Social Cognitive Affective Neuroscience

This article proposes a novel approach to understanding the affective structure of human interaction, an aspect often overlooked in classical models. Drawing on interdisciplinary insights from information theory (Shannon), complex systems theory (Morin), and affective neuroscience (Damasio), we conceptualize emotions as directional forces. Each force is characterized by its intensity (φ) and its orientation (θ) relative to a contextual goal or telos.

Auf einen Blick 1. Neun internationale Experten warnen vor der Aushöhlung unserer Bürgerrechte und der Demokratie im Zuge der digitalen Technikrevolution. 2. Wir steuern demnach geradewegs auf die Automatisierung unserer Gesellschaft und die Fernsteuerung ihrer Bürger durch Algorithmen zu, in denen sich »Big Data« und »Nudging«-Methoden zu einem mächtigen Instrument vereinen. Erste Ansätze dazu lassen sich bereits in China und Singapur beobachten. 3. Ein Zehnpunkteplan soll helfen, jetzt die richtigen Weichen zu stellen, um auch im digitalen Zeitalter Freiheitsrechte und Demokratie zu bewahren und die sich ergebenden Chancen zu nutzen.

Affect as a biosemiotic unit is not "emotion" but a **microtransmission of meaning through the body**, which, depending on perceptual structures (e.g., nervous systems, sensory receptors), is either integrated into a broader recognition system or blocked, rejected, ignored. Here lies the crucial struggle over the shape of consciousness: **between what is let through and what is suppressed or ignored**.

This analytic framework—based on structure, intensity, and reactivity—enables a concrete, rather than merely symbolic, study of the relationship between body, perception, and meaning. Only now can we approach Spinoza's philosophy, understanding that his concept of affect fits a biological-semiotic model, not merely a metaphysical tradition.

Willingness to fight and die (WFD) has been developed as a measure to capture willingness to incur costly sacrifices for the sake of a greater cause in the context of entrenched conf lict. WFD measures have been repeatedly used in field studies, including studies on the battlefield, although their neurofunctional correlates remain unexplored. Our aim was to identify the neural underpinnings of WFD, focusing on neural activity and interconnectivity of brain areas previously associated with value-based decision-making, such as the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC). A sample of Pakistani participants supporting the Kashmiri cause was selected and invited to participate in an functional magnetic resonance (fMRI) paradigm where they were asked to convey their WFD for a series of values related to Islam and current politics. As predicted, higher compared to lower WFD was associated with increased ventromedial prefrontal activity and decreased dorsolateral activity, as well as lower connectivity between the vmPFC and the dlPFC. Our findings suggest that WFD more prominently relies on brain areas typically associated with subjective value (vmPFC) rather than integration of material costs (dlPFC) during decision-making, supporting the notion that decisions on costly sacrifices may not be mediated by cost-benefit computation.

Adolescence is a period of rapid biological and psychological development, characterized by increasing emotional reactivity and risktaking, especially in peer contexts. Theories of adolescent neural development suggest that the balance in sensitivity across neural threat, reward and regulatory systems contributes to these changes. Building on previous research, this study used a novel social feedback task to explore activation and functional connectivity in the context of social threat and reward in a sample of mid-adolescent girls (n = 86, M age = 16.32). When receiving negative peer feedback, adolescents showed elevated activation in, and amygdala connectivity with, social processing regions [e.g. medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) and temporoparietal junction (TPJ)]. When receiving positive feedback, adolescents showed elevated activation in social and reward (e.g. mPFC and ventromedial prefrontal cortex) processing regions and less striatum-cerebellum connectivity. To understand the psychological implications of neural activation and co-activation, we examined associations between neural processing of threat and reward and self-reported social goals. Avoidance goals predicted elevated amygdala and striatum connectivity with social processing regions [e.g. medial temporal gyrus (MTG)], whereas approach goals predicted deactivation in social processing regions (e.g. MTG/TPJ and precuneus), highlighting the importance of considering individual differences in sensitivity to social threat and reward in adolescence.

This is Chapter 7 of a book called 'Living, Minding World,' which I am publishing chapter by chapter as I do a final edit. It's subtitle is 'where science and religion overlap . . .,' and its over-all thesis is that the ancients were correct to see a kind of intention and intelligence in Nature but went wrong when they interpreted that volition on the analogy of a human king or emperor. This was a fruitful mistake as it suggested the possibility that humans could “read the mind of God in the Book of Nature,” thereby contributing to the launch of science as distinct from religion and philosophy. But it was also deeply misleading; and it's even more so today, given the state of current knowledge.
Today we're in a position to see a kind of intelligence at work in our best understanding of the physical universe – in quantum field, theory, cosmology, genetics and evolutionary biology. We study that intelligence under labels like 'self-organization,' 'autopoiesis,' 'least action' and 'emergence,' and we begin to see ourselves as tentative by-products of self-organization, and not as Lords of Creation, appointed so by an Almighty God. It appears now that all the intelligence needed to account for the world's complexity was inherent from the beginning in that world itself. No external 'watchmaker' was needed.

