Social Neuroscience最新文献

We systematically investigated the application of embodied hyperscanning methodologies in social neuroscience research. Hyperscanning enables the simultaneous recording of neurophysiological and physiological signals from multiple participants. We highlight the trend toward integrating Mobile Brain/Body Imaging (MoBI) within the 4E research framework, which emphasizes the interconnectedness of brain, body, and environment. Our analysis revealed a geographic concentration of studies in the Global North, calling for global collaboration and transcultural research to balance the field. The predominant use of Magneto/Electroencephalogram (M/EEG) in these studies suggests a traditional brain-centric perspective in social neuroscience. Future research directions should focus on integrating diverse techniques to capture the dynamic interplay between brain and body functions in real-world contexts. Our review also finds a preference for tasks involving natural settings. Nevertheless, the analysis in hyperscanning studies is often limited to physiological signal synchrony between participants. This suggests a need for more holistic and complex approaches that combine inter-corporeal synchrony with intra-individual measures. We believe that the future of the neuroscience of relationships lies in embracing the complexity of cognition, integrating diverse methods and theories to enrich our grasp of human social behavior in its natural contexts.

As individuals increasingly engage in social interactions through digital mediums, understanding the neuroscientific underpinnings of such exchanges becomes a critical challenge and a valuable opportunity. In line with a second-person neuroscience approach, understanding the forms of interpersonal syntonisation that occur during digital interactions is pivotal for grasping the mechanisms underlying successful collaboration in virtual spaces. The hyperscanning paradigm, involving the simultaneous monitoring of the brains and bodies of multiple interacting individuals, seems to be a powerful tool for unravelling the neural correlates of interpersonal syntonisation in social exchanges. We posit that such approach can now open new windows on interacting brains' responses even to digitally-conveyed social cues, offering insights into how social information is processed in the absence of traditional face-to-face settings. Yet, such paradigm shift raises challenging methodological questions, which should be answered properly to conduct significant and informative hyperscanning investigations. Here, we provide an introduction to core methodological issues dedicated to novices approaching the design of hyperscanning investigations of remote exchanges in natural settings, focusing on the selection of neuroscientific devices, synchronization of data streams, and data analysis approaches. Finally, a methodological checklist for devising robust hyperscanning studies on digital interactions is presented.

Obesity is linked to notable psychological risks, particularly in social interactions where individuals with high body mass index (BMI) often encounter stigmatization and difficulties in forming and maintaining social connections. Although awareness of these issues is growing, there is a lack of research on real-time, dynamic interactions involving dyads with various BMI levels. To address this gap, our study employed a joint finger-tapping task, where participant dyads engaged in coordinated activity while their brain activity was monitored using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS). Our findings showed that both Bidirectional and Unidirectional Interaction conditions exhibited higher levels of behavioral and interbrain synchrony compared to the No Interaction condition. Notably, only in the Bidirectional Interaction condition, higher dyadic BMI was significantly correlated with poorer behavioral coordination and reduced interbrain synchrony. This finding suggests that the ability to maintain social coordination, particularly in scenarios requiring continuous mutual prediction and adjustment, is modulated by dyads' BMI.

The explosion of digital media has emerged quickly from the convergence of technological advances, pandemic urgency, and cultural changes that have now taken hold in the daily life of people around the world. With cell phone, tablet and laptop devices as well as broad internet service available to an estimated two-thirds of the world's population, the landscape of social interaction continues to change. "Social media" for personal, educational, business, health and other purposes is being used daily. With this shift, the field of social neuroscience has begun to consider both digital and in-person interactions. The hyperscanning technique lends itself well to this challenge and is beginning to be applied to study of varied social constructs as well as clinical samples. This special issue has assembled a set of papers specifically focused on hyperscanning as an informative approach to investigating digital vs. in-person interactions. Papers present conceptual, methodological, and primary data findings. Authors address issues of interpersonal stress regulation, shared and distinctive bodily and physiological characteristics of digital vs. in-person experiences, the effects of prior social interaction on emotional contagion, and the possible influence of BMI on neural synchrony during motor coordination.

Emotional contagion refers to the tendency for individuals to replicate the emotional states of others primarily, within the context of social interactions. Prior research has focused on the real-time emotional contagion during interpersonal communication. However, this study proposes that social interaction experiences, particularly those involving cooperation, might also play a role in promoting emotional contagion. To investigate this issue, the present study divided participants into the interactive group and the control group and conducted EEG-based hyperscanning to explore the impact of interpersonal interaction experience on emotional contagion. Behavioral results indicated that individuals reported a greater psychological closeness to their partners after experiencing interaction. Additionally, the interactive group showed stronger emotional congruence between observers and senders. EEG results further demonstrated that inter-brain synchrony in the emotional contagion phase among the observer and sender of the interactive group was significantly higher than that of the control group and was significantly correlated with the observer's emotional state. This research suggests that social interaction experience may affect emotional contagion by altering the interpersonal dynamics. The present study adds to the understanding of how social interactions can shape emotional experiences and emphasizes that interpersonal experiences might be a key factor in promoting emotional contagion.

