Leonardo Christov-Moore

• Ph.D. in Neuroscience, University of California, Los Angeles
• Primary Investigator at Institute for Advanced Consciousness Studies

Aesthetic chills are a peak emotional response to stimuli such as music, films, or speech characterized by shivers and goosebumps and activation of dopaminergic circuits. Despite growing scientific interest in this phenomenon, repeated exposure to chills stimuli has not been studied yet, due to the absence of a validated database. This study levera...

Non-pharmacologically induced altered states of consciousness that promote mental health and wellbeing are a growing focus of clinical and basic research. Previous work has revealed the mood-augmenting, belief-altering, and self-transcendent effects of aesthetic-chills-inducing audiovisual stimulation. The current study investigated how a guided lo...

Increasing access to and understanding of positive altered states is a subject of increasing interest for clinical and basic research, due to their documented effects on mental health and wellbeing. We have previously reported the mood-augmenting, belief-altering, and self-transcendent effects of aesthetic-chills-inducing audiovisual stimulation, a...

Affective empathy, the ability to share and understand others’ emotional states, is a fundamental aspect of social cognition. Recent evidence suggests that interoceptive inference, the brain’s prediction and processing of internal bodily signals, plays a key role in affective empathy. Building on the active inference framework, we propose that emot...

Previous behavioral research has found that working memory is associated with emotion regulation efficacy. However, there has been mixed evidence as to whether the neural mechanisms between emotion regulation and working memory overlap. The present study tested the prediction that individual differences on the working memory subtest of the Weschler...

Self-transcendence (ST) is a state of consciousness associated with feelings of ego-dissolution, connectedness, and moral elevation, which mediates well-being, meaning-making, and prosociality. Conventional paths to ST, like religious practice, meditation, and psychedelics, pose nontrivial barriers to entry, limiting ST’s study and application. Aes...

Empathy seems to rely on our ability to faithfully simulate multiple aspects of others’ inferred experiences, often using brain structures we would use during a similar experience. Much neuroimaging work in this vein has related empathic tendencies to univariate correlates of simulation strength or salience. However, novel evidence suggests that em...

Why does the same experience elicit strong emotional responses in some individuals while leaving others largely indifferent? Is the variance influenced by who people are (personality traits), how they feel (emotional state), where they come from (demographics), or a unique combination of these? In this 2,900+ participants study, we disentangle the...

Aesthetic chills are a peak emotional response to affectively charged stimuli such as music, films, or speech. This study investigates the impact of repeated exposure on the frequency and intensity of aesthetic chills. Through a longitudinal approach, we quantified changes in chill likelihood, intensity, and pleasure across multiple exposures, focu...

Aesthetic chills are a peak emotion characterized by shivers down the spine and goosebumps in response to salient stimuli such as music, speech, or films. In a previous study exposing a large number of Southern California participants (n=2947) to pre-validated audiovisual stimuli, we observed a strong correlation between the intensity of self-repor...

Empathy seems to rely on our ability to faithfully simulate multiple aspects of others’ inferred experiences, often using brain structures we would use during a similar experience. Much neuroimaging work in this vein has related empathic tendencies to univariate correlates of simulation strength or salience. However, novel evidence suggests that em...

Aesthetic chills are a peak emotional response to affectively charged stimuli such as music, films, or speech. This study investigates the impact of repeated exposure on the frequency and intensity of aesthetic chills. Through a longitudinal approach, we quantified changes in chill likelihood, intensity, and pleasure across multiple exposures, focu...

Trust is necessary for the survival of most living beings. Accounts of trust are largely confined to the individual, human scale, limiting our ability to model trust as a coordinating mechanism of the natural world. We outline an account of trust applicable to human and non-human agents, at individual and collective scales. It defines trust as a wa...

Deficits in empathic function have deleterious effects on individual, relational and community function, encouraging isolation, increasing the risk of unemployment and homelessness, and impacting long-term health outcomes. Assessing empathic function in vulnerable neurodivergent or nonverbal populations using self-reports and in-scanner tasks is fr...

Aesthetic chills involve pleasurable bodily sensations co-occurring with self-transcendent emotions. In this study, 94 participants were exposed to pre-validated musical stimuli with chills-inducing potential. Participants experiencing chills reported significantly greater psychological insight and emotional awareness compared to non-chills control...

Self-transcendence (ST) is a positive altered state of consciousness associated with ego-dissolution, connectedness, and moral elevation, which mediates well-being, meaning-making, and prosociality. Conventional paths to ST such as religious practice, meditative practice, and psychedelics pose nontrivial barriers to entry, limiting ST’s study and w...