IT: L'Intelligenza Neuro-Sistemica Integrata (NSI) è un modello formale e teorico che descrive la capacità dei sistemi complessi-biologici, cognitivi o artificiali-di riorganizzarsi dinamicamente in risposta a stati di disallineamento interno. Attraverso la funzione φᴺˢᴵ : S → S′, il modello identifica un passaggio da stati disfunzionali a configurazioni coese e operative. NSI integra segnali biologici, strutture cognitive, ambiente e relazione, consentendo la modellazione di dinamiche di riorganizzazione funzionale. È applicabile in ambito clinico, computazionale ed epistemologico, mantenendo verificabilità teorica e tracciabilità semantica. Un esempio applicativo teorico riguarda l'impiego di NSI come modello di integrazione tra segnali cognitivi e corporei nei percorsi di autoregolazione.

Stress engendered by stereotype threatening situations may facilitate encoding of negative, stereotype confirming feedback received during a performance among women in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). It is unclear, however, whether this process is comprised of the same neurophysiological mechanisms evident in any emotional memory encoding context, or if this encoding bias directly undermines positive self-perceptions in the stigmatized domain. A total of 160 men and women completed a math test that provided veridical positive and negative feedback, a memory test for feedback, and math self-enhancing and valuing measures in a stereotype threatening or neutral context while continuous electroencephalography activity and startle probe responses to positive and negative feedback was recorded. Indexing amygdala activity to feedback via startle responses and emotional memory network connectivity elicited during accurate recognition of positive and negative feedback via graph analyses, only stereotype threatened women encoded negative feedback better when they exhibited increased amygdala activity and emotional memory network connectivity in response to said feedback. Emotional memory biases, in turn, predicted decreases in women's self-enhancing, math valuing and performance. Findings provide an emotional memory encoding-based mechanism for well-established findings indicating that women have more negative math self-perceptions compared with men regardless of actual performance.

It has been suggested that the degree of compassionthe feeling of warmth, understanding and kindness that motivates the desire to help others, is modulated by observers views regarding the targets vulnerability and suffering. This study tested the hypothesis that as compassion developed to protect vulnerable kinships, hormones such as oxytocin, which have been suggested as playing a key role in tend-and-befriend behaviors among women, will enhance compassion toward women but not toward men. Thirty subjects participated in a double-blind, placebo-controlled, within-subject study. Following administration of oxytocin/placebo, participants listened to recordings of different female/male protagonists describing distressful emotional conflicts and were then asked to provide compassionate advice to the protagonist. The participants responses were coded according to various components of compassion by two clinical psychologists who were blind to the treatment. The results showed that in women and men participants oxytocin enhanced compassion toward women, but did not affect compassion toward men. These findings indicate that the oxytocinergic system differentially mediates compassion toward women and toward men, emphasizing an evolutionary perspective that views compassion as a caregiving behavior designed to help vulnerable individuals.

Lack of empathy is a hallmark of social impairments in individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). However, the concept empathy encompasses several socio-emotional and behavioral components underpinned by interacting brain circuits. This study examined empathic arousal and social understanding in individuals with ASD and matched controls by combining pressure pain thresholds (PPT) with functional magnetic resonance imaging (study 1) and electroencephalography/event-related potentials and eye-tracking responses (study 2) to empathy-eliciting stimuli depicting physical bodily injuries. Results indicate that participants with ASD had lower PPT than controls. When viewing body parts being accidentally injured, increased hemodynamic responses in the somatosensory cortex (SI/SII) but decreased responses in the anterior mid-cingulate and anterior insula as well as heightened N2 but preserved late-positive potentials (LPP) were detected in ASD participants. When viewing a person intentionally hurting another, decreased hemodynamic responses in the medial prefrontal cortex and reduced LPP were observed in the ASD group. PPT was a mediator for the SI/SII response in predicting subjective unpleasantness ratings to others pain. Both ASD and control groups had comparable mu suppression, indicative of typical sensorimotor resonance. The findings demonstrate that, in addition to reduced pain thresholds, individuals with ASD exhibit heightened empathic arousal but impaired social understanding when perceiving others distress.

Genetic variants within the serotonin transporter gene (5-HTTLPR) impact the neurobiology and risk for anxiety-related behaviours. There are also gender differences in the prevalence of anxiety-related behaviours. Although numerous studies have investigated the influence of 5-HTTLPR genotype on the neural systems involved in emotional regulation, none have investigated how these effects are modulated by gender and anxiety. We investigated this issue using two complementary region of interest-based structural neuroimaging approaches (voxel-based morphometry and Freesurfer) in 138 healthy individuals categorized into no anxiety and subclinical anxiety groups based on the Hamilton Rating Scale for Anxiety (HAM-A). Preliminarily, using anxiety as a continuous variable, we found a significant interaction effect of genotype by gender on anxiety. Females homozygous for the Short allele showed the highest HAM-A scores and males the lowest. In addition, a three-way significant interaction among genotype, gender and anxiety category was found for the right amygdala volume. Post hoc tests revealed that homozygous females carrying the Short variant with a subclinical anxiety condition had larger volume. The reported interaction effects demonstrate that gender strongly modulates the relationship between 5-HTTLPR genotype and subclinical expression of anxiety acting on amygdala, one region of the emotional neural network specifically involved in the anxiety-like behaviours.

