Valeria Gazzola

Valeria Gazzola (born c. 1977)[1] is an Italian neuroscientist, associate professor at the Faculty of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Amsterdam (UvA) and member of the Young Academy of Europe.[2][3] She is also a tenured department head at the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience (NIN) in Amsterdam, where she leads her own research group and the Social Brain Lab together with neuroscientist Christian Keysers. She is a specialist in the neural basis of empathy and embodied cognition: Her research focusses on how the brain makes individuals sensitive to the actions and emotions of others and how this affects decision-making.

Early life and education

Gazzola completed her Bachelor of Science at the University of Parma in Italy. Interested in science, she started studying physics, but realized after one year that she was even more interested in biology.[4] She continued at the University of Parma for her Master of Science degree in 2003. Her experimental thesis in the Rizzolatti Laboratory under the supervision of Vittorio Gallese entitled “The role of the somatosensory cortices during the observation of the tactile stimulation of others” contributed to a publication in Neuron.[5]

Career and research

In early work, financed through a VENI grant[6] from the Dutch Research Council (NWO), Gazzola established for the first time that somatosensory cortices, known to process tactile and proprioceptive information in the self, also play a necessary role in processing the actions and sensations of others.[7] Using neuroimaging, she established that somatosensory regions are activated while witnessing the actions[8] and sensations of others.[9] She then used neuromodulatory tools to establish that these somatosensory cortices are necessary for the perception of the actions[10] and pain[11] of others. She then looked at incarcerated psychopathic criminals to show that people with increased antisocial behavior showed reduced activations in these regions while witnessing the pain of others,[9] but could show that if asked to empathize, their activity normalizes, leading her to propose a mechanism that explains how the ability to empathize differs from the propensity to do so.[12]

In later work, financed by an Innovational Research Incentives Scheme (VIDI) grant[13][14] from the Dutch Research Council, Gazzola addressed how these systems influence behavior. She used electroencephalography (EEG) to show that activity in somatosensory cortices can predict how much a person will do to help others, and used transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) and transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), to show that altering that activity alters how much they do for others.[11] She then also developed an animal model of helping, and showed that cingulate activity, involved in an animal's own pain as well as activated by the pain of others,[15] is necessary for the animal's sensitivity to the pain of others and influences the animals willingness to help others.[16] In parallel, she also brought our understanding of how we perceive the actions of others to a new level by combining functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), TMS and cerebellar patients to show how somatosensory, premotor and cerebellar regions work together to transform the kinematics of observed actions into a perception of effort.[17][18][10]

In her current work, financed by a European Research Council (ERC) grant, Gazzola investigates the question of whether and how, the insula and cingulate contribute to our decisions to help others if doing so is costly. For this project, she co-founded the Centre for Ultrasound Brain imaging (CUBE) together with groups from the Erasmus Medical Center and Delft University of Technology funded by the Dutch Research Council.[19]

Publications

Her most cited articles are:

  • Keysers C, Wicker B, Gazzola V, Anton JL, Fogassi L, Gallese V. A touching sight: SII/PV activation during the observation and experience of touch. Neuron. 2004 Apr 22;42(2):335-46 (Cited 1141 times, according to Google Scholar[20]
  • Gazzola V, Aziz-Zadeh L, Keysers C. Empathy and the somatotopic auditory mirror system in humans. Current biology. 2006 Sep 19;16(18):1824-9.(Cited 1142 times, according to Google Scholar.[20])
  • Keysers C, Kaas JH, Gazzola V. Somatosensation in social perception. Nature Reviews Neuroscience. 2010 Jun;11(6):417-28.(Cited 844 times, according to Google Scholar[20])
  • Gazzola V, Rizzolatti G, Wicker B, Keysers C. The anthropomorphic brain: the mirror neuron system responds to human and robotic actions. Neuroimage. 2007 May 1;35(4):1674-84. (Cited 804 times, according to Google Scholar.[20])
  • Keysers C, Gazzola V. Integrating simulation and theory of mind: from self to social cognition. Trends in cognitive sciences. 2007 May 1;11(5):194-6 (Cited 609 times, according to Google Scholar.[20])
  • Keysers C, Gazzola V. Towards a unifying neural theory of social cognition. Progress in brain research. 2006 Jan 1;156:379-401.(Cited 511 times, according to Google Scholar.[20])

