Rotem Dan, Aliza R Brown, Lauren Hutson, Emily L Belleau, Shiba M Esfand, Valerie Ruberto, Emily Johns, Kaylee E Null, Fei Du, Diego A Pizzagalli
{"title":"Brain encoding during perceived control as a prospective predictor of improvement in quality of life.","authors":"Rotem Dan, Aliza R Brown, Lauren Hutson, Emily L Belleau, Shiba M Esfand, Valerie Ruberto, Emily Johns, Kaylee E Null, Fei Du, Diego A Pizzagalli","doi":"10.1093/scan/nsae075","DOIUrl":"10.1093/scan/nsae075","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Perceived control is strongly related to mental health and well-being. Specifically, lack of perceived control has been associated with learned helplessness and stress-related disorders, such as depression and anxiety. However, it is unknown whether brain activation to control and its protective effect against stress can predict changes in quality of life. To address this gap, we examined the neural underpinning of controllability in healthy females (N = 40) performing the Value of Control task in an functional magnetic resonance imaging scanner. Quality of life and perceived stress were assessed at baseline and 6-month follow-up. Increased brain activation for control was found within the putamen, insula, thalamus, mid-cingulate, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, motor cortex, and cerebellum. In contrast, increased brain activation for lack of control was found within the posterior cingulate and prefrontal cortices. In an exploratory analysis, an elastic-net algorithm was used to identify brain predictors of quality of life 6 months later. The right putamen's activation to control was selected as the best prospective predictor of improvement in life enjoyment and satisfaction and this association was mediated by changes in perceived stress. Our findings suggest that neural responsiveness to control may have utility as a potential marker of quality of life and resilience to adversity.</p>","PeriodicalId":94208,"journal":{"name":"Social cognitive and affective neuroscience","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-11-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142484675","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Leslie Tricoche, Marion Royer d'Halluin, Martine Meunier, Denis Pélisson
{"title":"Neural bases of social facilitation and inhibition: how peer presence affects elementary eye movements.","authors":"Leslie Tricoche, Marion Royer d'Halluin, Martine Meunier, Denis Pélisson","doi":"10.1093/scan/nsae079","DOIUrl":"10.1093/scan/nsae079","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Social Facilitation/Inhibition (SFI) refers to how others' presence influences task performance positively or negatively. Our previous study revealed that peer presence modulated saccadic eye movements, a fundamental sensorimotor activity. Pro- and anti-saccades were either facilitated or inhibited depending on trial block complexity (Tricoche et al., 2020). In the present fMRI study, we adapted our paradigm to investigate the neural basis of SFI on saccades. Considering inter- and intra-individual variabilities, we evaluated the shared and distinct neural patterns between social facilitation and inhibition. We predicted an involvement of the saccade-related and attention networks, alongside the Theory-of-Mind (ToM) network, with opposite activity changes between facilitation and inhibition. Results confirmed peer presence modulation in fronto-parietal areas related to saccades and attention, in opposite directions for facilitation and inhibition. Additionally, the ventral attention network was modulated during inhibition. Default mode regions, including ToM areas, were also modulated. Finally, pupil size, often linked to arousal, increased with peers and correlated with dorsal attention regions and anterior insula activities. These results suggest that SFI engages task-specific and domain-general networks, modulated differently based on observed social effect. Attention network seemed to play a central role at both basic (linked to arousal or vigilance) and cognitive control levels.</p>","PeriodicalId":94208,"journal":{"name":"Social cognitive and affective neuroscience","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-11-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142592360","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Mallory J Feldman, Jimmy Capella, Junqiang Dai, Adrienne S Bonar, Nathan H Field, Kevin Lewis, Mitchell J Prinstein, Eva H Telzer, Kristen A Lindquist
