Social cognitive and affective neuroscience最新文献

Individuals who perceive the caregiving they received from their parents as more caring tend to bond better with their infants and show more sensitive parenting behaviors. Early caregiving experiences are also related to differences in the functions of hormonal systems, including the oxytocinergic system. The current study examined how perceptions of childhood maternal care related to parenting behaviors, oxytocin levels, and neural responses to infant stimuli.

Methods: Perceived childhood maternal care was measured using the Parental Bonding Instrument (PBI) for 54 first-time birthing-parents. Salivary oxytocin and observations of parenting behaviors were assessed during parent-infant play at 3.5 months postpartum. Neural activation while listening to infant cry was measured with fMRI.

Results: More positive perceptions of childhood maternal care and higher oxytocin were interactively related to greater anterior cingulate activation to own infant cry. Higher oxytocin levels were associated with reduced left cuneus activation in response to own infant cry when compared with control cry and matched noise.

Conclusion: Findings suggested that positive memories of childhood caregiving may have protective functions for birthing-parents with high oxytocin levels during the early postpartum period, a time when parents need to manage increased stress and form an exclusive bond with their baby.

In the Ouija board phenomenon, the lack of agency experienced by the players leads them to attribute the movement of the planchette to spirits. The aim of this study was to investigate the neural and cognitive mechanisms involved in generating the sense of agency in such a joint action context. Two players (a participant and a confederate) jointly moved a Ouija board-style planchette containing a wireless mouse. This, in turn, moved a digital board on the screen. Participants reported a greater sense of agency in the condition where they had complete control of the planchette (the 'self' condition), and least agency when they passively held the planchette while it was moved by the confederate ('other' condition), with the two 'joint' action conditions in between. While the N1 peak did not differ between conditions, the early part of the N1 differentiated between the joint action conditions, and the solo action conditions. In contrast, the Tb and P2 components differed between the 'other' condition and the 'self' and 'joint' conditions. These findings are discussed with reference to motor-prediction and attentional mechanisms.

Interpersonal space is regulated carefully and updated dynamically during social interactions to maintain comfort. We investigated the naturalistic processing of interpersonal distance in real time and space using a powerful implicit neurophysiological measure of attentional engagement. In a sample of 37 young adults recruited at a UK university, we found greater EEG alpha band suppression when a person occupies or moves into near personal space than for a person occupying or moving into public space. In the dynamic condition only, the differences attenuated over the course of the experiment, and were sensitive to individual differences in social anxiety. These data show, for the first time, neurophysiological correlates of interpersonal distance coding in a naturalistic setting. Critically, while veridical distance is important for attentional response to the presence of a person in one's space, the behavioural relevance of their movement through public and personal space takes primacy.

Oxytocin, a neuropeptide pivotal in social and reproductive behaviors, has recently gained attention for its potential impact on cognitive processes relevant to creativity. Yet, the direct intricate interplay between oxytocin and creativity, particularly in the context of individual differences in motivational orientations, remains poorly understood. Here, we investigated the effects of intranasal oxytocin on creative thinking in individuals characterized by varying levels of approach and avoidance motivations. The initial study, involving participants with high approach or avoidance motivation, employed the Alternative Uses Task (AUT) to assess creativity under oxytocin administration. Subsequently, the second study induced different motivational states through a recall task, aiming to validate and extend observed effects. Results revealed a significant enhancement of creativity in individuals with approach motivation following oxytocin administration, while no parallel effect was discerned in those with avoidance motivation. Aligning with behavioral findings, functional connectivity and graph theory analyses of neural data illuminated the coordinated effects of oxytocin on creativity-related neural networks. These outcomes collectively suggest that oxytocin exerts a dissociable influence on creativity contingent upon an individual's motivational tendencies, providing insights into the intricate relationship between oxytocin and human creative behavior.

Despite theoretical emphasis on loneliness affecting social information processing, empirical studies lack consensus. We previously adopted a clinical science framework to measure the association between social cognitive capacity and bias and both objective and perceived social isolation in nonclinical participants. Our prior study found that while objective social isolation is linked to both social cognitive capacity and social cognitive bias, loneliness is associated only with the latter. This study extended our previous model using a computational approach to capture implicit cognitive processes. We replicated and extended our earlier findings with a new sample of 271 participants, using neuropsychological tasks and a dot-probe paradigm that was analyzed via Drift Diffusion Model. We presented two complementary trajectories of how social cognitive bias may arise: the increased propensity to engage with salient social stimuli or a decreased information processing capacity dependent on the presence or absence of potential social threats. Furthermore, we found evidence that loneliness is associated with the time needed for perceptual processing of stimuli, both directly and indirectly, via social cognitive bias. Taken together, the complex and context-dependent nature of information processing biases observed in the current study suggests that complex and multifaceted interventions should be implemented to counter social information processing biases in lonely individuals.

