Camilla van Geen, Michael S Cohen, Karolina M Lempert, Kameron A MacNear, Frances M Reckers, Laura Zaneski, David A Wolk, Joseph W Kable
{"title":"Age-related differences in trust decisions: when memory fails and appearances prevail.","authors":"Camilla van Geen, Michael S Cohen, Karolina M Lempert, Kameron A MacNear, Frances M Reckers, Laura Zaneski, David A Wolk, Joseph W Kable","doi":"10.1093/scan/nsaf032","DOIUrl":"10.1093/scan/nsaf032","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Older adults are frequent victims of scams, possibly due to biases in how they decide whom to trust. Indeed, older adults' decisions are more likely to be influenced by how generous a person looks and less so by their memory for how this person behaved. Here, we leverage functional magnetic resonance imaging data to clarify the mechanism by which this age-dependent difference emerges. Eighty-six participants learned how much of a $10 endowment an individual shared in a dictator game, and then made decisions about whom to play another round with. As we hypothesized, older adults did not reliably prefer to re-engage with people who had proven themselves to be generous. This bias was driven by a combination of worse associative memory for how much each person shared, linked to decreased medial temporal lobe activity during encoding, and decreased inhibition of irrelevant facial features, linked to reduced activity in the inferior frontal gyrus. Taken together, our findings highlight 'age-related differences' in the ability to both encode relevant information and adaptively deploy it in service of social decisions.</p>","PeriodicalId":94208,"journal":{"name":"Social cognitive and affective neuroscience","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2025-05-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12079027/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144056300","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":"Loneliness modulates the neural dynamics of language processing in healthy older adults: evidence from event-related potentials.","authors":"Bing Li, Chih-Mao Huang, Ya-Yi Wang, Qiduo Lin, Hsu-Wen Huang","doi":"10.1093/scan/nsaf030","DOIUrl":"10.1093/scan/nsaf030","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Loneliness, a distressing emotional response to perceived deficiencies in social interactions, has seen a marked increase in prevalence since the COVID-19 pandemic. While previous research has linked loneliness in older adults to affective disorders and cognitive decline, its impact on language comprehension-a crucial aspect of social interaction-remains underexplored. This study addresses this gap by examining the effects of loneliness on semantic retrieval in healthy older adults. Using event-related potentials, we measured participants' neural responses as they verified category membership across three conditions: high typicality, low typicality, and category violations. We found that loneliness was negatively correlated with an N400 amplitude reduction for low-typicality items compared to category violations. Moreover, individuals who reported a high level of loneliness exhibited attenuated and delayed N400 effects within more restricted time windows compared to their less lonely counterparts. These results indicate that loneliness impairs semantic memory retrieval in older adults, potentially compromising language comprehension and further exacerbating social isolation. This research highlights the detrimental impact of loneliness on linguistic abilities, which may contribute to a vicious cycle of increasing social isolation and deepening loneliness.</p>","PeriodicalId":94208,"journal":{"name":"Social cognitive and affective neuroscience","volume":"20 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2025-05-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12060866/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144048927","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":"Loneliness modulates the neural dynamics of language processing in healthy older adults: evidence from event-related potentials.","authors":"Bing Li, Chih-Mao Huang, Ya-Yi Wang, Qiduo Lin, Hsu-Wen Huang","doi":"10.1093/scan/nsaf030","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/scan/nsaf030","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Loneliness, a distressing emotional response to perceived deficiencies in social interactions, has seen a marked increase in prevalence since the COVID-19 pandemic. While previous research has linked loneliness in older adults to affective disorders and cognitive decline, its impact on language comprehension-a crucial aspect of social interaction-remains underexplored. This study addresses this gap by examining the effects of loneliness on semantic retrieval in healthy older adults. Using event-related potentials, we measured participants' neural responses as they verified category membership across three conditions: high typicality, low typicality, and category violations. We found that loneliness was negatively correlated with an N400 amplitude reduction for low-typicality items compared to category violations. Moreover, individuals who reported a high level of loneliness exhibited attenuated and delayed N400 effects within more restricted time windows compared to their less lonely counterparts. These results indicate that loneliness impairs semantic memory retrieval in older adults, potentially compromising language comprehension and further exacerbating social isolation. This research highlights the detrimental impact of loneliness on linguistic abilities, which may contribute to a vicious cycle of increasing social isolation and deepening loneliness.