{"title":"Proximity within adolescent peer networks predicts neural similarity during affective experience.","authors":"Mallory J Feldman, Jimmy Capella, Junqiang Dai, Adrienne S Bonar, Nathan H Field, Kevin Lewis, Mitchell J Prinstein, Eva H Telzer, Kristen A Lindquist","doi":"10.1093/scan/nsae072","DOIUrl":"10.1093/scan/nsae072","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Individuals befriend others who are similar to them. One important source of similarity in relationships is similarity in felt emotion. In the present study, we used novel methods to assess whether greater similarity in the multivoxel brain representation of affective stimuli was associated with adolescents' proximity within real-world school-based social networks. We examined dyad-level neural similarity within a set of brain regions associated with the representation of affect including the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), amygdala, insula, and temporal pole. Greater proximity was associated with greater vmPFC neural similarity during pleasant and neutral experiences. Moreover, we used unsupervised clustering on social networks to identify groups of friends and observed that individuals from the same (versus different) friend groups were more likely to have greater vmPFC neural similarity during pleasant and negative experiences. These findings suggest that similarity in the multivoxel brain representation of affect may play an important role in adolescent friendships.</p>","PeriodicalId":94208,"journal":{"name":"Social cognitive and affective neuroscience","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-11-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11540295/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142484679","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Heather J Ferguson, Martina De Lillo, Camilla Woodrow-Hill, Rebecca Foley, Elisabeth E F Bradford
{"title":"Neural empathy mechanisms are shared for physical and social pain, and increase from adolescence to older adulthood.","authors":"Heather J Ferguson, Martina De Lillo, Camilla Woodrow-Hill, Rebecca Foley, Elisabeth E F Bradford","doi":"10.1093/scan/nsae080","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/scan/nsae080","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Empathy is a critical component of social interaction that enables individuals to understand and share the emotions of others. We report a pre-registered experiment in which 240 participants, including adolescents, young adults and older adults, viewed images depicting hands and feet in physically or socially painful situations (vs. non-painful). Empathy was measured using imagined pain ratings and EEG mu suppression. Imagined pain was greater for physical vs. social pain, with young adults showing particular sensitivity to social pain events compared to adolescents and older adults. Mu desynchronisation was greater to pain vs. no-pain situations, but the physical/social context did not modulate pain responses. Brain responses to painful situations increased linearly from adolescence to young and older adulthood. These findings highlight shared activity across the core empathy network for both physical and social pain contexts, and an empathic response that develops over the lifespan with accumulating social experience.</p>","PeriodicalId":94208,"journal":{"name":"Social cognitive and affective neuroscience","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-11-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142570815","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Group empathy for pain is stronger than individual empathy for pain in the auditory modality.","authors":"Min Shao, Yulan Qiu, Yudie Zhang, Huiling Qian, Zilong Wei, Mingyu Hong, Shuqin Liu, Jing Meng","doi":"10.1093/scan/nsae074","DOIUrl":"10.1093/scan/nsae074","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Humans live in collective groups and are highly sensitive to perceived emotions of a group, including the pain of a group. However, previous research on empathy for pain mainly focused on the suffering of a single individual (\"individual empathy for pain\"), with limited understanding of empathy for pain to a group (\"group empathy for pain\"). Thus, the present study aimed to investigate the cognitive neural mechanisms of group empathy for pain in the auditory modality. The study produced group painful voices to simulate the painful voices made by a group, and recruited 34 participants to explore differences between their responses to group painful voices and individual painful voices using the event-related potential (ERP) techniques. The results revealed that group painful voices were rated with higher pain intensity, more negative affective valence, and larger P2 amplitudes than individual painful voices. Furthermore, trait affective empathy scores of the participants were positively correlated with their P2 amplitudes of group painful voices. The results suggested that the group empathy for pain may facilitate affective empathetic processing in auditory modality.</p>","PeriodicalId":94208,"journal":{"name":"Social cognitive and affective neuroscience","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-10-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11523625/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142484678","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Michael Moutoussis, Joe Barnby, Anais Durand, Megan Croal, Laura Dilley, Robb B Rutledge, Liam Mason