The emotional diversity emerging from the interplay of demographics, personality, and context, renders their scientific investigation notably difficult. In this study, we disentangle the factors that underlie individual variations in the experience of aesthetic chills, the feeling of cold and shivers down the spine during peak experiences. Leveragi...

We significantly enriched ChillsDB, a dataset of audiovisual stimuli validated to elicit aesthetic chills. A total of 2,937 participants from Southern California were exposed to 40 stimuli, consisting of 20 stimuli (10 from ChillsDB and 10 new) presented either in audiovisual or audio-only formats. Questionnaires were administered assessing demogra...

Given the accelerating powers of artificial intelligence (AI), we must equip artificial agents and robots with empathy to prevent harmful and irreversible decisions. Current approaches to artificial empathy focus on its cognitive or performative processes, overlooking affect, and thus promote sociopathic behaviors. Artificially vulnerable, fully em...

When communicating about political issues, messages targeted to resonate with the core values of the receiver may be effective, an approach known as moral reframing. During the COVID-19 pandemic, we tested the relationships between moral values and mask-wearing in a sample (N = 540) of self-identified liberals, conservatives, and moderates in the U...

While CNT correctly criticizes utility-based accounts of decision-making, it unfairly reduces probabilistic models to point estimates and treats affect and narrative as mechanistically opaque yet explanatorily sufficient modules. Hierarchically nested Bayesian accounts offer a mechanistically explicit and parsimonious alternative incorporating affe...

Our culture and its scientific endeavor direly need a holistic characterization of mind and body. Many phenomena attest to the profound effects of beliefs on bodily function (e.g., open-label placebo’s effects on chronic pain) and interoceptive systems’ role in mental processes (e.g., the emerging role of gut microbiomes in mood). We need a mechani...

Human trust can be construed as a heuristic wager on the predictability and benevolence of others, within a compatible worldview. A leap of faith across gaps in information. Generally, we posit that trust constitutes a functional bridge between individual and group homeostasis, by helping minimize energy consumed in continuously monitoring the beha...

Interoception—the perception of internal bodily signals—has recently emerged as an area of significant interest due to its potential implications in emotion and the prevalence of dysfunctional interoceptive processes across psychopathological conditions. Despite the importance of interoception in cognitive neuroscience and psychiatry, its experimen...

For decades, psychostimulants have been the gold standard pharmaceutical treatment for attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). In the United States, an astounding 9% of all boys and 4% of girls will be prescribed stimulant drugs at some point during their childhood. Recent meta-analyses have revealed that individuals with ADHD have reduced...

Task fMRI provides an opportunity to analyze the working mechanisms of the human brain during specific experimental paradigms. Deep learning models have increasingly been applied for decoding and encoding purposes study to representations in task fMRI data. More recently, graph neural networks, or neural networks models designed to leverage the pro...

Human trust can be construed as a heuristic wager on the predictability and benevolence of others, within a compatible worldview. A leap of faith across gaps in information. Generally, we posit that trust constitutes a functional bridge between individual and group homeostasis, by helping minimize energy consumed in continuously monitoring the beha...

Recent work using multivariate pattern analysis (MVPA) on functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data has found that distinct affective states produce correspondingly distinct patterns of neural activity in the cerebral cortex. However, it is unclear whether individual differences in the distinctiveness of neural patterns evoked by affective...

Artificial intelligence (AI) is expanding into every niche of human life, organizing our activity, expanding our agency and interacting with us to an exponentially increasing extent. At the same time, AI’s efficiency, complexity and refinement are growing at an accelerating speed. An expanding, ubiquitous intelligence that does not have a means to...

Despite evidence in support of the benefits of wearing masks, attitudes about mask-wearing during the COVID-19 pandemic became politicized, and therefore tied with political values and group identities. When communicating about political issues, messages targeted to resonate with the core values of the receiver may be effective, an approach known a...

Background Family dementia caregivers experience high rates of depression and anxiety that often go untreated due to time demands. We aimed to determine the feasibility of a brief, 4-week Mentalizing Imagery Therapy intervention, which couples mindfulness with guided imagery practices aimed at bolstering mentalizing capacity, to reduce caregiver ps...

Background: Family dementia caregivers experience high rates of depression and anxiety that often go untreated due to time demands. We aimed to determine the feasibility of a brief, 4-week Mentalizing Imagery Therapy intervention, which couples mindfulness with guided imagery practices aimed at bolstering mentalizing capacity, to reduce caregiver p...

Everyday tasks in social settings require humans to encode neural representations of not only their own spatial location, but also the location of other individuals within an environment. At present, the vast majority of what is known about neural representations of space for self and others stems from research in rodents and other non-human animal...

