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Social interactions, or the reciprocal exchange between socially engaged individuals, plays a central role in shaping human life. Social interactions are fundamental for neurocognitive development, and a key factor contributing to mental and physical health. Despite their importance, research investigating the neurocognitive systems associated with human social interaction is relatively new. Human neuroimaging research has traditionally used approaches that separate the individual from social contexts, thereby limiting the ability to examine brain systems underlying interactive social behavior. More recent work has begun incorporating real-time social contexts, and have implicated an extended network of brain regions associated with social interaction. However, open questions remain about the neurocognitive processes that are critical for social interactions and the brain systems that are commonly engaged. The current dissertation aims to address these gaps in our understanding through a set of studies using computational and data-driven approaches. Study 1 examined the relationship between social interaction and mentalizing, which is the ability to infer the mental states of others that is considered to be critically important for social interactions. Prior work has demonstrated that mentalizing and social interaction elicit brain activity spatially overlapping areas, but spatial overlap is not necessarily indicative of a common underlying process. Thus, Study 1 utilized multivariate approaches to examine the similarity of brain activity patterns associated with mentalizing outside of social contexts and when interacting with a peer (regardless of mentalizing) as a means for inferring a functional relationship between the two. Study 2 investigated brain regions commonly engaged across social interactive contexts using coordinate-based meta-analysis, which is an approach for aggregating findings across neuroimaging literature. This involved an exhaustive search strategy to find fMRI and PET studies that utilize social interactive approaches, and calculated spatial convergence across studies as a means to uncover brain regions that are reliably implicated during social interaction. The results from Studies 1 and 2 offer major advancements for a neuroscientific understanding of social interaction by demonstrating a functional link with mentalizing and through elucidating brain systems that are commonly reported in studies using social interactive approaches.

Recent advances in social neuroscience have highlighted the critical role of the cerebellum in social cognition, and especially the posterior cerebellum. Studies have supported the view that the posterior cerebellum builds internal action models of our social interactions to predict how other people’s actions will be executed and what our most likely responses are to these actions. This mechanism allows to better anticipate action sequences during social interactions in an automatic and intuitive way and to fine-tune these anticipations, making it easier to understand other’s social behaviors and mental states (e.g. beliefs, intentions, traits). In this paper, we argue that the central role of the posterior cerebellum in identifying and automatizing social action sequencing provides a fruitful starting point for investigating social dysfunctions in a variety of clinical pathologies, such as autism, obsessive–compulsive and bipolar disorder, depression, and addiction. Our key hypothesis is that dysfunctions of the posterior cerebellum lead to under- or overuse of inflexible social routines and lack of plasticity for learning new, more adaptive, social automatisms. We briefly review past research supporting this view and propose a program of research to test our hypothesis. This approach might alleviate a variety of mental problems of individuals who suffer from inflexible automatizations that stand in the way of adjustable and intuitive social behavior, by increasing posterior cerebellar plasticity using noninvasive neurostimulation or neuro-guided training programs., SCOPUS: no.j, info:eu-repo/semantics/published

Recent advances in social neuroscience have highlighted the critical role of the cerebellum and especially the posterior cerebellar Crus in social mentalizing (i.e., theory of mind). Research in the past 5 years has provided growing evidence supporting the view that the posterior cerebellum builds internal action models of our social interactions to predict how other people's actions will be executed, and what our most likely responses to these actions will be. This paper presents an overview of a series of fMRI experiments on novel tasks involving a combination of (a) the learning or generation of chronological sequences of social actions either in an explicit or implicit manner, which (b) require social mentalizing on another person's mental state such as goals, beliefs, and implied traits. Together, the results strongly confirm the central role of the posterior cerebellar Crus in identifying and automatizing action sequencing during social mentalizing, and in predicting future action sequences based on social mentalizing inferences about others. This research program has important implications: It provides for the first time (a) fruitful starting points for diagnosing and investigating social sequencing dysfunctions in a variety of mental disorders which have also been related to cerebellar dysfunctions, (b) provides the necessary tools for testing whether non-invasive neurostimulation targeting the posterior cerebellum has a causal effect on social functioning, and (c) whether these stimulation techniques and training programs guided by novel cerebellar social sequencing insights, can be exploited to increase posterior cerebellar plasticity in order to alleviate social impairments in mental disorders.

Although empathy drives prosocial behaviors, it is not always a reliable source of information in moral decision making. In this essay, I integrate evolutionary theory, behavioral economics, psychology, and social neuroscience to demonstrate why and how empathy is unconsciously and rapidly modulated by various social signals and situational factors. This theoretical framework explains why decision making that relies solely on empathy is not ideal and can, at times, erode ethical values. This perspective has social and societal implications and can be used to reduce cognitive biases and guide moral decisions.

With the growing population of older adults, we are facing unprecedented levels of age-related health problems, including Alzheimer's Disease and Alzheimer’s Disease Related Dementias. In addition, older adults—and especially those suffering from Alzheimer’s Disease—are frequently the targets of financial exploitation (Lichtenberg, 2016). Fraud and financial abuse yield annual losses of nearly $3 billion with the vast majority of cases being perpetrated by strangers (51%) or friends and family (34%) (Roberto & Teaster, 2011). Yet, very little is known about how older adults integrate information from the social domain to inform economic decision making. To address this gap, we will assess social decision-making skills with two games from the behavioral economics literature that probe trust and fairness. We will also build off prior work that has suggested that victims of financial exploitation are often from low socioeconomic status groups (Choi & Mayer, 2000), have poorer cognitive functioning (James, Boyle, & Bennett, 2014), have more severe depression (Butters et al., 2008; Dotson, Beydoun, & Zonderman, 2010), and are more socially withdrawn (Choi & Mayer, 2000; Kuiper et al., 2015) by collecting information on these variables as well. In our prior work, we assessed the correlates of financial susceptibility in older adults around the Philadelphia, PA metropolitan area (10.17605/OSF.IO/FCRUS). Here, we administer a similar survey to replicate and extend our prior work in three key ways: 1) We broaden our participant base to citizens across the state of Pennsylvania in order to increase the diversity of our sample; 2) To replicate our prior work, we administer questionnaires identified in our first survey as significantly associated with financial susceptibility; and 3) we also asked questions to assess social, psychological, economic impacts related to COVID19. Thus the new survey includes self-report measures of financial exploitation, gullibility, social support, cognition, and health (see Measures). We will also continue to include hypothetical questions from the Ultimatum Game and the Trust Game to assess social preferences for fairness and trust. Survey responses will be collected from a Qualtrics integrated panel of 375 adults, aged 50 years and older. Our survey will continue to include questions aimed at gaining insight into personal finances and socioeconomic status. As with our prior submission, we will include questions to assess other sociodemographic variables (e.g., ethnicity, marital status, social network) and family history of Alzheimer’s Disease. Our primary analyses will aim to replicate our core findings from our first study while addressing two overarching research questions. First, which variables are associated with self-reported fraud? Second, are the links between sociodemographic factors (e.g., SES, health, etc.) and self-reported fraud moderated by other variables tied to social preferences, gullibility, social support, emotion regulation, and cognitive abilities? Our exploratory analyses will examine whether and how perceptions of COVID-19 are linked to fraud. Understanding how fraud is related to these variables in our survey will be a first step toward developing novel interventions that mitigate risk of financial exploitation in vulnerable groups and understand possible state-level interventions.

