Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience

Coordinating actions with others is thought to require Theory of Mind (ToM): the ability to take perspective by attributing underlying intentions and beliefs to observed behavior. However, researchers have yet to establish a causal role for specific cognitive processes in coordinated action. Since working memory load impairs ToM in single-participant paradigms, we tested whether load manipulation affects two-person coordination. We used EEG to measure P3, an assessment of working memory encoding, as well as inter-brain synchronization (IBS), which is thought to capture mutual adjustment of behavior and mental states during coordinated action...

The concept of emotional intelligence (EI) refers to the ability to recognize and regulate emotions to appropriately guide cognition and behaviour. Unfortunately, studies on the neural bases of EI are scant, and no study so far has exhaustively investigated grey matter (GM) and white matter (WM) contributions to it. To fill this gap, we analysed trait measure of EI and structural MRI data from 128 healthy participants to shed new light on where and how EI is encoded in the brain. In addition, we explored the relationship between the neural substrates of trait EI and trait anxiety...

Our emotions may influence how we interact with others. Previous studies have shown an important role of emotion induction in generating empathic reactions towards others' affect. However, it remains unclear whether (and to which extent) our own emotions can influence the ability to infer people's mental states, a process associated with Theory of Mind (ToM) and implicated in the representation of both cognitive (e.g. beliefs and intentions) and affective conditions. We engaged 59 participants in two emotion-induction experiments where they saw joyful, neutral and fearful clips...

The cerebellum causally supports social processing by generating internal models of social events based on statistical learning of behavioral regularities. However, whether the cerebellum is only involved in forming or also in using internal models for the prediction of forthcoming actions is still unclear. We used cerebellar transcranial Direct Current Stimulation (ctDCS) to modulate the performance of healthy adults in using previously learned expectations in an action prediction task. In a first learning phase of this task, participants were exposed to different levels of associations between specific actions and contextual elements, to induce the formation of either strongly or moderately informative expectations...

Cognitive training for older adults varies in efficacy, but it is unclear why some older adults benefit more than others. Positive affective experience (PAE), referring to high positive valence and/or stable arousal states across everyday scenarios, and associated functional networks can protect plasticity mechanisms against Alzheimer's disease neurodegeneration, which may contribute to training outcome variability. The objective of this study is to investigate whether PAE explains variability in cognitive training outcomes by disrupting the adverse effect of neurodegeneration on plasticity...

Self-referential information is uniquely salient and preferentially processed even in children. The literature has used the self-referent encoding task (SRET) combined with event-related potentials (ERPs) to study self-referential processing and its associations with youth psychopathology. However, it is unclear how the ERP and behavioral indices of SRET are associated with each other, although this knowledge can promote our mechanistic understanding of this construct and its role in psychopathology. We examined this question in 115 9- to 12-year-old children, a critical period for the development of self-related concepts...

People frequently share their negative experiences and feelings with others. Little is known, however, about the social outcomes of sharing negative experiences and the underlying neural mechanisms. We addressed this dearth of knowledge by leveraging functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) hyperscanning: while dyad participants took turns to share their own (self-disclosure group) or a stranger's (non-disclosure group) negative and neutral experiences, their respective brain activity was recorded simultaneously by fNIRS...

Recent work has demonstrated that reminders of those we are closest to have a unique combination of effects on fear learning and represent a new category of fear inhibitors, termed prepared fear suppressors. Notably, social-support-figure images have been shown to resist becoming associated with fear, suppress conditional-fear-responding, and lead to long-term fear reduction. Due to the novelty of this category, understanding the underlying neural mechanisms that support these unique abilities of social-support-reminders has yet to be investigated...

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

Domain-general conflict control refers to the cognitive process in which individuals suppress task-irrelevant information and extract task-relevant information. It supports both effective implementation of cognitive conflict control and emotional conflict control. The present study employed functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and adopted an emotional valence conflict task and the arrow version of the flanker task to induce contextualized emotional conflicts and cognitive conflicts, respectively. The results from the conjunction analysis showed that the multitasking-related activity in the pre-SMA, bilateral dPMCs, the left pIPS, the left aIPS, and the right inferior occipital gyrus (IOG) represents common subprocesses for emotional and cognitive conflict control, either in parallel or in close succession...