</p>","PeriodicalId":94208,"journal":{"name":"Social cognitive and affective neuroscience","volume":"20 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2025-05-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144129986","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":"10.1093/scan/nsae071","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Moral beauty, reflected in one's actions, and facial beauty both affect how we are judged. Here, we investigated how moral and facial beauty interact to affect social judgments and emotional responses, employing event-related brain potentials (ERPs). All participants (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 and late positive potential), 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":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2025-04-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12036660/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142484673","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":"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 are judged. Here, we investigated how moral and facial beauty interact to affect social judgments and emotional responses, employing event-related brain potentials (ERPs). All participants (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 and late positive potential), 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":"20 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2025-04-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144129881","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}
Heegyu Kim, Sangyeon Kim, Sung Chan Jun, Chang S Nam
{"title":"Is what I think what you think? Multilayer network-based inter-brain synchrony approach.","authors":"Heegyu Kim, Sangyeon Kim, Sung Chan Jun, Chang S Nam","doi":"10.1093/scan/nsaf028","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/scan/nsaf028","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Social interaction plays a crucial role in human societies, encompassing complex dynamics among individuals. To understand social interaction at the neural level, researchers have utilized hyperscanning in several social settings. These studies have mainly focused on inter-brain synchrony and the efficiency of paired functional brain networks, examining group interactions in dyads. However, this approach may not fully capture the complexity of multiple interactions, potentially leading to gaps in understanding inter-network differences. To overcome this limitation, the present study aims to bridge this gap by introducing methodological enhancements using the multilayer network approach, which is tailored to extract features from multiple networks. We applied this strategy to analyze the triad condition during social behavior processes to identify group interaction indices. Additionally, to validate our methodology, we compared the multilayer networks of triad conditions with group synchrony to paired conditions without group synchrony, focusing on statistical differences between alpha and beta waves. Correlation analysis between inter-brain and group networks revealed that this methodology accurately reflects the characteristics of actual behavioral synchrony. The findings of our study suggest that measures of paired brain synchrony and group interaction may exhibit distinct trends, offering valuable insights into interpreting group synchrony.</p>","PeriodicalId":94208,"journal":{"name":"Social cognitive and affective neuroscience","volume":"20 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2025-04-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144129985","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}
Sarah J Dembling, Nicole M Abaya, Peter J Gianaros, Tristen K Inagaki
{"title":"The heart of social pain: examining resting blood pressure and neural sensitivity to exclusion.","authors":"Sarah J Dembling, Nicole M Abaya, Peter J Gianaros, Tristen K Inagaki","doi":"10.1093/scan/nsaf025","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/scan/nsaf025","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Previous work suggests blood pressure (BP) relates to social algesia, where those with higher BP are more tolerant of social pain. The neural correlates of this association, however, are unknown. Based on findings suggesting neural regions involved in physical pain are activated during social pain, the current study explores whether BP relates to subjective and neural responses to social pain, apart from emotional responding. BP was measured, after which participants completed emotional processing and social exclusion functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) paradigms. Results replicated previous findings, with higher systolic BP related to lower trait sensitivity to social pain. However, there were no associations between BP and reported sensitivity to social pain during social exclusion. Moreover, after accounting for adiposity, we found no association between BP and anterior insula (AI) or dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC) activity to exclusion. Finally, there were no reliable associations between BP and reported valence or arousal, or AI and dACC activity to emotional images. Findings partly replicate and extend prior findings on BP and emotional responding to social pain; however, they appear inconsistent with predictions at the neural level. Future experimental manipulation of BP may allow for causal inferences and adjudication of conceptual perspectives on cardiovascular contributions to social algesia.</p>","PeriodicalId":94208,"journal":{"name":"Social cognitive and affective neuroscience","volume":"20 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2025-04-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144129787","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}
Sarah J Dembling, Nicole M Abaya, Peter J Gianaros, Tristen K Inagaki