To create suspenseful, dramatic or comical situations, filmmakers make creative decisions about the flow of story information: when, how and, most importantly, who to deliver information for it to come across effectively. They often use Dramatic Irony, a narrative device where the audience knows something that at least one characters does not, thereby creating drama and a divergence in perspectives in relation to the differential knowledge provided. Viewers are first shown the installation scenes that reveal the key information that the character(s) does not have access to and following, are shown the exploitation scenes that stage the dramatic irony conflict, in which the characters’ goals or wellbeing are impacted as a consequence of their ignorance e.g. misunderstandings or decoys. We hypothesized that the salient divergence of knowledge in dramatic irony scenes prompts spectators to infer the character’s mental states and thus proposed Theory of Mind (ToM) as a critical sociocognitive mechanism underlying the comprehension of dramatic irony. For the first time, we directly tested the hypothesis that ToM is implicated in film narratives by manipulating audience access to knowledge from the installation scenes (Study 1). In a between-subjects design, participants watched one of two knowledge conditions: in the Dramatic Irony condition, they watched 6 clips from different Harold Lloyd silent comedy films with complete scenes of dramatic irony (context, installation scene and exploitation scene); and in the Control condition, the installation scenes were edited out so participants only watched the context and exploitation scenes, which still maintained narrative coherence, allowing us to compare whether viewers process the same exploitation scenes engaging more in ToM reasoning when they know more than the character vs. when they do not. We hypothesized that if participants in the dramatic irony condition build a more complex event model, or alternatively different event models for character perspectives, there would be deeper moments of processing of the cognitive states in the exploitation scenes. This should be confirmed by delays or slowed-down moments in a novel self-paced viewing task as well as eye-tracking data: (a) pupil data as an indirect marker of processing load and (b) the analysis of spatio-temporal distribution of attention, i.e. what part of the images participants are processing differently across conditions, which would inform us about how participants extract information about characters’ mental states, and whether there are longer viewing times when event models are switched/updated to follow character perspectives.

Theta-beta ratio (TBR) decreases with age and negatively predicts executive function, while theta increases with age and positively predicts executive function. This registration is specific to analyses of MIDUS2 initial baseline EEG data examining the role of theta and beta to age related differences in TBRs, and the potential influence of individual differences in peak alpha power to TBRs. UPDATE 06/01/2020: A math error was discovered in the description of how the TBR measures will be calculated. We will take the ratio of Theta and Beta power first, then log-normalize the subsequent ratio.

This project proposes a series of experimental studies to examine the use of Theory of Mind (ToM) in cinematic narrative understanding and in particular to investigate the cognitive processing of dramatic irony, as a proposed limit case of viewers’ ToM. Dramatic irony is a narrative device, often used in cinema, where the audience is shown critical facts ahead of one or more characters, thereby creating drama and a divergence in perspectives in relation to the differential knowledge provided. Understanding cinematic dramatic irony requires inferring and updating mental states in a dynamic way over time, integrating different sources of information, therefore capturing some of the richness and complexity that defines real-world ToM processing in comparison to classic psychological lab tasks which require participants to recognize false beliefs from highly-stylized and decontextualized images or cartoons.

Social and pragmatic difficulties in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are widely recognized, although their underlying neural level processing is not well understood. The aim of this study was to examine the activity of the brain network components linked to social and pragmatic understanding in order to reveal whether complex socio-pragmatic events evoke differences in brain activity between the ASD and control groups. Nineteen young adults (mean age 23.6 years) with ASD and 19 controls (mean age 22.7 years) were recruited for the study. The stimulus data consisted of video clips showing complex social events that demanded processing of pragmatic communication. In the analysis, the functional magnetic resonance imaging signal responses of the selected brain network components linked to social and pragmatic information processing were compared. Although the processing of the young adults with ASD was similar to that of the control group during the majority of the social scenes, differences between the groups were found in the activity of the social brain network components when the participants were observing situations with concurrent verbal and non-verbal communication events. The results suggest that the ASD group had challenges in processing concurrent multimodal cues in complex pragmatic communication situations.

Evolutionary and neuroscientific approaches to intergroup bias have been highly generative, but research has yet to consider how these two approaches can build on each other. Here, we review neuroscientific methods findings on intergroup bias. We then review the emerging perspective that views intergroup bias as a psychological adaptation to pressures present in ancestral ecologies. We conclude by considering evidence that collectivist and individualist cultures evolved in response to unique ecological threats. As such, members of each should be differentially susceptible to environmental cues connoting threats to pathogens. We then propose future directions for neuroscientific research that assesses intergroup bias from an evolutionary perspective. Consideration of cultural factors should enable improved understanding of intergroup bias, with proper consideration of how biology and psychology have adapted to the social environments faced in ancestral populations.

