件下记忆障碍的发生发展密切相关.或者说,遗忘是为了更好的记忆.对不愉快或者不必要记忆的遗忘有利于机体及时地获取新信息以适应环境的变化;而遗忘出现异常很可能会导致相关记忆障碍.例如,阿尔茨海默症(Alz...     

Introduction: On irreconciliation

Most post-conflict reconciliatory exercises make it incumbent upon survivors to forgive, and seek closure as a demonstration of ‘moving on’. Various anthropologists have criticized reconciliation and related forms of ‘alternative justice’ extensively but within the framework of maintaining social bonds and the rule of law. In this introduction, I reflect critically on the interdisciplinary scholarship on reconciliation, apology, and forgiveness, and theorize irreconciliation as a less examined lens of analysis. Rather than being in opposition to ‘peace’, irreconciliation allows us to interrogate the status quo by refusing to forgive endemic impunities, particularly in the aftermath of staged processes of justice and the absence-presence of the rule of law. In this special issue of the JRAI, I ethnographically explore irreconciliation's links with law, aesthetics, temporality, resistance, and control to locate its multiple analytical manifestations. Irreconciliation allows an important examination of the rule of law within processes of unresolved genocidal injustices and debates relating to slavery, Black Lives Matter, and institutional responses.     

Assessing the potential for an ongoing arms race within and between the sexes: selection and heritable variation

In promiscuous species, sexual selection generates two opposing male traits: offense (acquiring new mates and supplanting stored sperm) and defense (enforcing fidelity on one's mates and preventing sperm displacement when this fails). Coevolution between these traits requires both additive genetic variation and associated natural selection. Previous work with Drosophila melanogaster found autosomal genetic variation for these traits among inbred lines from a mixture of populations, but only nonheritable genetic variation was found within a single outbred population. These results do not support ongoing antagonistic coevolution between offense and defense, nor between either of these male traits and female reproductive characters. Here we use a new method (hemiclonal analysis) to study genomewide genetic variation in a large outbred laboratory population of D. melanogaster. Hemiclonal analysis estimates the additive genetic variation among random, genomewide haplotypes taken from a large, outbred, locally adapted laboratory population and determines the direction of the selection gradient on this variation. In contrast to earlier studies, we found low but biologically significant heritable variation for defensive and offensive offspring production as well as all their components (P1, fidelity, P2, and remating). Genetic correlations between these traits were substantially different from those reported for inbred lines. A positive genetic correlation was found between defense and offense, demonstrating that some shared genes influence both traits. In addition to this common variation, evidence for unique genetic variation for each trait was also found, supporting an ongoing coevolutionary arms race between defense and offense. Reproductive conflict between males can strongly influence female fitness. Correspondingly, we found genetic variation in both defense and offense that affected female fitness. No evidence was found for intersexual conflict in the context of male defense, but we found substantial intersexual conflict in the context of male offensive sperm competitive ability. These results indicate that conflict between competing males also promotes an associated arms race between the sexes.     

Down-regulation of negative emotional processing by transcranial direct current stimulation: effects of personality characteristics

Evidence from neuroimaging and electrophysiological studies indicates that the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) is a core region in emotional processing, particularly during down-regulation of negative emotional conditions. However, emotional regulation is a process subject to major inter-individual differences, some of which may be explained by personality traits. In the present study we used transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) over the left DLPFC to investigate whether transiently increasing the activity of this region resulted in changes in the ratings of positive, neutral and negative emotional pictures. Results revealed that anodal, but not cathodal, tDCS reduced the perceived degree of emotional valence for negative stimuli, possibly due to an enhancement of cognitive control of emotional expression. We also aimed to determine whether personality traits (extraversion and neuroticism) might condition the impact of tDCS. We found that individuals with higher scores on the introversion personality dimension were more permeable than extraverts to the modulatory effects of the stimulation. The present study underlines the role of the left DLPFC in emotional regulation, and stresses the importance of considering individual personality characteristics as a relevant variable, although replication is needed given the limited sample size of our study.     

Mourning and Forgiveness as Sites of Reconciliation Pedagogies

This paper explores mourning and forgiveness not simply as sources of existential, political, or emotional meaning, but primarily as possible sites of reconciliation pedagogies. Reconciliation pedagogies are public and school pedagogical practices that examine how certain ideas can enrich our thinking and action toward reconciliation—not through a moralistic agenda but through an approach that views such ideas both constructively and critically. Mourning and forgiveness may constitute valuable points of departure for reconciliation pedagogies, if common pain is acknowledged as an important aspect of rehumanizing the “enemy-other.” This work is difficult and the wider society may be skeptical; however, such work is about assisting a “never again” mentality develop in schools and civil society.     

The effects of predator learning, forgetting, and recognition errors on the evolution of warning coloration

This paper demonstrates that the specifics of predator avoidance learning, information loss, and recognition errors may heavily influence the evolution of aposematism. I establish a mathematical model of the change in frequency over time of bright individuals of a distasteful prey species. Warning color spreads through green beard selection as reformulated by Guilford (1990); bright colored forms gain an advantage due to their phenotypic resemblance to other bright forms, which have been sampled by the predator. I use a general classical conditioning model to examine gradual predator learning and forgetting, and then consider the extreme of one-trial learning and no forgetting over time that may occur with very toxic prey. The advantage of conspicuous coloration under these latter conditions depends upon its role in lowering a constant probability of the prey being misidentified and thus mistakenly attacked by a predator, a rarely emphasized factor in the evolution of warning coloration. This constant probability of mistaken attacks can also be interpreted as a constant probability that forgetting has occurred (forgetting does not increase with time) or a periodic decision by the predator to resample avoided prey. I show that when predators learn and forget gradually, as under the general classical conditioning model, it is very difficult for aposematic coloration to become established unless bright individuals cross an often high threshold frequency through chance factors. In contrast, the conditions expected with highly toxic prey promote the evolution of warning coloration more easily, by means from the fixation of very bright mutations to the fixation of successive mutations each of which causes a small increase in a prey's conspicuousness. The results therefore predict that aposematic coloration may have evolved in a different manner in different predator and prey systems. They also suggest that it may be extremely difficult for warning coloration to evolve in more mildly toxic or distasteful prey outside of a mimicry system.     

Forgetting : theories and potential mechanisms

The cellular and molecular mechanisms of learning and memory are extremely complex and not well understood. The mechanisms of forgetting are even further more unclear, but several theories have been formulated to explain their cause and origin. Forgetting has recently been revealed to recruit specific mechanisms and anatomical basis which some components are distinct from those of learning and memory. Forgetting appears to depend essentially on protein phosphatases, enzymes highly abundant in the brain that are able to regulate numerous biochemical targets in neurons. The formation of memory by contrast depends on protein kinases. Memory and forgetting are indeed reciprocally controlled by a balance between kinases et phosphatases that determines the efficacy of learning and the persistence of memory. This review provides a brief account of the main features of forgetting and a summary of the most recent findings on its potential mechanisms.