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Attachment theory is built on the assumption of consistency; the mother–infant bond is thought to underpin the life-long representations individuals construct of attachment relationships. Still, consistency in the individual’s neural response to attachment-related stimuli representing his or her entire relational history has not been investigated. Mothers and children were followed across two decades and videotaped in infancy (3–6 months), childhood (9–12 years) and young adulthood (18–24 years). In adulthood, participants underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging while exposed to videos of own mother–child interactions (Self) vs unfamiliar interactions (Other). Self-stimuli elicited greater activations across preregistered nodes of the human attachment network, including thalamus-to-brainstem, amygdala, hippocampus, anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), insula and temporal cortex. Critically, self-stimuli were age-invariant in most regions of interest despite large variability in ...

In 54 participants (41% women) from the Czech arm of the European Longitudinal Study of Pregnancy and Childhood, a national birth cohort with prospectively collected data from their birth until young adulthood, we aimed to study the association between early-life socioeconomic deprivation (ELSD), cognitive ability in adolescence, trait anxiety and resting state functional connectivity of the lateral prefrontal cortex (LPFC) in young adulthood. We found that ELSD was associated with lower cognitive ability in adolescence (at age 13) as well as higher trait anxiety in young adulthood (at age 23/24). Higher cognitive ability in adolescence predicted lower trait anxiety in young adulthood. Resting state functional connectivity between the right LPFC and a cluster of voxels including left precentral gyrus, left postcentral gyrus and superior frontal gyrus mediated the relationship between lower cognitive ability in adolescence and higher trait anxiety in young adulthood. These findings i...

Social touch may modulate emotions, but the neurobehavioral correlates are poorly understood. Here, we investigated neural responses to a picture of a deceased close person and if neural activity and connectivity are modulated by social touch from one’s romantic partner. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we found altered reactivity in several brain areas including the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and the anterior insula in response to the personal picture compared to a picture of an unfamiliar person. Hand holding with the romantic partner, compared to being alone, reduced reactivity in the ACC and cerebellum and provided subjective comfort. To separate physical touch from the emotional effect of partner presence, we evaluated hand holding with the partner relative to a stranger and found reduced reactivity in the anterior insula. Connectivity between the anterior insula and the ACC was reduced during partner touch, and the connectivity strength was negatively related ...

Changed reward functions have been proposed as a core feature of stimulant addiction, typically observed as reduced neural responses to non-drug-related rewards. However, it was unclear yet how specific this deficit is for different types of non-drug rewards arising from social and non-social reinforcements. We used functional neuroimaging in cocaine users to investigate explicit social reward as modeled by agreement of music preferences with music experts. In addition, we investigated non-social reward as modeled by winning desired music pieces. The study included 17 chronic cocaine users and 17 matched stimulantnaive healthy controls. Cocaine users, compared with controls, showed blunted neural responses to both social and non-social reward. Activation differences were located in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex overlapping for both reward types and, thus, suggesting a non-specific deficit in the processing of non-drug rewards. Interestingly, in the posterior lateral orbitofrontal cortex, social reward responses of cocaine users decreased with the degree to which they were influenced by social feedback from the experts, a response pattern that was opposite to that observed in healthy controls. The present results suggest that cocaine users likely suffer from a generalized impairment in value representation as well as from an aberrant processing of social feedback.

An increasing number of studies suggest that implicit attitudes towards food and body shape predict eating behaviour and characterize patients with eating disorders (EDs). However, literature has not been previously analysed; thus, differences between patients with EDs and healthy controls and the level of automaticity of the processes involved in implicit attitudes are still matters of debate. The present systematic review aimed to synthesize current evidence from papers investigating implicit attitudes towards food and body in healthy and ED populations. PubMed, EMBASE (Ovid), PsycINFO, Web of Science and Scopus were systematically screened and 183 studies using different indirect paradigms were included in the qualitative analysis. The majority of studies reported negative attitudes towards overweight/obese body images in healthy and ED samples and weight bias as a diffuse stereotypical evaluation. Implicit food attitudes are consistently reported as valid predictors of eating be...

Brief periods of unconscious thought (UT) have been shown to improve decision making compared with making an immediate decision (ID). We reveal a neural mechanism for UT in decision making using blood oxygen level-dependent (BOLD) functional magnetic resonance imaging. Participants (N ¼ 33) encoded information on a set of consumer products (e.g. 48 attributes describing four different cars), and we manipulated whether participants (i) consciously thought about this information (conscious thought), (ii) completed a difficult 2-back working memory task (UT) or (iii) made an immediate decision about the consumer products (ID) in a within-subjects blocked design. To differentiate UT neural activity from 2-back working memory neural activity, participants completed an independent 2-back task and this neural activity was subtracted from neural activity occurring during the UT 2-back task. Consistent with a neural reactivation account, we found that the same regions activated during the encoding of complex decision information (right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and left intermediate visual cortex) continued to be activated during a subsequent 2-min UT period. Moreover, neural reactivation in these regions was predictive of subsequent behavioral decision-making performance after the UT period. These results provide initial evidence for post-encoding unconscious neural reactivation in facilitating decision making.