We investigated whether communicative cues help observers to make sense of human interaction. We recorded EEG from an observer monitoring two individuals who were occasionally communicating with each other via either mutual eye contact and/or pointing gestures, and then jointly attending to the same object or attending to different objects that were placed on a table in front of them. The analyses were focussed on the processing of the interaction outcome (i.e. presence or absence of joint attention) and showed that its interpretation is a two-stage process, as reflected in the N300 and the N400 potentials. The N300 amplitude was reduced when the two individuals shared their focus of attention, which indicates the operation of a cognitive process that involves the relatively fast identification and evaluation of actor–object relationships. On the other hand, the N400 was insensitive to the sharing or distribution of the two individuals’ attentional focus. Interestingly, the N400 was reduced when the interaction outcome was preceded either by mutual eye contact or by a perceived pointing gesture. This shows that observation of communication “opens up” the mind to a wider range of action possibilities and thereby helps to interpret unusual outcomes of social interactions.

This study interrogates the frequently made claim that mirroring behavior is directly linked to interpersonal rapport. The paper proposes a more nuanced conceptualization of the positive effect of mirroring, showing it to be underpinning not affiliation as such but instead speakers' joint commitment to a common interactional cause. The analysis of naturally occurring talk shows that sound imitation is primarily an affiliation-neutral resource that facilitates the progression of interaction. The paper argues that socially embedded mirroring behavior is more than a behavioral manifestation of the motor resonance described in social neuroscience. Mirroring as part of jointly achieved talk is one of several mechanisms for conversational participants to establish progressivity, that is, trajectories of social action, sequence and stance. The data also show that sound mirroring, when it is part of naturally occurring interaction, is not automatic, but that participants choose to mirror, or not. It is proposed that socially situated imitation is reconceptualized as facilitating social collaboration and the joint achievement of interaction more broadly, rather than empathy or rapport in a narrow sense. Such a reconceptualization of mirroring allows us to describe more accurately how humans build sociality.

Conservatives are more sensitive to threatening/anxious situations in perceptual and cognitive levels, experiencing emotional responses and stress, while liberals are more responsive to but tolerant of ambiguous and uncertain information. Interestingly, conservatives have greater psychological well-being and are more satisfied with their lives than liberals despite their psychological vulnerability to stress caused by threat and anxiety sensitivities. We investigated whether conservatives have greater resilience and self-regulation capacity, which are suggested to be psychological buffers that enhance psychological well-being, than liberals and moderates. We also explored associations between intrinsic functional brain organization and these psychological resources to expand our neurobiological understanding of self-regulatory processes in neuropolitics. We found that conservatives, compared to liberals and moderates, had greater psychological resilience and self-regulation capacity that were attributable to greater impulse control and causal reasoning. Stronger intrinsic connectivities between the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) and precuneus and between the insula and frontal pole/OFC in conservatives were correlated with greater resilience and self-regulation capacity. These results suggest the neural underpinnings that may allow conservatives to manage the psychological stress and achieve greater life satisfaction. This study provides neuroscientific evidence for the different responses of liberals and conservatives to politically relevant social issues.

To reduce the escalation of intergroup conflict, it is important that we understand the processes related to the detection of group-based threat and reconciliation. In the present study, we investigated the neural mechanisms of such processes using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI). Functional neuroimaging techniques may shed light on quick, automatic responses to stimuli that happen outside of conscious awareness and are thus increasingly difficult to quantify relying only on participants' self-reported experiences. They may further provide invaluable insight into physiological processes occurring in situations of sensitive nature, whereby participants-deliberately or not-may withhold their honest responses due to social desirability. Non-Muslim Western Caucasian participants watched short video clips of stereotypical Middle-Eastern Muslim males threatening their ingroup, offering reconciliation to the ingroup, or making a neutral statement. Threatening statements led to increased activation in the amygdala, insula, supramarginal gyrus, and temporal lobe. Reconciliation efforts led to increased activation in the prefrontal cortex, anterior cingulate gyrus, and caudate. The results suggest that threat detection is a relatively automatic process while evaluating and responding to reconciliation offers requires more cognitive efforts. The implications of these findings and future research directions are discussed.

Humans are highly attuned to perceptual cues about their values. A growing body of evidence suggests that people selectively attend to moral stimuli. However, it is unknown whether morality is prioritized early in perception or much later in cognitive processing. We use a combination of behavioral methods and electroencephalography to investigate how early in perception moral words are prioritized relative to non-moral words. The behavioral data replicate previous research indicating that people are more likely to correctly identify moral than non-moral words in a modified lexical decision task. The electroencephalography data reveal that words are distinguished from non-words as early as 200 ms after onset over frontal brain areas and moral words are distinguished from non-moral words 100 ms later over left-posterior cortex. Further analyses reveal that differences in brain activity to moral vs non-moral words cannot be explained by differences in arousal associated with the words. These results suggest that moral content might be prioritized in conscious awareness after an initial perceptual encoding but before subsequent memory processing or action preparation. This work offers a more precise theoretical framework for understanding how morality impacts vision and behavior.

Cooperation is necessary for solving numerous social issues, including climate change, effective governance and economic stability. Value-based decision models contend that prosocial tendencies and social context shape people’s preferences for cooperative or selfish behavior. Using functional neuroimaging and computational modeling, we tested these predictions by comparing activity in brain regions previously linked to valuation and executive function during decision-making—the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC), respectively. Participants played Public Goods Games with students from fictitious universities, where social norms were selfish or cooperative. Prosocial participants showed greater vmPFC activity when cooperating and dlPFC-vmPFC connectivity when acting selfishly, whereas selfish participants displayed the opposite pattern. Norm-sensitive participants showed greater dlPFC-vmPFC connectivity when defying group norms. Modeling expectations of cooperation was associated with activity near the right temporoparietal junction. Consistent with value-based models, this suggests that prosocial tendencies and contextual norms flexibly determine whether people prefer cooperation or defection.

The family of neuroimaging analytical techniques known as multivoxel pattern analysis (MVPA) has dramatically increased in popularity over the past decade, particularly in social and affective neuroscience research using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). MVPA examines patterns of neural responses, rather than analyzing single voxel- or region-based values, as is customary in conventional univariate analyses. Here, we provide a practical introduction to MVPA and its most popular variants (namely, representational similarity analysis (RSA) and decoding analyses, such as classification using machine learning) for social and affective neuroscientists of all levels, particularly those new to such methods. We discuss how MVPA differs from traditional mass-univariate analyses, the benefits MVPA offers to social neuroscientists, experimental design and analysis considerations, step-by-step instructions for how to implement specific analyses in one’s own dataset and issues that are currently facing research using MVPA methods.