Uncovering the neural mechanisms underlying human natural ambulatory behavior is a major challenge for neuroscience. Current commercially available implantable devices that allow for recording and stimulation of deep brain activity in humans can provide invaluable intrinsic brain signals but are not inherently designed for research and thus lack fl...

This paper seeks to explore the broad question of whether and how art can be applied to medical therapeutic practices. As part of this research, the paper outlines an ongoing project, exemplifying this combined approach, which seeks to improve function in stroke patients. We reviewed previous collaborations between art and psychology dating back to...

Recent task fMRI studies suggest that individual differences in trait empathy and empathic concern are mediated by patterns of connectivity between self-other resonance and top-down control networks that are stable across task demands. An untested implication of this hypothesis is that these stable patterns of connectivity should be visible even in...

Attention-deficit/ hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is the most common neurodevelopment disorder in children, and many genetic markers have been linked to the behavioral phenotypes of this highly heritable disease. The neuroimaging correlates are similarly complex, with multiple combinations of structural and functional alterations associated with the...

Background: Family dementia caregivers often suffer from an immense toll of grief while caring for their loved ones. We sought to identify the clinical relationship between grief, depression and mindfulness and identify neural predictors of symptomatology and improvement. Methods: Twenty three family dementia caregivers were assessed at baseline fo...

Sex differences in empathy for pain have been repeatedly observed. However, it is unclear whether this is due to sex differences in “bottom-up” somatomotor representations of others’ pain (self-other resonance) or to “top-down” prefrontal control of such responses. Here, we provide data from 70 subjects suggesting that sex differences in empathy fo...

Recent studies suggest that individual differences in empathic concern may be mediated by continuous interactions between self-other resonance and cognitive control networks. To test this hypothesis, we used machine learning to examine whether resting fMRI connectivity (i.e. the degree of synchronous BOLD activity across multiple cortical areas in...

Background: Family dementia caregivers often suffer from an immense toll of grief while caring for their loved ones. We sought to identify the clinical relationship between grief, depression and mindfulness and identify neural predictors of symptomatology and improvement. Methods: 23 family dementia caregivers were assessed at baseline for grief, m...

The dual process model of moral decision-making suggests that decisions to reject causing harm on moral dilemmas (where causing harm saves lives) reflect concern for others. Recently, some theorists have suggested such decisions actually reflect self-focused concern about causing harm, rather than witnessing others suffering. We examined brain acti...

Distributions of deontological and utilitarian moral dilemma response tendencies. Solid line indicates ideal normal distribution. Mean and standard deviation are presented for both response tendency subscales.

MNI coordinates (in mm) of representative peaks of activation for the contrast Pain > Touch.

Recent research suggests that prosocial outcomes in sharing games arise from prefrontal control of self-maximizing impulses. We used continuous Theta Burst Stimulation (cTBS) to disrupt the functioning of two prefrontal areas, the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) and dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (DMPFC). We used cTBS in the right MT/V5...

Humans seem to place a positive reward value on prosocial behavior. Evidence suggests that this prosocial inclination is driven by our reflexive tendency to share in the observed sensations, emotions and behavior of others, or “self-other resonance”. In this study, we examine how neural correlates of self-other resonance relate to prosocial decisio...

Research on emotions has largely focused on their importance for the individual. However, our survival as a species has depended on our ability to efficiently form groups with coordinated behavior. There is increasing awareness of the powerful role of emotions in cognition and decision-making. Thus, to better understand group behavior, we must impr...

Evidence suggests that there are differences in the capacity for empathy between males and females. However, how deep do these differences go? Stereotypically, females are portrayed as more nurturing and empathetic, while males are portrayed as less emotional and more cognitive. Some authors suggest that observed gender differences might be largely...

Although we fundamentally agree with Schilbach et al., we argue here that there is still some residual utility for non-interactive scenarios in social neuroscience. They may be useful to quantify individual differences in prosocial inclination that are not influenced by concerns about reputation or social pressure.

Background: Delayed language acquisition and marked deficits in communication skills are hallmark features of autism (Bailey et al., 1996). Converging evidence suggests that Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is characterized by deficient long-range connectivity and excessive local connectivity (Belmonte et al., 2004). Just examined connectivity during...

The ability to detect unusual events occurring in the environment is essential for survival. Several studies have pointed to the hippocampus as a key brain structure in novelty detection, a claim substantiated by its wide access to sensory information through the entorhinal cortex and also distinct aspects of its intrinsic circuitry. Novelty detect...