Repeated stimulus presentations are commonly used in social and affective neuroimaging tasks, but much remains to be known about how the brain processes such repetitions. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we found three groups of brain regions with distinct response patterns during repeated presentations of natural scene images. One group consisted of several limbic, paralimbic, frontoparietal and medial prefrontal areas and showed a habituation-like response across pleasant, unpleasant, and neutral image categories. A second group of occipital and adjacent posterior cortical regions showed a pattern of diminishing responses with repeated presentations of affective images but not for neutral images, and also plateaued to activation levels above baseline for all image categories. A third group involved bilateral frontopolar areas and the precuneus and exhibited a novel, non-monotonic response pattern. Activity was low on the first presentation, peaked upon the second presentation (first repetition) and subsequently diminished. These findings indicate that the transition from novel to increasingly familiar, and also arousing to less arousing, involves a broad array of neural mechanisms alluding to both passive learning and active inference strategies.

Traditionally, lust and pride have been considered pleasurable, yet sinful in the West. Conversely, guilt is often considered aversive, yet valuable. These emotions illustrate how evaluations about specific emotions and beliefs about their hedonic properties may often diverge. Evaluations about specific emotions may shape important aspects of emotional life (e.g. in emotion regulation, emotion experience and acquisition of emotion concepts). Yet these evaluations are often understudied in affective neuroscience. Prior work in emotion regulation, affective experience, evaluation/attitudes and decision-making point to anterior prefrontal areas as candidates for supporting evaluative emotion knowledge. Thus, we examined the brain areas associated with evaluative and hedonic emotion knowledge, with a focus on the anterior prefrontal cortex. Participants (N = 25) made evaluative and hedonic ratings about emotion knowledge during functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). We found that greater activity in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), ventromedial PFC (vmPFC) and precuneus was associated with an evaluative (vs hedonic) focus on emotion knowledge. Our results suggest that the mPFC and vmPFC, in particular, may play a role in evaluating discrete emotions.

Vul et al. claim that brain-personality correlations in many social neuroscience studies are “implausibly high, ” “likely…spurious, ” and “should not be believed. ” Several of their conclusions are incorrect due to flawed reasoning, statistical errors, and sampling anomalies. First, the conceptual issues discussed by Vul et al. have little to do with social neuroscience per se and are equally relevant for nearly all fMRI analyses that report measures of effect size from searches over multiple voxels or regions (r, t, or Z statistics). Second, Vul et al. incorrectly claim that whole-brain regression analyses use an invalid and “non-independent ” two-step inferential procedure. We explain how whole-brain regressions are a valid single-step method of identifying brain regions that have reliable correlations with individual difference measures. Third, Vul et al. claim that large correlations obtained using whole-brain regression analyses may be the result of noise alone. We provide a si...

Repeated stimulus presentations are commonly used in social and affective neuroimaging tasks, but much remains to be known about how the brain processes such repetitions. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we found three groups of brain regions with distinct response patterns during repeated presentations of natural scene images. One group consisted of several limbic, paralimbic, frontoparietal and medial prefrontal areas and showed a habituation-like response across pleasant, unpleasant, and neutral image categories. A second group of occipital and adjacent posterior cortical regions showed a pattern of diminishing responses with repeated presentations of affective images but not for neutral images, and also plateaued to activation levels above baseline for all image categories. A third group involved bilateral frontopolar areas and the precuneus and exhibited a novel, non-monotonic response pattern. Activity was low on the first presentation, peaked upon the second prese...

Brief periods of unconscious thought (UT) have been shown to improve decision making compared with making an immediate decision (ID). We reveal a neural mechanism for UT in decision making using blood oxygen level-dependent (BOLD) functional magnetic resonance imaging. Participants (N ¼ 33) encoded information on a set of consumer products (e.g. 48 attributes describing four different cars), and we manipulated whether participants (i) consciously thought about this information (conscious thought), (ii) completed a difficult 2-back working memory task (UT) or (iii) made an immediate decision about the consumer products (ID) in a within-subjects blocked design. To differentiate UT neural activity from 2-back working memory neural activity, participants completed an independent 2-back task and this neural activity was subtracted from neural activity occurring during the UT 2-back task. Consistent with a neural reactivation account, we found that the same regions activated during the encoding of complex decision information (right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and left intermediate visual cortex) continued to be activated during a subsequent 2-min UT period. Moreover, neural reactivation in these regions was predictive of subsequent behavioral decision-making performance after the UT period. These results provide initial evidence for post-encoding unconscious neural reactivation in facilitating decision making.

The computation by which our brain elaborates fast responses to emotional expressions is currently an active field of brain studies. Previous studies have focused on stimuli taken from everyday life. Here, we investigated event-related potentials in response to happy vs neutral stimuli of human and non-humanoid robots. At the behavioural level, emotion shortened reaction times similarly for robotic and human stimuli. Early P1 wave was enhanced in response to happy compared to neutral expressions for robotic as well as for human stimuli, suggesting that emotion from robots is encoded as early as human emotion expression. Congruent with their lower faceness properties compared to human stimuli, robots elicited a later and lower N170 component than human stimuli. These findings challenge the claim that robots need to present an anthropomorphic aspect to interact with humans. Taken together, such results suggest that the early brain processing of emotional expressions is not bounded to ...