Humans continually form and update impressions of each other's identities based on the disclosure of thoughts, feelings, and beliefs. At the same time, individuals also have specific beliefs and knowledge about their own self-concept. Over a decade of social neuroscience research has shown that retrieving information about the self and about other persons recruits similar areas of the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC), however it remains unclear if an individual's neural representation of self is reflected in the brains of well-known others or if instead the two representations share no common relationship. Here we examined this question in a tight-knit network of friends as they engaged in a round-robin trait evaluation task in which each participant was both perceiver and target for every other participant and in addition also evaluated their self. Using functional MRI and a multilevel modeling approach, we show that multivoxel brain activity patterns in the MPFC during a person's self-referential thought are correlated with those of friends when thinking of that same person. Moreover, the similarity of neural self-other patterns was itself positively associated with the similarity of self-other trait judgments ratings as measured behaviorally in a separate session. These findings suggest that accuracy in person perception may be predicated on the degree to which the brain activity pattern associated with an individual thinking about their own self-concept is similarly reflected in the brains of others. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Motives motivate human behavior. Most behaviors are driven by more than one motive, yet it is unclear how different motives interact and how such motive combinations affect the neural computation of the behaviors they drive. To answer this question, we induced two prosocial motives simultaneously (multi-motive condition) and separately (single motive conditions). After the different motive inductions, participants performed the same choice task in which they allocated points in favor of the other person (prosocial choice) or in favor of themselves (egoistic choice). We used fMRI to assess prosocial choice-related brain responses and drift diffusion modelling to specify how motive combinations affect individual components of the choice process. Our results showed that the combination of the two motives in the multi-motive condition increased participants’ choice biases prior to the behavior itself. On the neural level, these changes in initial prosocial bias were associated with neural responses in the bilateral dorsal striatum. In contrast, the efficiency of the prosocial decision process was comparable between the multi-motive and the single-motive conditions. These findings provide insights into the computation of prosocial choices in complex motivational states, the motivational setting that drives most human behaviors.HighlightsActivating different social motives simultaneously can enhance prosocial choicesMulti-motive combinations change initial prosocial biasesDorso-striatal activation increases with larger increase of prosocial biasMulti-motive combinations modulate relative response caution

John Cacioppo and colleagues’ Somatovisceral Afference Model of Emotion (SAME) highlighted the importance of interoception in emotional experience. Here we compare how the SAME and the more recent Theory of Constructed Emotion (TCE) view the role of interoceptive signals in creating emotional experiences. We describe the characteristics of touch sensations that are carried by thin, unmyelinated fibers called C-tactile afferents (CTs) to the posterior insula, and are thus deemed interoceptive despite their typically social (external) origin. We explore how this social interoceptive input might contribute to the emotion-related effects of social touch more generally, and speculate that all social touch, with or without CT afferent stimulation, can directly influence allostasis, or the predictive regulation of short- and long-term energy resources required by the body. Finally, we describe several features of CT-optimal touch that make it a potentially useful tool to help illuminate basic interoceptive mechanisms, emotion-related phenomena, and disorders involving atypical affect or somatosensation. These proposed ideas demonstrate the long intellectual reach of John Cacioppo and Gary Berntson’s highly productive scientific collaboration, which was formative for the fields of social neuroscience, social psychophysiology, and affective neuroscience.

Social interaction complexity makes humans unique. But in times of social deprivation this strength risks to expose important vulnerabilities. Human social neuroscience studies have placed a premium on the default network (DN). In contrast, hippocampus (HC) subfields have been intensely studied in rodents and monkeys. To bridge these two literatures, we here quantified how DN subregions systematically co-vary with specific HC subfields in the context of subjective social isolation (i.e., loneliness). By co-decomposition using structural brain scans of ∼40,000 UK Biobank participants, loneliness was specially linked to midline subregions in the uncovered DN patterns. These association cortex signatures coincided with concomitant HC patterns implicating especially CA1 and molecular layer. These patterns also showed a strong affiliation with the fornix white-matter tract and the nucleus accumbens. In addition, separable signatures of structural HC-DN co-variation had distinct associations with the genetic predisposition for loneliness at the population level.

More than a decade of neuroimaging and brain stimulation studies point to a crucial role for the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (rDLPFC) in prosocial behavior. The intuitive prosociality model postulates that the rDLPFC controls intuitive prosocial behavior, whereas the reflective model assumes that the rDLPFC controls selfish impulses during prosocial behavior. The intuitive prosociality model implies that the transient disruption of the rDLPFC should increase voluntary transfers in both dictator and generosity games. In contrast, the reflective model suggests that the transient disruption of the rDLPFC should decrease transfers in the dictator game, without affecting voluntary transfers in the generosity game, in which selfish motives are minimized. The aim of this paper was to compare predictions of the intuitive and reflective models using the classic dictator game and generosity game and continuous theta burst stimulation (cTBS). In this study, two groups of healthy participants (dictators) received either cTBS over the rDLPFC or right extrastriate visual areas. As shown by the results, the transient disruption of the rDLPFC significantly promoted prosocial motives in the dictator game only, particularly in the trials with the lowest dictator’s costs. These findings partially support the notion that the rDLPFC controls intuitive prosocial behavior.

The interrelation between motor and emotional processes has been a recurrent question since several decades in the scientific literature. An interesting experimental technique to explore this question is posturography which assess the modulation of human postural control. In an emerging scientific field, this technique has been used to explore the reaction of the body in different emotional conditions. However, among available studies, some inconsistencies appear. In this brief report, we want to show how a widely used experimental model, i.e., empathy for pain, allowed in several study to provide comprehensive understanding elements on the postural correlates of socioemotional information processing. In particular, the role of mental simulation is discussed.