Honors

References
  1. https://herseninstituut.nl/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/cv_gazzola4_6p.pdf
  2. "Valeria Gazzola elected as member for the Young Academy of Europe". Nederlands Herseninstituut. 2016-06-03. Retrieved 2021-06-06.
  3. "Gazzola". Young Academy of Europe. 2016-12-18. Retrieved 2021-06-06.
  4. "University of Groningen, Action in the Brain, Valeria Gazzola" (PDF).
  5. Keysers, Christian; Wicker, Bruno; Gazzola, Valeria; Anton, Jean-Luc; Fogassi, Leonardo; Gallese, Vittorio (April 2004). "A Touching Sight". Neuron. 42 (2): 335–346. doi:10.1016/s0896-6273(04)00156-4. ISSN 0896-6273. PMID 15091347. S2CID 1414735.
  6. "Investigating causality within the Mirror Neuron System using a combination of repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation and functional magnetic resonance imaging | NWO". www.nwo.nl (in Dutch). March 2010. Retrieved 2021-06-05.
  7. Keysers, Christian; Kaas, Jon H.; Gazzola, Valeria (June 2010). "Somatosensation in social perception". Nature Reviews Neuroscience. 11 (6): 417–428. doi:10.1038/nrn2833. ISSN 1471-0048. PMID 20445542. S2CID 12221575.
  8. Gazzola, V.; Keysers, C. (2009-06-01). "The Observation and Execution of Actions Share Motor and Somatosensory Voxels in all Tested Subjects: Single-Subject Analyses of Unsmoothed fMRI Data". Cerebral Cortex. 19 (6): 1239–1255. doi:10.1093/cercor/bhn181. ISSN 1047-3211. PMC 2677653. PMID 19020203.
  9. Meffert, Harma; Gazzola, Valeria; den Boer, Johan A.; Bartels, Arnold A. J.; Keysers, Christian (August 2013). "Reduced spontaneous but relatively normal deliberate vicarious representations in psychopathy". Brain. 136 (8): 2550–2562. doi:10.1093/brain/awt190. ISSN 1460-2156. PMC 3722356. PMID 23884812.
  10. Valchev, Nikola; Tidoni, Emmanuele; Hamilton, Antonia F. de C.; Gazzola, Valeria; Avenanti, Alessio (May 2017). "Primary somatosensory cortex necessary for the perception of weight from other people's action: A continuous theta-burst TMS experiment". NeuroImage. 152: 195–206. doi:10.1016/j.neuroimage.2017.02.075. PMC 5440175. PMID 28254507.
  11. V., Gallo, Selene Paracampo, Riccardo Muller-Pinzler, L. Severo, Mario Carlo Blömer, Laila Fernandes-Henriques, Carolina Henschel, Anna Lammes, Balint Kalista Maskaljunas, Tatjana Suttrup, J. Avenanti, Alessio Keysers, Christian Gazzola (2018). "The causal role of the somatosensory cortex in prosocial behaviour". eLife. 7. doi:10.7554/eLife.32740. OCLC 1038719949. PMC 5973831. PMID 29735015.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  12. Keysers, Christian; Gazzola, Valeria (April 2014). "Dissociating the ability and propensity for empathy". Trends in Cognitive Sciences. 18 (4): 163–166. doi:10.1016/j.tics.2013.12.011. PMC 4560165. PMID 24484764.
  13. "Do shared circuits really help? Empowering transcranial direct current stimulation to reveal the causal link between emotion sharing and helping | NWO". www.nwo.nl (in Dutch). October 2015. Retrieved 2021-06-05.
  14. Amsterdam, Universiteit van (2015-05-18). "Vidi grant for twenty UvA and AMC-UvA researchers". University of Amsterdam. Retrieved 2021-06-06.
  15. Carrillo, Maria; Han, Yinging; Migliorati, Filippo; Liu, Ming; Gazzola, Valeria; Keysers, Christian (April 2019). "Emotional Mirror Neurons in the Rat's Anterior Cingulate Cortex". Current Biology. 29 (8): 1301–1312.e6. doi:10.1016/j.cub.2019.03.024. ISSN 0960-9822. PMC 6488290. PMID 30982647.
  16. Hernandez-Lallement, Julen; Attah, Augustine Triumph; Soyman, Efe; Pinhal, Cindy M.; Gazzola, Valeria; Keysers, Christian (March 2020). "Harm to Others Acts as a Negative Reinforcer in Rats". Current Biology. 30 (6): 949–961.e7. doi:10.1016/j.cub.2020.01.017. hdl:20.500.11755/ee7ae8ac-7393-4276-84ce-1bad1b8e5e0d. ISSN 0960-9822. PMID 32142701. S2CID 212424287.
  17. Abdelgabar, Abdel R; Suttrup, Judith; Broersen, Robin; Bhandari, Ritu; Picard, Samuel; Keysers, Christian; De Zeeuw, Chris I; Gazzola, Valeria (2019-11-21). "Action perception recruits the cerebellum and is impaired in patients with spinocerebellar ataxia". Brain. 142 (12): 3791–3805. doi:10.1093/brain/awz337. ISSN 0006-8950. PMC 7409410. PMID 31747689.
  18. Valchev, Nikola; Gazzola, Valeria; Avenanti, Alessio; Keysers, Christian (2016-03-15). "Primary somatosensory contribution to action observation brain activity—combining fMRI and cTBS". Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience. 11 (8): 1205–1217. doi:10.1093/scan/nsw029. ISSN 1749-5024. PMC 4967793. PMID 26979966.
  19. "CUBE – Understanding the Brain with Ultrasound". Retrieved 2021-06-06.
  20. Google Scholar Author page, Accessed Dec. 6, 2021
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