Theory of Mind and Empathy. Part I - Model of Social Emotional Thinking

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Przybyszewski, Andrzej W.^{a; *; †} | Polkowski, Lech T.^b

Affiliations: [a] Polish–Japanese Institute of Information Technology, Koszykowa 86, 00-097 Warsaw, Poland. przy@pjwstk.edu.pl; andrzej.przybyszewski@umassmed.edu | [b] Polish–Japanese Institute of Information Technology, Koszykowa 86, 00-097 Warsaw, Poland. polkow@pjwstk.edu.pl

Correspondence: [†] Address for correspondence: PJIIT, Koszykowa 86, 00-097 Warszawa, Poland.

Note: [*] This work was partly supported by grant Dec-2011/03/B/ST6/03816 from the Polish National Science Centre. Also affiliated at: Dept. Neurology, UMass Medical School, 55 Lake Av. Worcester, MA 02135, USA.

Abstract: There are two very different approaches to understand functioning of the brain. First, there is a huge progress in the research of the neurological and neurophysiological properties of different brain substructures, circuits, networks, single cells, synapses and their molecular properties. It contributes to the progress of research in the fields of basic medical sciences and the dramatic increase in average life expectancy. On the another side that does not directly follows neurological developments, it is our introspection related to individual ways of thinking in order to solve different problems that also involve human creativity (cognitive theory of mind). We use many diverse ways of thinking, and they depend on different circumstances. Especially interesting are influences of intuition, feelings and emotions on our creativity, which is in a large part are also related to the social interactions (affective empathy). In this work, we formalise emotional scales and transfer of emotions between individuals (social emotional thinking). We also demonstrate a continuity of the emotion transfer mappings, and an importance of the interactions between emotional faces. It is not only human specific to show and to react to face emotions, but strong and wide human social interactions are based on the precise emotional social thinking. By measuring critical values of face deformations that may influence mutual emotions, we can test precision and tolerance of human visual and emotional systems. By introduction indiscernibility relations between individual reading of face parts deformation, we have used rough set theory to probe social emotional thinking. As one of us have demonstrated that the visual system has properties that follows rough set theory (cognitive theory of mind), this work extends this concept to the social emotional interactions (cognitive and affective theory of mind). As in modern world IT - information technology - has became driving factor in the process of globalisation by creating effective channels of information exchange; hence it becomes extremely important to analyse emotional meaning (cognitive empathy) for this vast information flow. By using as described here, rough set theory to determine, which parts of information have significant emotional influence, our model may give grounds to increase the collective well-being.

Keywords: amygdala, insula, similarities, driver and modulatory logical rules, cognitive empathy, affective empathy

DOI: 10.3233/FI-2017-1466

Journal: Fundamenta Informaticae, vol. 150, no. 2, pp. 221-230, 2017