The coordination of attention between individuals is a fundamental part of everyday human social interaction. Previous work has focused on the role of gaze information for guiding responses during joint attention episodes. However, in many contexts, hand gestures such as pointing provide another valuable source of information about the locus of attention. The current study developed a novel virtual reality paradigm to investigate the extent to which initiator gaze information is used by responders to guide joint attention responses in the presence of more visually salient and spatially precise pointing gestures. Dyads were instructed to use pointing gestures to complete a cooperative joint attention task in a virtual environment. Eye and hand tracking enabled real-time interaction and provided objective measures of gaze and pointing behaviours. Initiators displayed gaze behaviours that were spatially congruent with the subsequent pointing gestures. Responders overtly attended to the initiator’s gaze during the joint attention episode. However, both these initiator and responder behaviours were highly variable across individuals. Critically, when responders did overtly attend to their partner’s face, their saccadic reaction times were faster when the initiator’s gaze was also congruent with the pointing gesture, and thus predictive of the joint attention location. These results indicate that humans attend to and process gaze information to facilitate joint attention responsivity, even in contexts where gaze information is implicit to the task and joint attention is explicitly cued by more spatially precise and visually salient pointing gestures.

A controversial and unresolved issue in cognitive neuroscience is whether humans can experience supernumerary limbs as part of their own body. Some previous experiments have claimed that it is possible to elicit supernumerary hand illusions based on modified versions of the rubber hand illusion. However, other studies have provided conflicting results that suggest that only one rubber hand can be perceived as one's own. To address this issue, we developed a supernumerary hand illusion paradigm that allowed us to disambiguate ownership of individual rubber hands from simultaneous ownership of two fake hands. In our setup, the participant's real right hand was hidden under a platform, while two identical right rubber hands were placed in parallel on top of the platform in direct view of the participant. We applied synchronous strokes to both rubber hands and the real hand (SS), synchronous strokes to one rubber hand and the real hand and asynchronous strokes to the other model hand (AS and SA), or asynchronous strokes to both fake hands in relation to the real hand (AA). Our results demonstrate that a genuine illusion of owning two rubber hands can be elicited and that such a supernumerary hand illusion can be isolated from the sense of ownership of a single rubber hand both in terms of questionnaire ratings and threat-evoked skin conductance responses (SCRs). These findings advance our knowledge about the dynamic flexibility and fundamental constraints of body representation and emphasize the importance of correlated afferent signals for causal inference in body ownership. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Many daily choices are based on one's own knowledge. However, when predicting other people's behavior, we need to consider the differences between our knowledge and other people's presumed knowledge. Social agents need a mechanism to use privileged information for their own behavior but exclude it from predictions of others. Using fMRI, we investigated the neural implementation of such social and personal predictions in healthy human volunteers of both sexes by manipulating privileged and shared information. The medial frontal cortex appeared to have an important role in flexibly making decisions using privileged information for oneself or predicting others' behavior. Specifically, we show that ventromedial PFC tracked the state of the world independent of the type of decision (personal, social), whereas dorsomedial regions adjusted their frame of reference to the use of privileged or shared information. Sampling privileged evidence not available to another person also relied on specific interactions between temporoparietal junction area and frontal pole.SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENTWhat we know about the minds of others and how we use that information is crucial to understanding social interaction. Mentalizing, or reading the minds of others, is argued to be particularly well developed in the human and crucially affected in some disorders. However, the intractable nature of human interactions makes it very difficult to study these processes. Here, we present a way to objectively quantify the information people have about others and to investigate how their brain deals with this information. This shows that people use similar areas in the brain related to nonsocial decision-making when making decisions in social situations and modify this information processing by the knowledge about others use these to modify their information processing according to the knowledge of others.

Prosociality is a core feature of human functioning and has been a topic of interest across disciplinary boundaries for decades. In this review, we highlight different neuroscientific approaches that have enriched traditional psychological methods for studying prosocial behavior among individuals and groups. First, we outline findings from task-based neuroimaging studies that provide correlational evidence for the involvement of different neural mechanisms in prosocial behavior. Next, we present different brain stimulation studies that show several brain areas to be causally related to prosocial behavior. Furthermore, we outline the task-independent neural trait approach that quantifies temporally stable brain-based characteristics in an effort to uncover sources of interindividual differences in prosocial preferences. We discuss how the findings from these approaches have contributed to our understanding of prosocial behavior and suggest directions for future research.

Comprehending the meaning of body postures is essential for social organisms such as humans. For example, it is important to understand at a glance whether two people seen at a distance are in a friendly or conflictual interaction. However, it is still unclear what fraction of the possible body configurations carry meaning, and what is the best way to characterize such meaning. Here, we address this by using stick figures as a low-dimensional, yet evocative, representation of body postures. We systematically scanned a set of 1,470 upper-body postures of stick figures in a dyad with a second stick figure with a neutral pose. We asked participants to rate the stick figure in terms of 20 emotion adjectives like sad or triumphant and in terms of eight active verbs that connote intent like to threaten and to comfort. The stick figure configuration space was dense with meaning: people strongly agreed on more than half of the configurations. The meaning was generally smooth in the sense that small changes in posture had a small effect on the meaning, but certain small changes had a large effect. Configurations carried meaning in both emotions and intent, but the intent verbs covered more configurations. The effectiveness of the intent verbs in describing body postures aligns with a theory, originating from the theater, called dramatic action theory. This suggests that, in addition to the well-studied role of emotional states in describing body language, much can be gained by using also dramatic action verbs which signal the effort to change the state of others. We provide a dictionary of stick figure configurations and their perceived meaning. This systematic scan of body configurations might be useful to teaching people and machines to decipher body postures in human interactions.

Humans are social animals and typically tend to seek social interactions. In our daily life we constantly move our gaze to collect visual information which often includes social information, such as others’ emotions and intentions. Recent studies began to explore how individuals vary in their gaze behavior. However, these studies focused on basic features of eye movements (such as the length of movements) and did not examine the observer predilection for specific social features such as faces. We preformed two test-retest experiments examining the amount of time individuals fixate directly on faces embedded in images of naturally occurring scenes. We report on stable and robust individual differences in visual predilection for faces across time and tasks. Individuals’ preference to fixate on faces could not be explained by a preference for fixating on low-level salient regions (e.g. color, intensity, orientation) nor by individual differences in the Big-Five personality traits. We conclude that during visual exploration individuals vary in the amount of time they direct their gaze towards faces. This tendency is a trait that not only reflects individuals’ preferences but also influences the amount of information gathered by each observer, therefore influencing the basis for later cognitive processing and decisions.

