Gazzola Lab

Research focus

ERC Starting Grant · 2017

Pioneering focused Ultrasounds as a new non-invasive deep brain stimulation for a causal investigation of empathy related brain processes in moral learning and decision making

The success of humans depends on their ability to cooperate. Cooperation requires learning to avoid actions that harm others and select those that balance benefits for self and other. Reinforcement leaning captures how individuals learn to optimize benefits for themselves, by associating actions and outcomes for the self. The social context requires to incorporate outcomes for others into that equation by transforming them into the currency used to value our own outcomes. Research on empathy, by suggesting that we transform the emotions of others into neural representation of how we would feel in their stead, provides testable mechanistic hypotheses of how we do that. The painful facial…

From the public funding record at EU CORDIS. Describes the funded project, not the reviews below.