Although women and men differ in psychological and endocrine stress responses as well as in the prevalence rates of stressrelated disorders, knowledge on sex differences regarding stress regulation in the brain is scarce. Therefore, we performed an in-depth analysis of data from 67 healthy participants (31 women, taking oral contraceptives), who were exposed to the ScanSTRESS paradigm in a functional magnetic resonance imaging study. Changes in cortisol, affect, heart rate and neural activation in response to psychosocial stress were examined in women and men as well as potential sex-specific interactions between stress response domains. Stress exposure led to significant cortisol increases, with men exhibiting higher levels than women. Depending on sex, cortisol elevations were differently associated with stress-related responses in striato-limbic structures: higher increases were associated with activations in men but with deactivations in women. Regarding affect or heart rate responses, no sex differences emerged. Although women and men differ in their overall stress reactivity, our findings do not support the idea of distinct neural networks as the base of this difference. Instead, we found differential stress reactions for women and men in identical structures. We propose considering quantitative predictors such as sex-specific cortisol increases when exploring neural response differences of women and men.

The adult brain is endowed with mechanisms subserving enhanced processing of salient emotional and social cues. Stimuli associated with threat represent one such class of cues. Previous research suggests that preferential allocation of attention to social signals of threat (i.e. a preference for fearful over happy facial expressions) emerges during the second half of the first year. The present study was designed to determine the age of onset for infants' attentional bias for fearful faces. Allocation of attention was studied by measuring event-related potentials (ERPs) and looking times (in a visual paired comparison task) to fearful and happy faces in 5-and 7-month-old infants. In 7-month-olds, the preferential allocation of attention to fearful faces was evident in both ERPs and looking times, i.e. the negative central mid-latency ERP amplitudes were more negative, and the looking times were longer for fearful than happy faces. No such differences were observed in the 5-month-olds. It is suggested that an enhanced sensitivity to facial signals of threat emerges between 5 and 7 months of age, and it may reflect functional development of the neural mechanisms involved in processing of emotionally significant stimuli.

Affect refers to sensations and physiological shifts in intensity that may or may not formalise into conceptually distinct and collectively recognized feelings. Compared to emotions, which anthropologists see as feelings embedded in sociolinguistic concepts like love, anger, jealousy, han (Korean for sadness-grief), song (Ifaluk for justified anger), or hygge (Danish and Norwegian for cosiness), affects are conceived as more fluid. Although registered through biological and bodily sensation, affects are also culturally conditioned and can, in turn, strongly influence sociocultural dynamics. Anthropologists have long explored the varieties of emotional experience across cultures, from the analysis of different patterns of emotional behaviour in the early twentieth century to the linguistic comparison of different emotional expressions through the 1970s and 80s. Since around the 1990s, however, anthropologists began to shift their focus to the diverse ways that emotions also involve less linguistically determined but nevertheless socially conditioned bodily experiences they called ‘affect’. This entry documents early psychological and philosophical genealogies of affect; the relation of affect to anthropological studies of emotion; critiques of and counterpoints to the affect concept; and enduring themes in ethnographic studies of affect.

Mindfulness meditation has been shown to promote emotional stability. Moreover, during the processing of aversive and self-referential stimuli, mindful awareness is associated with reduced medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) activity, a central default mode network (DMN) component. However, it remains unclear whether mindfulness practice influences functional connectivity between DMN regions and, if so, whether such impact persists beyond a state of meditation. Consequently, this study examined the effect of extensive mindfulness training on functional connectivity within the DMN during a restful state. Resting-state data were collected from 13 experienced meditators (with over 1000 h of training) and 11 beginner meditators (with no prior experience, trained for 1 week before the study) using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Pairwise correlations and partial correlations were computed between DMN seed regions time courses and were compared between groups utilizing a Bayesian sampling scheme. Relative to beginners, experienced meditators had weaker functional connectivity between DMN regions involved in self-referential processing and emotional appraisal. In addition, experienced meditators had increased connectivity between certain DMN regions (e.g. dorso-medial PFC and right inferior parietal lobule), compared to beginner meditators. These findings suggest that meditation training leads to functional connectivity changes between core DMN regions possibly reflecting strengthened present-moment awareness.

The effect of multiple sclerosis (MS) on the ability to identify emotional expressions in faces was investigated, and possible associations with patients' characteristics were explored. 56 non-demented MS patients and 56 healthy subjects (HS) with similar demographic characteristics performed an emotion recognition task (ERT), the Benton Facial Recognition Test (BFRT), and answered the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale (HADS). Additionally, MS patients underwent a neurological examination and a comprehensive neuropsychological evaluation. The ERT consisted of 42 pictures of faces (depicting anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, surprise and neutral expressions) from the NimStim set. An iViewX highspeed eye tracker was used to record eye movements during ERT. The fixation times were calculated for two regions of interest (i.e., eyes and rest of the face). No significant differences were found between MS and HC on ERT's behavioral and oculomotor measures. Bivariate and multiple regression analyses revealed significant associations between ERT's behavioral performance and demographic, clinical, psychopathological, and cognitive measures.