Although a large proportion of our lives are spent participating in social interactions, the investigation of the neural mechanisms supporting these interactions has largely been restricted to situations of social observation - that is, situations in which an individual observes a social stimulus without opportunity for interaction. In recent years, efforts have been made to develop a truly social, or 'second-person', neuroscientific approach to these investigations in which neural processes are examined within the context of a real-time reciprocal social interaction. These developments have helped to elucidate the behavioural and neural mechanisms of social interactions; however, further theoretical and methodological innovations are still needed. Findings to date suggest that the neural mechanisms supporting social interaction differ from those involved in social observation and highlight a role of the so-called 'mentalizing network' as important in this distinction. Taking social interaction seriously may also be particularly important for the advancement of the neuroscientific study of different psychiatric conditions.

A large literature in social neuroscience has associated the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) with the processing of self-related information. However, only recently have social neuroscience studies begun to consider the large behavioral literature showing a strong self-positivity bias, and these studies have mostly focused on its correlates during self-related judgments and decision-making. We carried out a functional MRI (fMRI) study to ask whether the mPFC would show effects of the self-positivity bias in a paradigm that probed participants’ self-concept without any requirement of explicit self-judgment. We presented social vignettes that were either self-relevant or non-self-relevant with a neutral, positive or negative outcome described in the second sentence. In previous work using event-related potentials, this paradigm has shown evidence of a self-positivity bias that influences early stages of semantically processing incoming stimuli. In the present fMRI study, we found evidence for this bias within the mPFC: an interaction between self-relevance and valence, with only positive scenarios showing a self vs other effect within the mPFC. We suggest that the mPFC may play a role in maintaining a positively biased self-concept and discuss the implications of these findings for the social neuroscience of the self and the role of the mPFC.

One can never know the internal workings of another person—one can only infer others' mental states based on external cues. In contrast, each person has direct access to the contents of their own mind. Here, we test the hypothesis that this privileged access shapes the way people represent internal mental experiences, such that they represent their own mental states more distinctly than the states of others. Across four studies, participants considered their own and others' mental states; analyses measured the distinctiveness of mental state representations. Two fMRI studies used representational similarity analyses to demonstrate that the social brain manifests more distinct activity patterns when thinking about one's own states vs. others'. Two behavioral studies complement these findings, and demonstrate that people differentiate between states less as social distance increases. Together, these results suggest that we represent our own mind with greater granularity than the minds of others., The brain can represent the mental states of others, as well as those of the self. Here, the authors show that social brain manifests more distinct activity patterns when thinking about one's own states, compared to those of others, suggesting that we represent our own mind with greater granularity.

Research at the intersection of social neuroscience and cognitive effort is an interesting new area for exploration. There is great potential to broaden our understanding of how social context and cognitive effort processes, currently addressed in disparate literatures, interact with one another. In this paper, we briefly review the literature on cognitive effort, focusing on effort-linked valuation and the gap in the literature regarding cognitive effort in the social domain. Next, we present a study designed to explore valuation processes linked to cognitive effort within the social context of an inequality manipulation. More specifically, we created monetary inequality among the participant (SELF, endowed with $50) and two confederates: one also endowed with $50 (OTHER HIGH) and another with only $5 (OTHER LOW). We then scanned participants using fMRI as they attempted to earn bonus payments for themselves and others through a cognitively effortful feedback-based learning task. Positive feedback produced significantly greater activation than negative feedback in key valuation regions, the ventral striatum (VS) and ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), both when participants were performing the task on their own behalf and when earning rewards for others. While reward-related activity in the VS was exaggerated for SELF compared to OTHER HIGH for both positive and negative feedback, activity in the vmPFC did not distinguish between recipients in the group-level results. Furthermore, participants naturally fell into two groups: those most engaged when playing for themselves and those who reported engagement for others. While Self-Engaged participants showed differences between the SELF and both OTHER conditions in the VS and vmPFC, Other-Engaged participants only showed an attenuated response to negative feedback for OTHER HIGH compared to SELF in the VS and no differences between recipient conditions in the vmPFC. Together, this work shows the importance of individual differences and the fragility of advantageous inequality aversion in the face of cognitive effort, highlighting the need to study cognitive effort in the social domain.

Social neuroscience is unveiling how the brain coordinates the construal of social categories and the generation of intergroup biases from facial perception. Recent evidence indicates that social categorization is more sensitive and malleable to elemental facial features than previously assumed. At the same time, perception of social categories can be crafted by top-down factors, including prior knowledge, motivations, and social expectations. In this review, we summarize extant wisdom and propose a model that goes beyond traditional accounts that have conceived stereotypes and prejudices as the end result of "reading out" social categories in the face, and have assumed a hierarchical brain organization. Our model proposes recursive and dynamic interactions amid distant brain regions. Accordingly, the reciprocal exchange of sensory evidence and predictions biases and "explains away" visual input in face perception regions until a compromise is achieved and social perception stabilizes. Ideally, this effort would contribute to shape a research field at the interface between neural and social sciences, which is often referred to as social vision.

Empathy supports adaptive social behaviors such as cooperation and helping. It is also fragile, and commonly unravels in contexts such as intergroup conflict. Insights from neuroscience support the idea that empathy is context sensitive, but recent findings suggest that empathy (and its fragility) reflect individuals' motives in a given context rather than context alone. Here we explore motivated empathy from the perspective of social neuroscience, examining how motives shape empathy-related brain activity. We also describe recent motive-based empathy interventions, their biological underpinnings, and their behavioral consequences. Finally, we propose novel applications of recent neuroimaging techniques to promote empathy, emotional wellbeing, and social adjustment.

