Social cognitive and affective neuroscience最新文献

Understanding the socio-political attitudes of other people is a crucial skill, yet the neural mechanisms supporting this capacity remain understudied. This study used multivariate pattern analysis to examine patterns of activity in the default mode network (DMN) while participants assessed their own attitudes and the attitudes of other people. Classification analyses indicated that common patterns in DMN regions encode both own and others' support across a variety of contemporary socio-political issues. Moreover, cross-classification analyses demonstrated that a common coding of attitudes is implemented at a neural level. This shared informational content was associated with a greater perceived overlap between own attitude positions and those of others (i.e. attitudinal projection), such that higher cross-classification accuracy corresponded with greater attitudinal projection. This study thus identifies a possible neural basis for egocentric biases in the social perception of individual and group attitudes and provides additional evidence for self/other overlap in mentalizing.

Several studies in political psychology reported higher levels of empathy among political leftists (i.e. liberals) as compared to political rightists (i.e. conservatives). Yet, all those studies lean on self-reports, which are often limited by subjective bias and conformity to social norms. Here, we tested this putative asymmetry using neuroimaging: we recorded oscillatory neural activity using magnetoencephalography while 55 participants completed a well-validated neuroimaging paradigm for empathy to vicarious suffering. The findings revealed a typical rhythmic alpha-band 'empathy response' in the temporal-parietal junction. This neural empathy response was significantly stronger in the leftist than in the rightist group. In addition to this dichotomous division, the neural response was parametrically associated with both self-reported political inclination and right-wing ideological values. This is the first study to reveal an asymmetry in the neural empathy response as a function of political ideology. The findings reported in this study are in line with the current literature in political psychology and provide a novel neural perspective to support the ideological asymmetry in empathy. This study opens new vistas for addressing questions in political psychology by using neuroimaging.

Youth antisocial behavior (AB) is associated with deficits in socioemotional processing, reward and threat processing and executive functioning. These deficits are thought to emerge from differences in neural structure, functioning and connectivity, particularly within the default, salience and frontoparietal networks. However, the relationship between AB and the organization of these networks remains unclear. To address this gap, the current study applied unweighted, undirected graph analyses to resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging data in a cohort of 161 adolescents (95 female) enriched for exposure to poverty, a risk factor for AB. As prior work indicates that callous-unemotional (CU) traits may moderate the neurocognitive profile of youth AB, we examined CU traits as a moderator. Using multi-informant latent factors, AB was found to be associated with less efficient frontoparietal network topology, a network associated with executive functioning. However, this effect was limited to youth at low or mean levels of CU traits, indicating that these neural differences were specific to those high on AB but not CU traits. Neither AB, CU traits nor their interaction was significantly related to default or salience network topologies. Results suggest that AB, specifically, may be linked with shifts in the architecture of the frontoparietal network.

Self- and vicarious experience of physical pain induces inhibition of the motor cortex (M1). Experience of social rejections recruits the same neural network as physical pain; however, whether social pain modulates M1 corticospinal excitability remains unclear. This study examines for the first time whether social exclusion words, rather than simulated social exclusion tasks, modulate embodied sensorimotor networks during the vicarious experience of others' pain. Participants observed visual sequences of painful and functional events ending with a superimposed word with social exclusion, social inclusion or non-social meaning. Motor-evoked potentials (MEPs) to single-pulse transcranial magnetic stimulation of the left M1 were recorded at 400 or 550 ms from word onset. MEPs tended to inhibit during the observation of pain, relative to functional events. Moreover, MEPs recorded at 400 ms from word onset, during pain movies, decreased following the presentation of exclusion, relative to inclusion/neutral words. The magnitude of these two modulations marginally correlated with participants' interindividual differences in personal distress and self-esteem. These findings provide evidence of vicarious responses to others' pain in the M1 corticospinal system and enhancement of such vicarious response in the earlier phases of semantic processing of exclusion words-supporting activation of social pain-embodied representations.

The space surrounding the body [i.e. peripersonal space (PPS)] has a crucial impact on individuals' interactions with the environment. Research showed that the interaction within the PPS increases individuals' behavioral and neural responses. Furthermore, individuals' empathy is affected by the distance between them and the observed stimuli. This study investigated empathic responses to painfully stimulated or gently touched faces presented within the PPS depending on the presence vs absence of a transparent barrier erected to prevent the interaction. To this aim, participants had to determine whether faces were painfully stimulated or gently touched, while their electroencephalographic signals were recorded. Brain activity [i.e. event-related potentials (ERPs) and source activations] was separately compared for the two types of stimuli (i.e. gently touched vs painfully stimulated faces) across two barrier conditions: (i) no-barrier between participants and the screen (i.e. no-barrier) and (ii) a plexiglass barrier erected between participants and the screen (i.e. barrier). While the barrier did not affect performance behaviorally, it reduced cortical activation at both the ERP and source activation levels in brain areas that regulate the interpersonal interaction (i.e. primary, somatosensory, premotor cortices and inferior frontal gyrus). These findings suggest that the barrier, precluding the possibility of interacting, reduced the observer's empathy.

