This article was published in an Elsevier journal. The attached copy is furnished to the author for non-commercial research and education use, including for instruction at the authors institution, sharing with colleagues and providing to institution administration. Other uses, including reproduction and distribution, or selling or licensing copies, or posting to personal, institutional or third party websites are prohibited. In most cases authors are permitted to post their version of the article (e.g. in Word or Tex form) to their personal website or institutional repository. Authors requiring further information regarding Elseviers archiving and manuscript policies are encouraged to visit: http:/www.elsevier.com/copyright Authors personal copy Cognitive-emotional interactions The role of social cognition in emotion Andreas Olsson and Kevin N. Ochsner Department of Psychology, Columbia University, 1190 Amsterdam Avenue, New York, NY 10027, USA Althoughrecentresearchhasshownthatsocial cognition and emotion engage overlapping regions of thebrain,fewaccountsofthisoverlaphavebeenoffered. What systems might be commonly or distinctively involved in each? The close functional relationship be- tween social cognition and emotion might be under- stood in terms of a central role for mental state attributionintheunderstanding,learningandregulation of emotion. In each of these cases, mental state attribu- tions might be supported by either stimulus-driven or more refl ective processes. Exploring the role of mental state attribution in emotion Whether viewed from a phyologenetic or an ontogenetic perspective, it is clear that the abilities to understand, learnfromandbehaveappropriatelytowardsone another were as essential for our homonid ancestors as they are for a developing child 1. In the past decade, insight into the neural mechanisms supporting these abilities has been provided by two burgeoning fi elds of research: social cognitive neuroscience and affective neuroscience. Although these fi elds developed largely independently 2, for multiple reasons the boundaries betweenthephenomenatheystudyarebecoming increasingly blurred (Box 1). Perhaps chief among them is the fi nding that ostensibly different types of social cognitive or emotional abilities recruit similar suites of cortical and subcortical neural systems. Although this fact has been noted 3, to date few accounts of the apparentinterdependenceofsocialcognitionand emotion have been advanced. Here, we review recent work suggesting that this relationship can be understood at least in part in terms of a fundamental role of one type of social cognitive capacity in processing emotion: the ability to explain beha- vior in terms of intentional mental states, which we will refer to as mental state attribution (MSA; Box 2). The role of MSAcan be consideredin three domains: (i) understand- ing emotion, (ii) learning emotionally signifi cant infor- mation and (iii) regulation of emotional responses. For each domain, we discuss the roles in emotion processing of systems supporting MSAs that vary in their degree of representational complexity and refl ective control. Based on this review, we propose a neural framework for un- derstanding the role of social cognition in emotion that can guide future research. Understanding emotions in self and others The ability to understand both another persons and ones own emotional states is essential for virtually all aspects of social behavior and crucially depends upon MSA. Indeed, emotion understanding by defi nition requires a causal attribution about the intentions behind an action. Evi- dence suggests that MSA contributes to emotion under- standing through the operation of both rapid stimulus- driven processes 4,5 and more deliberative, refl ective and conceptually driven processes 68. Evidence for the neural bases of stimulus-driven MSA came initially from imaging studies showing that some motor regions respond during both the execution and observation of specifi c movements 4. The idea was that if motor regions code the intentions behind ones own action, then if activated when observing another person engaging in the same action, they could support a direct experiential understanding of that persons intention 4,9. This shared representation logic guided subsequent studies of the direct experience and observation of pain or emotion that also showed activation of overlapping neural systems, including most prominently the two cor- tical regions that receive ascending viscerosensory inputs: the anterior insula (AI) and the midportion of the anterior cingulate cortex (mACC) 4,7,1015. The AI is believed to support affective experience in part through interoceptive awareness of these body state inputs 16,17, whereas the ACC is thought to code affective attributes of pain, such as the perceived unpleasantness (as opposed to sensory-dis- criminative properties, such as location and intensity) 18 2