{"title":"The heart of social pain: examining resting blood pressure and neural sensitivity to exclusion.","authors":"Sarah J Dembling, Nicole M Abaya, Peter J Gianaros, Tristen K Inagaki","doi":"10.1093/scan/nsaf025","DOIUrl":"10.1093/scan/nsaf025","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Previous work suggests blood pressure (BP) relates to social algesia, where those with higher BP are more tolerant of social pain. The neural correlates of this association, however, are unknown. Based on findings suggesting neural regions involved in physical pain are activated during social pain, the current study explores whether BP relates to subjective and neural responses to social pain, apart from emotional responding. BP was measured, after which participants completed emotional processing and social exclusion functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) paradigms. Results replicated previous findings, with higher systolic BP related to lower trait sensitivity to social pain. However, there were no associations between BP and reported sensitivity to social pain during social exclusion. Moreover, after accounting for adiposity, we found no association between BP and anterior insula (AI) or dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC) activity to exclusion. Finally, there were no reliable associations between BP and reported valence or arousal, or AI and dACC activity to emotional images. Findings partly replicate and extend prior findings on BP and emotional responding to social pain; however, they appear inconsistent with predictions at the neural level. Future experimental manipulation of BP may allow for causal inferences and adjudication of conceptual perspectives on cardiovascular contributions to social algesia.</p>","PeriodicalId":94208,"journal":{"name":"Social cognitive and affective neuroscience","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2025-04-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12000721/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143756708","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}
Heegyu Kim, Sangyeon Kim, Sung Chan Jun, Chang S Nam
{"title":"Is what I think what you think? Multilayer network-based inter-brain synchrony approach.","authors":"Heegyu Kim, Sangyeon Kim, Sung Chan Jun, Chang S Nam","doi":"10.1093/scan/nsaf028","DOIUrl":"10.1093/scan/nsaf028","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Social interaction plays a crucial role in human societies, encompassing complex dynamics among individuals. To understand social interaction at the neural level, researchers have utilized hyperscanning in several social settings. These studies have mainly focused on inter-brain synchrony and the efficiency of paired functional brain networks, examining group interactions in dyads. However, this approach may not fully capture the complexity of multiple interactions, potentially leading to gaps in understanding inter-network differences. To overcome this limitation, the present study aims to bridge this gap by introducing methodological enhancements using the multilayer network approach, which is tailored to extract features from multiple networks. We applied this strategy to analyze the triad condition during social behavior processes to identify group interaction indices. Additionally, to validate our methodology, we compared the multilayer networks of triad conditions with group synchrony to paired conditions without group synchrony, focusing on statistical differences between alpha and beta waves. Correlation analysis between inter-brain and group networks revealed that this methodology accurately reflects the characteristics of actual behavioral synchrony. The findings of our study suggest that measures of paired brain synchrony and group interaction may exhibit distinct trends, offering valuable insights into interpreting group synchrony.</p>","PeriodicalId":94208,"journal":{"name":"Social cognitive and affective neuroscience","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2025-04-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11980598/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143627360","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}
Paul J Brancaleone, Roberto U Cofresí, Hannah I Volpert-Esmond, David M Amodio, Tiffany A Ito, Bruce D Bartholow
{"title":"Within-person dynamics of attention to race and expression of race bias: a real-time test of the self-regulation of prejudice model.","authors":"Paul J Brancaleone, Roberto U Cofresí, Hannah I Volpert-Esmond, David M Amodio, Tiffany A Ito, Bruce D Bartholow","doi":"10.1093/scan/nsaf026","DOIUrl":"10.1093/scan/nsaf026","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Prior research has supported some aspects of a theorized prejudice self-regulation model. We provide the first test of the full model-based process of bias regulation as it unfolds in real time. Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded from White undergraduates at two large American universities (N = 130; 40% female) during a racial stereotype priming task. Attention to Black male face primes, indexed by the P2 ERP, increased following self-regulation failures. In turn, within-person, trial-to-trial variability in attention to Black male faces predicted variability in bias expression. The latter effect was moderated by individual differences in internal motivation to respond without prejudice (IMS). Specifically, among lower-IMS individuals, trials in which Black faces elicited relatively larger P2 amplitudes (relative to an individual's own average P2 amplitude) were associated with increased behavioral race bias. In contrast, and consistent with theory, among higher-IMS individuals trials in which Black faces elicited larger relative P2 amplitudes were associated with decreased bias. Findings provide direct evidence supporting the temporal sequencing of race-bias regulation and identify within-person variability in attention to race as a potential mechanism for determining when and in whom bias will be regulated.</p>","PeriodicalId":94208,"journal":{"name":"Social cognitive and affective neuroscience","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2025-04-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11980601/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143756709","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}