Although the importance of the psychiatric diagnostic interview is undeniable in the actual clinical practice, its peculiarities as a specific kind of interpersonal phenomenon have not attracted much attention in the literature. This chapter approaches the diagnostic interview from the perspective of research on social cognition, by drawing on discussions about the difference between secondperson and third-person relations. We start by motivating a picture of the diagnostic interview according to which the clinician has to draw on multiple sources of diagnostically relevant information. This picture leads to the question of how to approach the complexity of the interview, and the role that the distinction between second-person and third-person relations might play for a better understanding of it. By elaborating on a conceptualization of second-person relations which foregrounds the roles of reciprocity and communication, we propose that second-and third-person relations are complementary methodological tools by means of which the clinician seeks to gain a better understanding of the patient.

At the end of the twentieth century the discovery of 'slow', affective touch nerves in humans known as C Tactile (CT) afferents, which are entirely separate from the faster pathways for touching objects, had huge social implications. The Swedish neuroscientists responsible formulated an “affective touch hypothesis” or “social touch hypothesis” to consider their purpose. Part I offers a history of the science of social touch, from related discoveries in mammals by physiologists in the 1930s, to the recent rediscoveries of the CT nerves in humans. Part II considers how these findings are being intentionally folded into technologies for interaction. First, as mediated social touch, communicating at a distance through haptics. Second, with the increasing number of social and service robots in health care and domestic settings, the role of affective touch within human-robot interaction design.

Copyright and moral rights for the publications made accessible in the public portal are retained by the authors and/or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. -Users may download and print one copy of any publication from the public portal for the purpose of private study or research -You may not further distribute the material or use it for any profit-making activity or commercial gain -You may freely distribute the URL identifying the publication in the public portal If you believe that this document breaches copyright, please contact us providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim.

Social cognition consists of several skills which allow us to interact with other humans. These skills include social stimuli processing, drawing inferences about others' mental states, and engaging in social interactions. In recent years, there has been growing evidence of social cognitive impairments in patients with schizophrenia. Apparently, these impairments are separable from general neurocognitive impairments, such as attention, memory, and executive functioning. Moreover, social cognition seems to be a main determinant of functional outcome and could be used as a guide to elaborate new pharmacological and psychological treatments. However, most of these studies focus on individual mechanisms and observational perspectives; only few of them study schizophrenic patients during interactive situations. We first review evidences of social cognitive impairments both in social stimuli processing and in mental state attribution. We focus on the relationship between these functions and both general cognitive impairments and functional outcome. We next review recent game theory approaches to the study of how social engagement occurs in schizophrenic patients.The advantage of using game theory is that game-oriented tasks can assess social decision making in an interactive everyday situation model. Finally, we review proposed theoretical models used to explain social alterations and their underlying biological mechanisms. Based on interactive studies, we propose a framework which takes into account the dynamic nature of social processes.Thus, understanding social skills as a result of dynamical systems could facilitate the development of both basic research and clinical applications oriented to psychiatric populations.

During social bargain, one has to both figure out the others intentions and behave strategically in such a way that the others behaviors will be consistent with ones expectations. To understand the neurobiological mechanisms underlying these behaviors, we used electroencephalography while subjects played as proposers in a repeated ultimatum game. We found that subjects adapted their offers to obtain more acceptances in the last round and that this adaptation correlated negatively with prefrontal theta oscillations. People with higher prefrontal theta activity related to a rejection did not adapt their offers along the game to maximize their earning. Moreover, between-subject variation in posterior theta oscillations correlated positively with how individual theta activity influenced the change of offer after a rejection, reflecting a process of behavioral adaptation to the others demands. Interestingly, people adapted better their offers when they knew that they where playing against a computer, although the behavioral adaptation did not correlate with prefrontal theta oscillation. Behavioral changes between human and computer games correlated with prefrontal theta activity, suggesting that low adaptation in human games could be a strategy. Taken together, these results provide evidence for specific roles of prefrontal and posterior theta oscillations in social bargaining.

Introduction: Decision-making is a process that can be strongly affected by social factors. Evidence has shown how people deviate from traditional rationalchoice predictions under different levels of social interactions. The emergence of prosocial decision-making, defined as any action that is addressed to benefit another individual even at the expense of personal benefits, has been reported as an example of such social influence. Furthermore, brain evidence has shown the involvement of structures such as the prefrontal cortex, anterior insula, and midcingulate cortex during decision settings in which a decision maker interacts with others under physical pain or distress or while being observed by others. Methods: Using a slightly modified version of the dictator game and EEG recordings, we tested the hypothesis that the inclusion of another person into the decision setting increases prosocial decisions in young adults and that this increase is higher when the other person is associated with others in need. At the brain level, we hypothesized that the increase in prosocial decisions correlates with frontal theta activity. Results and Discussion: The results showed that including another person in the decision, setting increased prosocial behavior only when this presence was associated with someone in need. This effect was associated with an increase in frontocentral theta-oscillatory activity. These results suggest that the presence of someone in need enhances empathy concerns and norm compliance, raising the participants' prosocial decision-making.

