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...meta-analyses have likewise reported an important role for mPFC in mentalizing about self and others (Qin & Northoff, 2011; Van Overwalle, 2009, 2011; van der Meer, Costafreda, Aleman, & David, 2010; =-=Legrand & Ruby, 2009-=-; Van Overwalle & Baetens, 2009). In particular, a meta-analysis by van der Meer and colleagues provided evidence that vmPFC is associated with self-relevant cognition but that dmPFC is associated wit...

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...cally meaningful. Specifically, prior research that we address in our discussion has associated these anatomical regions with sociocognitive processes related to mentalizing (Buckner & Carroll, 2007; =-=Legrand & Ruby, 2009-=-; Schilbach, Eickhoff, Rotarska-Jagiela, Fink, & Vogeley, 2008; but see Smith et al., 2009, for an alternative view). Results Behavioral data. Anthropomorphism—operationalized as ratings of the extent...

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...PC alongside regions such as the hippocampal formation, the amygdala, the posterior cingulate cortex (PCC: BA 30/31), the dorsal medial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC: BA 8/9), ventral medial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC: BA 10), the angular gyrus (BA 39) and the lateral temporal cortex (BA 20/21). The results confirmed the involvement of all these regions which is fitting given their well documented roles in declarative memory and semantic cognition, language processing, hypothetical thinking, and evaluative judgement (e.g., Abraham et al., 2008; Binder et al., 2009; Cappa, 2008; Fiebach et al., 2007; Legrand & Ruby, 2009). In contrast, comparing working memory to divergent thinking was expected to lead to activations in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC: BA 9/46/8), the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC: BA 24/8/6) and the superior parietal lobule (SPL: BA 40), regions known to be involved in cognitive control processes (e.g., Badre & Wagner, 2004; Botvinick, 2007; Olson & Berryhill, 2009). This hypothesis was partially confirmed as only the dlPFC and SPL were found to be more strongly activated. However, while the bilateral regions of the SPL were implicated, only the right dlPFC and ACC were found to be...

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...terior cingulate cortex (PACC), the dorsomedial prefrontal, the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, the anterior insula, the amygdala and the ventral and dorsal striatum [6,10,11,13,17–19] (but see also =-=[20]-=- and [21] for a critical position). A recent study investigated the role of the anterior insula in self-reflection [5], another different aspect of the self. The anterior insula is involved in a varie...

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...ous and spiritual concepts may result from specific patterns of brain activity and the results of this study are at least consistent with this possibility. The results from this study might also suggest that meditation-based practices affect beliefs and experiences through a fronto-parietal network since these structures have consistently been involved in both the acute practice of meditation and, now, in the long-term effects of such practices. In addition, the frontal lobes have been suggested as an important mediator in the sense of self and altered states of consciousness (Dietrich, 2003; Legrand & Ruby, 2009). Future studies will ideally evaluate larger numbers of subjects and also more specifically include measures of religiosity, spirituality, and other subjective beliefs. There are several important limitations to this study. One issue is that the subjects come from several different traditions which arguably might result in different brain changes. However, this should have made it more difficult to produce significant group findings. Thus, it is interesting that these practitioners from different traditions still had similar results when pooled together. This suggests that the practices emplo...

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...utral stimuli and this effect was even more pronounced for self-referential versus other referential stimuli, which is in line with the findings of Blair et al. (2008). Moreover, the fMRI analyses across all participants revealed that selfreferential processing in contrast to other-referential processing was accompanied by activations in regions such as the ventral and dorsal medial prefrontal cortex, posterior cingulate cortex, inferior parietal lobule and temporal poles. These brain regions have been extensively implicated in self-referential thinking using a variety of different paradigms (Legrand and Ruby 2009; Lou et al. 2004; Northoff et al. 2006; Schmitz and Johnson 2007; Zysset et al. 2002). Finally, the processing of negative valence information (social and health) relative to neutral information was associated with activity in the ventral medial PFC and the amygdala which fits well with the bulk of previous literature on emotional information processing (Canteras et al. 2010; Etkin 2010; Lamm and Singer 2010; Morrison and Salzman 2010; Salzman and Fusi 2010; Shin and Liberzon 2010; Singer et al. 2009). Together these findings indicate a successful implementation of the experimental paradigm w...

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...sentations On the basis of this proposed model of self representations, a taxonomy of linguistic expressions of the self can be derived. One assumption behind this taxonomy is that representations of the self are not confined to the first person pronoun “I” but extend to pronouns in general (it, they, he/she, and so on). This assumption is supported by neuroimaging results which showed that self-relatedness evaluation involves a wide cerebral network, such that a subjective perspective is not intrinsically self evaluative, but rather relates any represented object to the representing subject (Legrand and Ruby 2009). A taxonomy of self representations, along with a dozen or so categories of affective lexicon, is implemented by a language analysis program, SSWC (Sundararajan-Schubert Word Count), which parses categories of language use not on the basis of semantic content of words, but rather according to the triadic structure of the sign as formulated by Peirce. Skipping the categories of emotion lexicon, only the categories of self representations in SSWC are presented below. Am Soc (2011) 42:220–231 223 Lower Dimensional Representations of the Self In lower dimensional representations, the self is eith...