{"title":"Impressions about harm are formed rapidly and then refined, modulated by serotonin.","authors":"Michael Moutoussis, Joe Barnby, Anais Durand, Megan Croal, Laura Dilley, Robb B Rutledge, Liam Mason","doi":"10.1093/scan/nsae078","DOIUrl":"10.1093/scan/nsae078","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Attributing motives to others is a crucial aspect of mentalizing, can be biased by prejudice, and is affected by common psychiatric disorders. It is therefore important to understand in depth the mechanisms underpinning it. Toward improving models of mentalizing motives, we hypothesized that people quickly infer whether other's motives are likely beneficial or detrimental, then refine their judgment (classify-refine). To test this, we used a modified Dictator game, a game theoretic task, where participants judged the likelihood of intent to harm vs. self-interest in economic decisions. Toward testing the role of serotonin in judgments of intent to harm, we delivered the task in a week-long, placebo vs. citalopram study. Computational model comparison provided clear evidence for the superiority of classify-refine models over traditional ones, strongly supporting the central hypothesis. Further, while citalopram helped refine attributions about motives through learning, it did not induce more positive initial inferences about others' motives. Finally, model comparison indicated a minimal role for racial bias within economic decisions for the large majority of our sample. Overall, these results support a proposal that classify-refine social cognition is adaptive, although relevant mechanisms of serotonergic antidepressant action will need to be studied over longer time spans.</p>","PeriodicalId":94208,"journal":{"name":"Social cognitive and affective neuroscience","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-10-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11552519/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142515634","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Luis Felipe Sarmiento, Jorge Alexander Ríos-Flórez, Fabio Alexis Rincón Uribe, Rafael Rodrigues Lima, Tobias Kalenscher, Amauri Gouveia, Felix Jan Nitsch
{"title":"Do stress hormones influence choice? A systematic review of pharmacological interventions on the HPA axis and/or SAM system.","authors":"Luis Felipe Sarmiento, Jorge Alexander Ríos-Flórez, Fabio Alexis Rincón Uribe, Rafael Rodrigues Lima, Tobias Kalenscher, Amauri Gouveia, Felix Jan Nitsch","doi":"10.1093/scan/nsae069","DOIUrl":"10.1093/scan/nsae069","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal axis (HPA axis) and the sympathetic-adrenal-medullary system (SAM system), two neuroendocrine systems associated with the stress response, have often been implicated to modulate decision-making in various domains. This systematic review summarizes the scientific evidence on the effects of pharmacological HPA axis and SAM system modulation on decision-making. We found 6375 references, of which 17 studies fulfilled our inclusion criteria. We quantified the risk of bias in our results with respect to missing outcome data, measurements, and selection of the reported results. The included studies administered hydrocortisone, fludrocortisone (HPA axis stimulants), yohimbine, reboxetine (SAM system stimulants), and/or propranolol (SAM system inhibitor). Integrating the evidence, we found that SAM system stimulation had no impact on risk aversion, loss aversion or intertemporal choice, while SAM system inhibition showed a tentative reduction in sensitivity to losses. HPA axis stimulation had no effect on loss aversion or reward anticipation but likely a time-dependent effect on decision under risk. Lastly, combined stimulation of both systems exhibited inconsistent results that could be explained by dose differences (loss aversion) and sex differences (risk aversion). Future research should address time-, dose-, and sex-dependencies of pharmacological effects on decision-making.</p>","PeriodicalId":94208,"journal":{"name":"Social cognitive and affective neuroscience","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-10-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11498176/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142373959","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Fate Noohi, Eena L Kosik, Christina Veziris, David C Perry, Howard J Rosen, Joel H Kramer, Bruce L Miller, Sarah R Holley, William W Seeley, Virginia E Sturm
{"title":"Structural neuroanatomy of human facial behaviors.","authors":"Fate Noohi, Eena L Kosik, Christina Veziris, David C Perry, Howard J Rosen, Joel H Kramer, Bruce L Miller, Sarah R Holley, William W Seeley, Virginia E Sturm","doi":"10.1093/scan/nsae064","DOIUrl":"10.1093/scan/nsae064","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The human face plays a central role in emotions and social communication. The emotional and somatic motor networks generate facial behaviors, but whether facial behaviors have representations in the structural anatomy of the human brain is unknown. We coded 16 facial behaviors in 55 healthy older adults who viewed five videos that elicited emotions and examined whether individual differences in facial behavior were related to regional variation in gray matter volume. Voxel-based morphometry analyses revealed that greater emotional facial behavior during the disgust trial (i.e. greater brow furrowing and eye tightening as well as nose wrinkling and upper lip raising) and the amusement trial (i.e. greater smiling and eye tightening) was associated with larger gray matter volume in midcingulate cortex, supplementary motor area, and precentral gyrus, areas spanning both the emotional and somatic motor networks. When measured across trials, however, these facial behaviors (and others) only related to gray matter volume in the precentral gyrus, a somatic motor network hub. These findings suggest that the emotional and somatic motor networks store structural representations of facial behavior and that the midcingulate cortex is critical for generating the predictable movements in the face that arise during emotions.