This research investigates the neural correlates of consciousness (NCC) through a novel “no-cognition” paradigm that employs the unique capacity of meditators to prevent cognitive reactions to stimuli. It also uses the innovative ability of machine learning to decode perceptual content from brain activity to test a prediction about the temporal dynamics of consciousness. 

Within neuroscience, the exact parameters of NCC is a matter of contention. For cognitively based theories, the NCC entails activity related to cognition in the frontal cortex in addition to perceptually related  processing in the occipital and temporal cortex. This is opposed to sensory-based theories that mainly focus on the occipital and temporal cortex. 

Using electroencephalography, the experiment tested the neural responses of a group of advanced meditators and non-meditative controls. A comparison of the groups across no-task and task conditions evaluated whether the P3b component is an NCC, as predicted by the
cognitively based global neuronal workspace theory (GNWT), or constitutes a neural correlate of cognitive processing related to task relevance. We also tested GNWT’s prediction that consciousness arises 300–600 ms post stimulus. 

Our results appear to provide evidence that the P3b component is not an NCC, but is instead a neural correlate of cognitive processing related to task relevance, as demonstrated by the P3b’s presence in the task condition and disappearance in the no-task condition. For decoding, we found that accuracy remained above chance until 500 ms in both conditions when comparing between stimulus categories and individual face stimuli, which is consistent with GNWT’s temporal predictions about consciousness’s ignition. Overall, this data implies that some facets of the competing theories are valid, while other aspects are invalid, thus suggesting that cognitivist and sensory based theories should be integrated, instead of entirely opposed to one another.

Two studies examined whether social identity processes, i.e. group identification and social identity threat, amplify the degree to which people attend to social category information in early perception [assessed with event-related brain potentials (ERPs)]. Participants were presented with faces of Muslims and non-Muslims in an evaluative priming task while ERPs were measured and implicit evaluative bias was assessed. Study 1 revealed that non-Muslims showed stronger differentiation between ingroup and outgroup faces in both early (N200) and later processing stages (implicit evaluations) when they identified more strongly with their ethnic group. Moreover, identification effects on implicit bias were mediated by intergroup differentiation in the N200. In Study 2, social identity threat (vs control) was manipulated among Muslims. Results revealed that high social identity threat resulted in stronger differentiation of Muslims from non-Muslims in early (N200) and late (implicit evalua...

Background In intimate relationships, which are characterized by emotional interdependence, partners act as attachment figures which serve emotion regulation functions. The experience of emotions as well as the strategies that partners use to regulate them and to respond to relational experiences, especially during stressful periods, differ greatly according to their attachment orientation. An important aspect in emotion dynamics is emotional inertia, which reflects the degree to which a person's current affective state is resistant to change on a moment-to-moment basis. Inertia has been related to maladaptive emotion regulation strategies, like suppression and rumination, preferentially used by highly anxious and avoidant individuals. The aim of this study is to examine associations between attachment orientations and reports on the experience of positive and negative affect, and their dynamics in daily life across the transition to parenthood. Methods Longitudinal data from a sample of 152 mixed-gender couples collected across the transition to parenthood was analyzed. We predicted that individuals with a more insecure attachment would report more negative and less positive affect, and that their emotional experience would be more resistant to change over time. We explored effects when participants reported feeling stressed. The data suggested that attachment anxiety was associated with less positive and more negative affect and that attachment avoidance was associated with more positive affect. Anxious individuals showed lower emotional inertia and not higher as we expected. Reported stress for anxious and avoidant individuals was significantly associated with more negative but not less positive affect. Conclusions Results are discussed in the light of their impact on couples during stressful periods. Differences between anxiety and avoidance are found, emphasizing the importance of attachment insecurities on the experience of emotion. Furthermore, our findings on momentary fluctuating affect offer complementary insight into the emotional functioning of individuals with different attachment orientations.

The neurobiological alterations resulting from adverse childhood experiences that subsequently may lead to neglectful mothering are poorly understood. Maternal neglect of an infant's basic needs is the most prevalent type of child maltreatment. We tested white matter alterations in neglectful mothers, the majority of whom had also suffered maltreatment in their childhood, and compared them to a matched control group. The two groups were discriminated by a structural brain connectivity pattern comprising inferior fronto-temporo-occipital connectivity, which constitutes a major portion of the face-processing network and was indexed by fewer streamlines in neglectful mothers. Mediation and regression analyses showed that fewer streamlines in the right inferior longitudinal fasciculus tract (ILF-R) predicted a poorer quality of mother-child emotional availability observed during cooperative play and that effect depended on the respective interactions with left and right inferior fronto-occipital fasciculi (IFO-R/L), with no significant impact of psychopathological and cognitive conditions. Volume alteration in ILF-R but not in IFO-L modulated the impact of having been maltreated on emotional availability. The findings suggest the altered inferior fronto-temporal-occipital connectivity, affecting emotional visual processing, as a possible common neurological substrate linking a history of childhood maltreatment with maternal neglect.

