Area Overview

　In our diverse society, we face numerous barriers that hinder the realization of harmonious co-existence. These barriers include the negative psychological factors arising from self versus non-self differences in gender, race, social status, etc., and impeded communication due to disabilities and age. The researchers in this area are striving to overcome these psychological factors and communication barriers, based on a scientific understanding of the envy that arises from self-other comparison, with the ultimate goal of promoting harmonious coexistence in society.

　Envy, jealousy, and feelings of unfairness are negative emotions that arise when we the compare ourselves to others. These emotions share many common factors, such as the way they manifest in our feelings, cognition, and behavior. In this research area, these emotions are broadly defined as ‘envy’. For example, the pleasure one feels from gaining a reward diminishes can decrease when one comes to know that someone else received a better reward. This often leads to the development of ‘envy’ toward the person. The self-other cognition underlying envy is a fundamental brain function that shares many similarities with the ability to infer the mental state of others, known as ‘theory-of-mind inference’. Patients with psychiatric disorders, such as autism spectrum disorder and schizophrenia, are often considered to have limited self-cognition in social relationships. Failure to compare themselves to others properly may lead to communication difficulties. With the increasing introduction of robots for nursing care and medical services, there is a pressing need to address the coexistence of humans and robots. We view the robots equipped with multifaceted socio-emotional mechanisms, supported by the “envy science,” will play a key role in the realization of harmonious coexistence between humans and robots in the future.

　In this research area, it is necessary to extensive gather detailed neural activity data related to envy generation in non-human primates and rodents for use in activity control verification and robot simulations. Based on these data and experiments, researchers can extract the function module that governs envy generation and propose a working hypothesis that explains the observed neural activity phenomena. These mutually complementary processes will lead to a deeper understanding of envy.