Social recognition is the sensitive domains of complex behavior critical for identification, interpretation and storage of socially meaningful information. Social recognition develops throughout childhood and adolescent, and is affected in a wide variety of psychiatric disorders. Recently, new data appeared on the molecular mechanisms of these processes, particularly, the excitatory-inhibitory (E/I) ratio which is modified during development, and then E/I balance is established in the adult brain. While E/I imbalance has been proposed as a mechanism for schizophrenia, it also seems to be the common mechanism in autism spectrum disorder (ASD). In addition, there is a strong suggestion that the oxytocinergic system is related to GABA-mediated E/I control in the context of brain socialization. In this review, we attempt to summarize the underpinning molecular mechanisms of E/I balance and its imbalance, and related biomarkers in the brain in healthiness and pathology. In addition, because there are increasing interest on oxytocin in the social neuroscience field, we will pay intensive attention to the role of oxytocin in maintaining E/I balance from the viewpoint of its effects on improving social impairment in psychiatric diseases, especially in ASD.

The false consensus effect (FCE) - the tendency to (erroneously) project our attitudes and opinions onto others - is an enduring bias in social reasoning with important societal implications. In this fMRI investigation, we examine the neural correlates of within-subject variation in consensus bias on a variety of social and political issues. Bias demonstrated a strong association with activity in brain regions implicated in self-related cognition, mentalizing, and valuation. Importantly, however, recruitment of these regions predicted consensus bias only in the presence of social disconfirmation, in the form of feedback discrepant with participants' own attitudes. These results suggest that the psychological and neural mechanisms underlying the tendency to project attitudes onto others are crucially moderated by motivational factors, including the desire to affirm the normativity of one's own position. This research complements social psychological theorizing about the factors contributing to the FCE, and further emphasizes the role of motivated cognition in social reasoning.

Word of mouth recommendations influence a wide range of choices and behaviors. What takes place in the mind of recommendation receivers that determines whether they will be successfully influenced? Prior work suggests that brain systems implicated in assessing the value of stimuli (i.e., subjective valuation) and understanding others’ mental states (i.e., mentalizing) play key roles. The current study used neuroimaging and natural language classifiers to extend these findings in a naturalistic context and tested the extent to which the two systems work together or independently in responding to social influence. First, we show that in response to text-based social media recommendations, activity in both the brain’s valuation system and mentalizing system was associated with greater likelihood of opinion change. Second, participants were more likely to update their opinions in response to negative, compared to positive, recommendations, with activity in the mentalizing system scaling with the negativity of the recommendations. Third, decreased functional connectivity between valuation and mentalizing systems was associated with opinion change. Results highlight the role of brain regions involved in mentalizing and positive valuation in recommendation propagation, and further show that mentalizing may be particularly key in processing negative recommendations, whereas the valuation system is relevant in evaluating both positive and negative recommendations.

Sharing emotional experiences impacts how we perceive and interact with the world, but the neural mechanisms that support this sharing are not well characterized. In this study, participants (N = 52) watched videos in an MRI scanner in the presence of an unfamiliar peer. Videos varied in valence and social context (i.e., participants believed their partner was viewing the same (joint condition) or a different (solo condition) video). Reported togetherness increased during positive videos regardless of social condition, indicating that positive contexts may lessen the experience of being alone. Two analysis approaches were used to examine both sustained neural activity averaged over time and dynamic synchrony throughout the videos. Both approaches revealed clusters in the medial prefrontal cortex that were more responsive to the joint condition. We observed a time‐averaged social‐emotion interaction in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, although this region did not demonstrate synchrony effects. Alternatively, social‐emotion interactions in the amygdala and superior temporal sulcus showed greater neural synchrony in the joint compared to solo conditions during positive videos, but the opposite pattern for negative videos. These findings suggest that positive stimuli may be more salient when experienced together, suggesting a mechanism for forming social bonds., Participants watched emotional videos in an MRI either with a partner or alone. Social‐emotion interactions in the amygdala and superior temporal sulcus showed greater neural synchrony in the joint condition during positive videos, alongside reports of greater feelings of togetherness. These findings suggest that positive stimuli may be more salient when experienced together, suggesting a mechanism for forming social bonds.

Sensory processing and motor coordination atypicalities are not commonly identified as primary characteristics of autism spectrum disorder (ASD), nor are they well captured in the NIMH’s original Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) framework. Here, motor and sensory features performed similarly to RDoC features in support vector classification of 30 ASD youth against 33 typically developing controls. Combining sensory with RDoC features boosted classification performance, achieving a Matthews Correlation Coefficient (MCC) of 0.949 and balanced accuracy (BAcc) of 0.971 (p = 0.00020, calculated against a permuted null distribution). Sensory features alone successfully classified ASD (MCC = 0.565, BAcc = 0.773, p = 0.0222) against a clinically relevant control group of 26 youth with Developmental Coordination Disorder (DCD) and were in fact required to decode against DCD above chance. These findings highlight the importance of sensory and motor features to the ASD phenotype and their relevance to the RDoC framework.

Determining the generalizability of biological mechanisms sup- porting psychological constructs is a central goal of cognitive neuroscience. Self-esteem is a popular psychological construct that is associated with a variety of measures of mental health and life satisfaction. Recently, there has been interest in identifying biological mechanisms that support individual differences in self-esteem. Understanding the biological basis of self-esteem requires identifying predictive biomarkers of self-esteem that generalize across groups of individuals. Previous research us- ing diffusion magnetic resonance imaging has shown that self- esteem is related to the integrity of structural connections link- ing frontostriatal brain systems involved in self-referential processing and reward. However, these findings were based on a small, relatively homogeneous group of participants. In the cur- rent study, we used an out-of-sample predictive modeling approach to generalize the results of the previous study to an independent sample of participants more than twice the size of the original study. We found that both linear univariate and multivariate machine learning models trained on frontostriatal integrity from the original data significantly predicted self-esteem in the independent dataset. These findings underscore the relationship between self-esteem and frontostriatal connectivity and suggest these results are robust to differences in scanning acquisition, analytic methods, and participant demographics.