The present research investigated the effect of self-uncertainty salience on self-esteem striving, as well as the corresponding self-regulatory processes. Inspired by uncertainty management and meaning maintenance models, we conducted an electroencephalogram experiment to examine how self-uncertainty salience affects performance on self-esteem related tasks, and how it affects neurophysiological activity related to performance monitoring (e.g., error-related negativity, error positivity) on those tasks. Results showed that when self-uncertainty was salient, participants performed better on a task that was high (but not low) in self-esteem relevance, and these participants also displayed a larger amplitude of error positivity after error commissions, which is considered a manifestation of heightened performance monitoring. Overall, these results suggest that self-uncertainty salience increases the need and efforts for self-esteem striving. Further implications are discussed in terms of meaning compensation and self-uncertainty management.

In this paper, we attempt to rehabilitate the notion of role by linking sociological role theory to recent work on motivational, affective, and cognitive neuroscience specifying the internal mechanisms behind motivated action. We argue that there is nothing inherently problematic or retrogressive in the idea of “role,” once its link to a purely normative account of motivated action is severed. Instead, by conceptualizing roles as emerging and persisting around structured reward systems, we are able to incorporate contemporary motivational science such that rewards become the proximate causal mechanisms currently missing in role theory. Consequently, a key implication of our argument is that the best way to link role, action, and structures is by reviving the idea of institutions as literal reward systems, which allows us to envision roles as the mechanisms via which the pursuit and delivery of rewards and goal‐objects are routinized. Implications for a motivational theory of roles, ...

Anxious individuals tend to show a negative affective bias in attention that likely reflects reduced executive control, a cognitive function associated with the inferior frontal cortex (IFC), particularly its posterior segment, pars opercularis. Here, we investigated the relations among gray matter volume in the pars opercularis of IFC, trait anxiety, and negative biases in attention, in healthy participants. Sixty-two adults underwent structural magnetic resonance imaging scanning, completed a trait anxiety measure, and performed an Affective Go/No-Go (AGN) task. IFC volumes were extracted using Freesurfer, and negative bias scores were calculated from AGN performance. Trait anxiety correlated negatively with left IFC volume, and positively with the negative bias in reaction time. Furthermore, trait anxiety mediated the negative relation between the IFC volume and the negative bias measure. Overall, the present findings extend previous understanding of the IFC involvement in anxiety at the structural level, and may inform the development of intervention programs targeting anxiety.

Anxious individuals tend to show a negative affective bias in attention that likely reflects reduced executive control, a cognitive function associated with the inferior frontal cortex (IFC), particularly its posterior segment, pars opercularis. Here, we investigated the relations among gray matter volume in the pars opercularis of IFC, trait anxiety, and negative biases in attention, in healthy participants. Sixty-two adults underwent structural magnetic resonance imaging scanning, completed a trait anxiety measure, and performed an Affective Go/No-Go (AGN) task. IFC volumes were extracted using Freesurfer, and negative bias scores were calculated from AGN performance. Trait anxiety correlated negatively with left IFC volume, and positively with the negative bias in reaction time. Furthermore, trait anxiety mediated the negative relation between the IFC volume and the negative bias measure. Overall, the present findings extend previous understanding of the IFC involvement in anxiet...

Despite functional brain imaging research pointing to the role of prefrontal cortex in cognitive reappraisal, the structural correlates of habitual engagement of reappraisal are unclear. Functional imaging studies of reappraisal have shown broad engagement of bilateral middle frontal cortex (MFC) and left superior frontal cortex (SFC), and specific engagement of the right SFC. However, volumetric studies have not identified clear associations between reappraisal and these regions. This discrepancy between functional and structural studies suggests that broad functional engagement associated with reappraisal might not be detectable at a structural level using highly localized volumetric measures. This study addressed the discrepant structural findings by assessing the relation between reappraisal and grey matter volume, using methods that allow both region-level broad/diffuse assessments (surface-based morphometry), and voxel-level specific/localized (voxel-based morphometry) measures. Results were consistent with diffuse positive volumetric associations with reappraisal in the right MFC and left SFC, and a localized positive volumetric association in the right SFC, thus resolving the discrepancy between functional and structural studies. This study provides novel evidence supporting the idea that functional engagement related to transient manipulations of reappraisal can be linked to structural associations related to habitual engagement of similar operations, within the same brain regions.

Converging evidence identifies trait optimism and the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) as personality and brain factors influencing anxiety, but the nature of their relationships remains unclear. Here, the mechanisms underlying the protective role of trait optimism and of increased OFC volume against symptoms of anxiety were investigated in 61 healthy subjects, who completed measures of trait optimism and anxiety, and underwent structural scanning using magnetic resonance imaging. First, the OFC gray matter volume was associated with increased optimism, which in turn was associated with reduced anxiety. Second, trait optimism mediated the relation between the left OFC volume and anxiety, thus demonstrating that increased gray matter volume in this brain region protects against symptoms of anxiety through increased optimism. These results provide novel evidence about the brain-personality mechanisms protecting against anxiety symptoms in healthy functioning, and identify potential targets ...