Fear of threatening contexts often generalizes to similar safe contexts, but few studies have investigated how contextual information influences cue generalization. In this study, we explored whether fear responses to cues would generalize more broadly in a threatening compared to a safe context. Forty-seven participants underwent a differential cue-in-context conditioning protocol followed by a generalization test, while we recorded psychophysiological and subjective responses. Two faces appeared on a computer screen in two contexts. One face (CS+) in the threat context (CTX+) was followed by a female scream 80% of the time, while another face (CS-) was not reinforced. No faces were reinforced in the safe context (CTX-). In the generalization test, the CSs and four morphs varying in similarity with the CS+ were presented in both contexts. During acquisition, conditioned responses to the cues were registered for all measures and the differential responding between CS+ and CS- was higher in CTX+ for US-expectancy ratings and skin conductance responses, but the affective ratings and steady-state visual evoked potentials were not context-sensitive. During test, adaptive generalized responses were evident for all measures. Despite increased US-expectancy ratings in CTX+, participants exhibited similar cue generalization in both contexts, suggesting that threatening contexts do not influence cue generalization.

Human vocabularies include specific words to communicate interpersonal behaviors, a core linguistic function mainly afforded by social verbs (SVs). This skill has been proposed to engage dedicated systems subserving social knowledge. Yet, neurocognitive evidence is scarce, and no study has examined spectro-temporal and spatial signatures of SV access. Here, we combined magnetoencephalography and time-resolved decoding methods to characterize the neural dynamics underpinning SVs, relative to nonsocial verbs (nSVs), via a lexical decision task. Time-frequency analysis revealed stronger beta (20 Hz) power decreases for SVs in right fronto-temporal sensors at early stages. Time-resolved decoding showed that beta oscillations significantly discriminated SVs and nSVs between 180 and 230 ms. Sources of this effect were traced to the right anterior superior temporal gyrus (a key hub underpinning social conceptual knowledge) as well as parietal, pre/motor and prefrontal cortices supporting nonverbal social cognition. Finally, representational similarity analyses showed that the observed fronto-temporal neural patterns were specifically predicted by verbs' socialness, as opposed to other psycholinguistic dimensions such as sensorimotor content, emotional valence, arousal, and concreteness. Overall, verbal conveyance of socialness seems to involve distinct neurolinguistic patterns, partly shared by more general sociocognitive and lexicosemantic processes.

Positive anticipatory experiences are key to daily well-being. However, the brain's functional architecture underlying real-world positive anticipatory experiences and well-being remains unexplored. In the present study, we combined an ecological momentary assessment and resting-state functional neuroimaging to identify the neural predictors of real-world positive anticipatory experiences and explore their relationships with subjective well-being (SWB). With a model-based approach, we quantified participants' accuracy in predicting positive events and the degree to which participants' affective states were influenced by the positive anticipation. We found that individuals with higher accuracy in predicting upcoming positive events showed greater SWB, and this relationship was mediated by greater positive anticipatory feelings. Importantly, functional connectivity of the dorsal and ventral striatal-hippocampal networks significantly predicted the accuracy and positive anticipatory feelings, respectively. These functional networks were further predictive of SWB. Our findings provide novel and ecologically valid evidence that the interaction between neural systems for reward-processing and memory plays an important role in real-life positive anticipatory experiences and everyday SWB.

Individuals with a schizophrenia spectrum disorder (SSD) have difficulties with social information processing, including mental state attribution, or "theory of mind" (ToM). Prior work has shown that these difficulties are related to disruption to the neural network subserving ToM. However, few such studies utilize naturalistic stimuli that are more representative of daily social interaction. Here, SSD and non-SSD individuals underwent fMRI while watching The Office to better understand how the ToM network responds to dynamic and complex social information, such as socially awkward moments. We find that medial prefrontal cortex tracks less with moment-to-moment awkwardness in SSD individuals. We also find a broad decrease in functional connectivity in the ToM network in SSD. Furthermore, neural response during awkward moments and functional connectivity was associated with psychotic experiences and social functioning. These results suggest that during naturalistic, socially awkward moments where mental state attribution is critical, individuals with SSD fail to recruit key regions of the ToM network, possibly contributing to decreased social understanding and impaired functioning.