Verbal communication relies heavily upon mutual understanding, or common ground. Inferring the intentional states of our interaction partners is crucial in achieving this, and social neuroscience has begun elucidating the intra- and inter-personal neural processes supporting such inferences. Typically, however, neuroscientific paradigms lack the reciprocal to-and-fro characteristic of social communication, offering little insight into the way these processes operate online during real-world interaction. In the present study, we overcame this by developing a "hyperscanning" paradigm in which pairs of interactants could communicate verbally with one another in a joint-action task whilst both undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging simultaneously. Successful performance on this task required both interlocutors to predict their partner's upcoming utterance in order to converge on the same word as each other over recursive exchanges, based only on one another's prior verbal expressions. By applying various levels of analysis to behavioural and neuroimaging data acquired from 20 dyads, three principal findings emerged: First, interlocutors converged frequently within the same semantic space, suggesting that mutual understanding had been established. Second, assessing the brain responses of each interlocutor as they planned their upcoming utterances on the basis of their co-player's previous word revealed the engagement of the temporo-parietal junctional (TPJ), precuneus and dorso-lateral pre-frontal cortex. Moreover, responses in the precuneus were modulated positively by the degree of semantic convergence achieved on each round. Second, effective connectivity among these regions indicates the crucial role of the right TPJ in this process, consistent with the Nexus model. Third, neural signals within certain nodes of this network became aligned between interacting interlocutors. We suggest this reflects an interpersonal neural process through which interactants infer and align to one another's intentional states whilst they establish a common ground.

Traditional disciplines have frequently dealt with complex phenomena from a given level of analysis, be that molecular, cellular, organ system, or organismic level. This can yield highly valuable information on biological and psychological processes. There is an explanatory value added, however, by an integrative multilevel approach, in which different levels of analysis and different levels of the neural organization are considered in the models and theories of psychological functions. This is the essence of the emerging discipline of social neuroscience, promoted by John Cacioppo and Gary Berntson, which seeks to inform the interactions between social psychological and biological processes.

Infants' ability to coordinate their attention with other people develops profoundly across the first year of life. Mainly based on experimental research focusing on infants' behavior under highly controlled conditions, developmental milestones were identified and explained in the past by prominent theories in terms of the onset of specific cognitive skills. In contrast to this approach, recent longitudinal research challenges this perspective with findings suggesting that social attention develops continuously with a gradual refinement of skills. Informed by these findings, we argue for an interactionist and dynamical systems view that bases observable advances in infant social attention skills on increasingly fine-tuned mutual adjustments in the caregiver-infant dyad, resulting in gradually improving mutual prediction. We present evidence for this view from recent studies leveraging new technologies which afford the opportunity to dynamically track social interactions in real-time. These new technically-sophisticated studies offer unprecedented insights into the dynamic processes of infant-caregiver social attention. It is now possible to track in much greater detail fluctuations over time with regard to object-directed attention as well as social attention and how these processes relate to one another. Encouraged by these initial results and new insights from this interactionist developmental social neuroscience approach, we conclude with a “call to action” in which we advocate for more ecologically valid paradigms for studying social attention as a dynamic and bi-directional process.

We address what it means to “engage in a relationship” and suggest Social Breathing as a model of immersing ourselves in the metaphorical social air around us, which is necessary for shared intention and joint action. We emphasize how emergent properties of social systems arise, such as the shared culture of groups, which cannot be reduced to the individuals involved. We argue that the processes involved in Social Breathing are: (1) automatic, (2) implicit, (3) temporal, (4) in the form of mutual bi-directional interwoven exchanges between social partners and (5) embodied in the coordination of the brains and behaviors of social partners. We summarize cross-disciplinary evidence suggesting that these processes involve a multi-person whole-brain-body network which is critical for the development of both we-ness and relational skills. We propose that Social Breathing depends on each individual’s ability to sustain multimodal interwovenness, thus providing a theoretical link between social neuroscience and relational/multi-person psychology. We discuss how the model could guide research on autism, relationships, and psychotherapy.

Social neuroscience has made great progress in describing the brain regions involved in both mentalizing about others and self-referential processing. This research has revealed that these processes a partially dissociable, yet largely overlapping, system of brain regions centering on the medial prefrontal cortex. To what degree are the representations of others dissociable from that of the self? In this chapter, I describe the entanglement of these processes and describe some potential paths forward to better understand the relationship between representations of self and others in the brain.

Individuals with a predisposition to empathize engage with sad music in a compelling way, experiencing overall more pleasurable emotions. However, the neural mechanisms underlying these music-related experiences in empathic individuals are unknown. The present study tested whether dispositional empathy modulates neural responses to sad compared with happy music. Twenty-four participants underwent fMRI while listening to 4-min blocks of music evoking sadness or happiness. Using voxel-wise regression, we found a positive correlation between trait empathy (with scores assessed by the Interpersonal Reactivity Index) and eigenvector centrality values in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), including the medial orbitofrontal cortex (mOFC). We then performed a functional connectivity (FC) analysis to detect network nodes showing stronger FC with the vmPFC/mOFC during the presentation of sad versus happy music. By doing so, we identified a “music-empathy” network (vmPFC/mOFC, dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, primary visual cortex, bilateral claustrum and putamen, and cerebellum) that is spontaneously recruited while listening to sad music and includes brain regions that support the coding of compassion, mentalizing, and visual mental imagery. Importantly, our findings extend the current understanding of empathic behaviors to the musical domain and pinpoint sad music as an effective stimulus to be employed in social neuroscience research.

Rhythmic joint coordination is ubiquitous in daily-life human activities. In order to coordinate their actions towards shared goals, individuals need to co-regulate their timing and move together at the collective level of behavior. Remarkably, basic forms of coordinated behavior tend to emerge spontaneously as long as two individuals are exposed to each other’s rhythmic movements. The present study investigated the dynamics of spontaneous dyadic entrainment, and more specifically how they depend on the sensory modalities mediating informational coupling. By means of a novel interactive paradigm, we showed that dyadic entrainment systematically takes place during a minimalistic rhythmic task despite explicit instructions to ignore the partner. Crucially, the interaction was organized by clear dynamics in a modality-dependent fashion. Our results showed highly consistent coordination patterns in visually-mediated entrainment, whereas we observed more chaotic and more variable profiles in the auditorily-mediated counterpart. The proposed experimental paradigm yields empirical evidence for the overwhelming tendency of dyads to behave as coupled rhythmic units. In the context of our experimental design, it showed that coordination dynamics differ according to availability and nature of perceptual information. Interventions aimed at rehabilitating, teaching or training sensorimotor functions can be ultimately informed and optimized by such fundamental knowledge.