The default mode network (DMN) is a network of brain regions active during rest and self-referential thinking. Individuals with major depressive disorder (MDD) show increased or decreased DMN activity relative to controls. DMN activity has been linked to a tendency to ruminate in MDD. It is unclear if individuals who are at risk for, but who have no current or past history of depression, also show differential DMN activity associated with rumination. We investigated whether females with high levels of neuroticism with no current or lifetime mood or anxiety disorders (n = 25) show increased DMN activation, specifically when processing negative self-referential information, compared with females with average levels of neuroticism (n = 28). Participants heard criticism and praise during functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans in a 3T Siemens Prisma scanner. The at-risk group showed greater activation in two DMN regions, the medial prefrontal cortex and the inferior parietal lobule (IPL), after hearing criticism, but not praise (relative to females with average levels of neuroticism). Criticism-specific activation in the IPL was significantly correlated with rumination. Individuals at risk for depression may, therefore, have an underlying neurocognitive vulnerability to use a brain network typically involved in thinking about oneself to preferentially ruminate about negative, rather than positive, information.

Even though overactive error monitoring, indexed by enhanced amplitudes of the error-related negativity (ERN), is a potential biomarker for obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), the mechanisms underlying clinical variations in ERN amplitude remain unknown. To investigate whether ERN enhancement in OCD results from altered error evaluation, we examined the trial-wise valence evaluation of errors and its relation to the ERN in 28 patients with OCD and 28 healthy individuals. Electroencephalogram was recorded during an affective priming paradigm in which responses in a go/no-go task were followed by valence-based word categorization. Results indicated that errors were followed by faster categorization of negative than positive words, confirming that negative valence is assigned to errors. This affective priming effect was reduced in patients with OCD, while go/no-go performance was comparable between groups. Notably, this reduction amplified with increasing symptom severity. These results suggest attenuated affective error evaluation in OCD, possibly resulting from interfering effects of anxiety. There was no evidence for a trial-level association between valence evaluation and ERN, implying that ERN amplitude does not reflect valence assignment to errors. Consequently, altered error monitoring in OCD may involve alterations in possibly distinct processes, with weaker assignment of negative valence to errors being one of them.

Prior studies in Social Neuroeconomics have consistently reported activation in social cognition regions during interactive economic games, suggesting mentalizing during economic choice. Such mentalizing occurs during active participation in the game, as well as during passive observation of others' interactions. We designed a novel version of the classic false-belief task (FBT) in which participants read vignettes about interactions between agents in the ultimatum and trust games and were subsequently asked to infer the agents' beliefs. We compared activation patterns during the economic games FBT to those during the classic FBT using conjunction analyses. We find significant overlap in the left temporoparietal junction (TPJ) and dorsal medial prefrontal cortex, as well as the temporal pole (TP) during two task phases: belief formation and belief inference. Moreover, generalized Psychophysiological Interaction (gPPI) analyses show that during belief formation, the right TPJ is a target of both the left TPJ and the right TP seed regions, whereas during belief inferences all seed regions show interconnectivity with each other. These results indicate that across different task types and phases, mentalizing is associated with activation and connectivity across central nodes of the social cognition network. Importantly, this is the case for both the novel economic games and the classic FBTs.

In everyday face-to-face communication, speakers use speech to transfer information and rely on co-occurring nonverbal cues, such as hand and facial gestures. The integration of speech and gestures facilitates both language comprehension and the skill of the theory of mind. Consecutive dialogue interpreting (DI) allows dyads of different linguistic backgrounds to communicate with each other. The interpreter interprets after the interlocutor has finished a turn, so the interlocutor watches the gesture first and hears the target language a few seconds later, resulting in speech-gesture asynchrony. In this study, we used the functional near-infrared spectroscopy hyperscanning technique to investigate the influence of speech-gesture asynchrony on different levels of communication. Twenty groups were recruited for the DI experiments. The results showed that when the interpreter performed consecutive interpreting, the time-lagged neural coupling at the temporoparietal junction decreased compared to simultaneous interpreting. It suggests that speech-gesture asynchrony significantly weakened the ability of interlocutors to understand each other's mental state, and the decreased neural coupling was significantly correlated with the interpreter's interpretation skill. In addition, the time-aligned neural coupling at the left inferior frontal gyrus increased, which suggests that, as compensation, the interlocutor's verbal working memory increases in line with the communication process.