Successful recovery from stress is integral for adaptive responding to the environment. At a cellular level, this involves (slow genomic) actions of cortisol, which alter or reverse rapid effects of noradrenaline and cortisol associated with acute stress. At the network scale, stress recovery is less well understood but assumed to involve changes within salience-, executive control-, and default mode networks. To date, few studies have investigated this phase and directly tested these assumptions. Here we present results from a double-blind, placebo-controlled, between-groups paradigm (N =165 healthy males) administering 10 mg oral yohimbine and/or 10 mg oral hydrocortisone two hours prior to resting state scanning...

The ability to accurately decode others' facial expressions is essential for successful social interaction. Previous theories suggest that aspects of parental emotionality-the frequency, persistence, and intensity of parents' own emotions-can influence children's emotion perception. Through a combination of mechanisms, parental emotionality may shape how children's brains specialize to respond to emotional expressions, but empirical data is lacking. The present study provides a direct empirical test of the relation between the intensity, persistence, and frequency of parents' own emotions and children's neural responses to perceiving emotional expressions...

Growing evidence supports the effectiveness of cognitive reappraisal in down-regulating food desire. Still, the neural bases of food craving down-regulation via reappraisal, as well as their degree of overlap versus specificity compared with emotion down-regulation, remain unclear. We addressed this gap through activation likelihood estimation (ALE) meta-analyses of neuroimaging studies on the neural bases of (a) food craving down-regulation, and (b) emotion down-regulation, alongside conjunction and subtraction analyses among the resulting maps...

When asked to categorize faces according to 'race', people typically categorize other-race faces faster than faces belonging to their own race. This Other Race Categorization Advantage is thought to reflect enhanced sensitivity to early visual signals characteristic of other-race faces, and can manifest within 200 ms of face presentation. However, recent research has highlighted the importance of signal intensity in this effect, where visual-degradation of the face images significantly enhances the effect and exposes a behavioural threshold at very low levels of visual quality where other-race visual signals are able to be perceived while same-race signals are not...

In the extensive neuroimaging literature on empathy for pain, few studies have investigated how this phenomenon may relate to everyday social situations such as spoken interactions. The present study used fMRI to assess how complaints, as vocal expressions of pain, are empathically processed by listeners and how these empathic responses may vary based on speakers' vocal expression and cultural identity. Twenty-four French participants listened to short utterances describing a painful event, that were either produced in a neutral-sounding or complaining voice by both ingroup (French) and outgroup (French-Canadian) speakers...

We previously found Spanish-English bilingual adults reported higher pain intensity when exposed to painful heat in the language of their stronger cultural orientation. Here, we elucidate brain systems involved in language-driven alterations in pain responses. During separate English- and Spanish-speaking fMRI scanning runs, 39 (21 female) bilingual adults rated painful heat intermixed between culturally evocative images and completed sentence reading tasks. Surveys of cultural identity and language use measured relative preference for US-American vs Hispanic culture (cultural orientation)...

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

Recognizing facial expressions is dependent on multiple brain networks specialized for different cognitive functions. In the current study, participants (N = 20) were scanned using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), while they performed a covert facial expression naming task. Immediately prior to scanning thetaburst transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) was delivered over the right lateral prefrontal cortex (PFC), or the vertex control site. A group whole-brain analysis revealed that TMS induced opposite effects in the neural responses across different brain networks...

This paper investigates the neural mechanism that underlies the effect of group identity on hold-up problems. The behavioral results indicated that the investment rate among members of the ingroup was significantly higher than that of the outgroup. In comparison to the NoChat treatment, the Chat treatment resulted in significantly lower offers for both ingroup and outgroup members. The event-related potentials (ERP) results demonstrated the presence of a distinct N2 component in the frontal midline of the brain when investment decisions were made for both ingroup and outgroup members...

Reward and emotion are tightly intertwined, so there is a growing interest in mapping their interactions. However, our knowledge of these interactions in the human brain, especially during the consummatory phase of reward is limited. To address this critical gap, we conducted a functional MRI study to investigate the effects of negative emotion on reward outcome processing. We employed a novel design where emotional valence (negative or neutral) indicated the type of outcome (reward or no-reward) in a choice task...