Schizophrenia is a severe psychiatric condition marked by social impairments. Given that social cognitive functioning strongly predicts life outcomes in schizophrenia, understanding its neurobiological basis is crucial. This study used receptor autoradiography to measure vasopressin 1a (AVPR1a) and oxytocin receptor (OXTR) densities in postmortem brain tissue from individuals with schizophrenia (N = 23) and matched controls (N = 18). We focused on the superior temporal sulcus, a region involved in social perception and often impaired in schizophrenia. AVPR1a binding densities exceeded those of OXTR. Notably, AVPR1a densities increased with age in females with schizophrenia, which may explain age-related changes in positive symptom severity (e.g. paranoia) in this group. Additionally, schizophrenia was associated with increased OXTR and a trend toward higher AVPR1a densities in the hypothalamus, a region central to oxytocin and vasopressin synthesis and stress response regulation. These findings suggest compensatory upregulation of nonapeptide receptor systems due to potentially reduced oxytocin and vasopressin release. Overall, our results highlight age- and sex-dependent alterations in receptor binding, providing insights into the neurobiology of social dysfunction in schizophrenia.

The effects of previous social experiences on social behavior have been demonstrated across species both in cooperative and competitive contexts. In dominance-subordinate hierarchies, differences across social ranks have been observed in many different mechanisms. Dominance hierarchies interfere in defensive behavior, where subordinate animals present a greater defensive behavior, regarding potential threats ("anxiety-like behavior"), than dominant animals. The serotonergic system plays a key role in regulating and mediating threat responses, including 5-HT2 receptors in the types of proximal threat responses modulated by the stress of social defeat. We separated 148 adult zebrafish in pairs and allowed them to interact for five days; after that, the dominant-subordinate rank was determined, and animals were treated with a 5-HT_2C receptor agonist (MK-212) or antagonist (RS-102221) before being observed in the novel tank test. While MK-212 increased bottom-dwelling, erratic swimming, and freezing across all statuses, RS-102221 decreased these variables in dominants but increased them in subordinates. Moreover, the effects of MK-212 were larger in subordinates than in controls or dominants, suggesting a sensitization of the 5-HT_2C receptor.

To develop pharmaceutical drugs, people experiment on lab-animals. While this practice disturbs the general population, various factors in laboratory settings may contribute to enabling experiments that harm animals. Using an ultra-realistic protocol mimicking animal research and collecting behavioral and physiological data, we invited laypersons from the general population to administrate a toxic drug on a (fake) laboratory animal. This preregistered study (n = 145) aimed to examine individual determinants and contextual frameworks that may influence willingness to engage in such experimentation. Because low self-regulatory abilities are associated with less discomfort seeing others suffer, and that objectification of lab-animals allows disengagement from them, we also examined whether they both would predict involvement in an animal-research. We also examined whether some personality markers known to predict human-animal relations (i.e. social dominance orientation, speciesist attitudes, and empathic dispositions) could be related to the willingness to experiment on a lab animal. Overall, the results of this research were mixed, as neither self-regulation abilities, animal objectification, social dominance orientation, nor empathy significantly predicted participation in animal testing. However, low speciesist attitudes significantly reduced the willingness to kill animals for science.

Partisanship has been associated with various cognitive biases. These findings are primarily based on self-reports and task performance and less on measures of neural activity. We reviewed the literature on in-group vs. out-group bias that employs face-viewing paradigms and ERP methodology to investigate unconscious bias in politics. We subsequently preregistered hypotheses about the extent to which partisanship is associated with early neural processing of political leaders' faces. Our lab experiment was conducted in the Netherlands (N = 51), a multi-party democracy, and sufficiently powered to pick up modest effect sizes for in-party vs. out-party comparisons. As expected, we find that politicians' faces elicit a stronger N170 ERP response than strangers' faces, but we did not find the same pattern for the N250 component. Contrary to our hypotheses, we did not find statistically significant differences in the P200 and N200 components for the in-party vs. out-party comparison. These findings, supported by our cluster-based permutation analysis, indicate that seeing faces of political leaders enhances attention during facial processing, regardless of party affiliation, possibly due to their frequent and affectively salient presence in media. Since in-party vs. out-party differences did not emerge early on, implications for partisanship are discussed relative to racial and minimal group bias findings.

Objective: Epilepsy is one of the chronic neurological diseases with high stigmatization due to the psychosocial problems caused by seizures. The study was conducted to examine the quality of life and stigma in people with epilepsy (PWE).

Method: The data of the descriptive and cross-sectional study were collected using the Personal Information Form, the Quality of Life in Epilepsy Inventory (QOLIE-31), and the Stigma Scale for Epilepsy (SSE) and analyzed using the SPSS program.

Results: The study included 86 patients receiving outpatient treatment at the neurology outpatient clinic of a university hospital. The mean score of epilepsy patients in QOLIE-31 was 61.95 ± 22.68, while their mean score in the SSE was 74.67 ± 5.94. It was determined that gender, seizure type, antiepileptic drug regimen, and seizure time affected the quality of life in PWE, while educational status and seizure type affected stigma. It was determined that there was a significant relationship between the level of stigma and quality of life in epilepsy patients, and that their quality of life decreased as the level of stigma increased.

Conclusion: As a result, epilepsy negatively affects the quality of life of patients and causes stigma. Reducing stigma is effective in increasing the quality of life.