</p>","PeriodicalId":94208,"journal":{"name":"Social cognitive and affective neuroscience","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-10-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11492553/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142305262","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Association of neuroimaging measures with facial emotional processing in healthy adults: a task fMRI study.","authors":"Gantian Huang, Chen Qiu, Meng Liao, Qiyong Gong, Longqian Liu, Ping Jiang","doi":"10.1093/scan/nsae076","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/scan/nsae076","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Investigating the neural processing of emotion-related neural circuits underlying emotional facial processing may help in understanding mental disorders. We used two subscales of the Toronto Alexithymia Scale to assess the emotional cognitive of 25 healthy participants. A higher score indicates greater difficulty in emotional perception. In addition, participants completed a n-back task during functional magnetic resonance imaging. Psychophysiological interaction analysis was used to explore the functional connectivity (FC) of neural circuits. Next, we used elastic-net regression analysis for feature selection and conducted correlation analysis between the neuroimaging measures and questionnaire scores. Following a 3-fold cross-validation, 5 neuroimaging measures emerged as significant features. Results of correlation analysis demonstrated that participants with higher TAS scores exhibited increased FC between the amygdala and occipital face area (OFA) during facial stimulus processing, but decreased connectivity during emotional processing. These findings suggested that individuals with poor emotional recognition exhibited increased connectivity among face-related brain regions during facial processing. However, during emotional processing, decreasing neural synchronization among neural circuits involved in emotional processing affects facial expression processing. These findings suggest potential neural marker related to subjective emotional perception, which may contribute to the diagnosis and treatment of emotional dysregulation in individuals with psychiatric conditions.</p>","PeriodicalId":94208,"journal":{"name":"Social cognitive and affective neuroscience","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-10-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142484674","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A beautiful face is good when we're judged by others, a moral character is better.","authors":"Julia Baum, Rasha Abdel Rahman","doi":"10.1093/scan/nsae071","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/scan/nsae071","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Moral beauty, reflected in one's actions, and facial beauty both affect how we're judged. Here, we investigated how moral and facial beauty interactively affect social judgments and emotional responses, employing event-related brain potentials. Participants (all female) associated positive, neutral, or negative verbal information with faces scoring high or low on attractiveness and performed ratings of the faces as manipulation checks. In a separate test phase, the faces were presented again, and participants made valenced social judgments of the persons. Results show a dominance of moral beauty in valenced social judgments as well as ERPs related to reflexive and evaluative emotional responses (early posterior negativity, EPN, late positive potential, LPP), whereas facial attractiveness mattered little. In contrast, facial attractiveness affected visual processing (N170). Similarly, relatively shallow impressions of attractiveness and likability that require no knowledge about the person were influenced by both facial attractiveness and social-emotional information. This pattern of dominant effects of social-emotional information regardless of attractiveness shows that when it comes to our emotional responses and social judgments, moral beauty is what matters most, even in the face of physical beauty.</p>","PeriodicalId":94208,"journal":{"name":"Social cognitive and affective neuroscience","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-10-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142484673","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}