When we think about the start of a successful close relationship, we often imagine two people independently evaluating each other. But what if how much we like someone depends on how much we think they like us? In the current study, we asked how social feedback changes how one thinks about potential romantic partners, as well as how often one thinks about them. We hypothesized that the mentalizing network would play a role in both of these processes. During an fMRI scan, participants watched dating profile videos of eight different target individuals, both before and after receiving social feedback from the target. We found that neural representations in the mentalizing network changed most in response to social feedback that was incongruent with one's initial evaluation, likely because romantic interest in another person is at least partially based on what one believes that other person is thinking. In addition, during a resting-state scan, reactivation frequency in the TPJ increased in response to congruent feedback. Considered together, these results demonstrate that the desire to be aligned with another person motivates both how and how often one thinks about that person, thus highlighting the importance of others' social evaluations in our own.
Emotional reactions to norm violations influence how people trade-off selfish interests against social norms, but it remains unknown which brain regions contribute to integrating physiological (e.g., heart rate) responses to norm violations into the decision process. Here, we provide evidence that the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) attenuates the link between value computations in normative choice and physiological heart rate responses to norm violations. Excitatory brain stimulation over the vmPFC reduced aversion to disadvantageous inequality in an Ultimatum game and increased post-decision confidence after acceptance of unfair monetary splits. Physiological heart rate responses were increased in response to splits perceived as unfair. Enhancing vmPFC excitability reduced the sensitivity to unfairness not by directly reducing heart rate reactions to unfairness but by de-correlating them from the decision process. This suggests that vmPFC moderates the association between physiological heart rate responses to norm violations and trade-offs between self-interests versus norm considerations, highlighting its key role for integrating emotional and cognitive processes in decision making.
Patients with damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) classically develop personality disturbances, emotion dysregulation, and social decision-making deficits that have been likened to psychopathic tendencies ("pseudopsychopathy"). These acquired deficits are thought to entail empathy impairments, viz., identifying other people's emotional experiences and caring about their well-being. However, these impairments may be due to either low motivation to empathize or impaired ability to empathize accurately. We examined whether patients with vmPFC lesions (who have been shown previously to have major deficits in empathy accuracy) would exhibit low empathy motivation. We conducted a lesion group comparison study to assess motivation to empathize. The results showed that damage to the vmPFC was not associated with low empathy motivation (including avoidance of affective or cognitive forms of empathy). Specifically, patients with vmPFC lesions did not avoid empathy any more so than comparison groups (participants with damage outside of the vmPFC or participants with no brain damage). Our findings suggest that patients with vmPFC damage may have preserved empathy motivation, at least in an off-line, laboratory task setting, despite their real-world impairments with deploying empathy. More research is needed to examine whether patients with vmPFC lesions would exhibit normal empathy motivation in everyday contexts.
Parent-child synchrony, the coordination of movements and goals between parents and children, plays a vital role in social development, yet its neural mechanisms and leadership dynamics remain unclear. Using functional near-infrared spectroscopy hyperscanning, 33 parent-child dyads (children 8-15 years) played a tablet-based game ("The Flocking Game") under spontaneous and intentional synchrony instructions. Results revealed that dyads exhibited behavioral synchrony values significantly greater than zero (with zero reflecting no synchrony) even without instruction, and synchrony increased when coordination of movement was explicitly required. Parents led more during spontaneous play, reflecting their natural regulatory role, whereas leadership equalized under intentional instructions. Neural analyses revealed significant inter-brain synchrony across the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), and inferior parietal lobule (IPL). In the intentional condition, stronger parent left-DLPFC coupling with the child IFG or IPL predicted greater behavioral synchrony, while spontaneous synchrony was linked to parent IPL-child IFG synchrony. These results suggest that spontaneous synchrony relies on mirroring within the action observation network, whereas intentional synchrony engages executive control, highlighting complementary neural pathways through which parental leadership shapes goal-directed interaction.
The lateral septum (LS) is a basal forebrain structure extensively studied in rodents, where it regulates social behavior, stress, and motivation. In humans, its subtle anatomy and poor delineation limit systematic investigation with non-invasive imaging. We present the first systematic review of functional neuroimaging studies reporting LS activation in humans. Following PRISMA guidelines and a preregistered protocol, we found 3728 records. After screening, 26 studies met inclusion criteria. LS activations were categorized by behavioral domain, and spatial coordinates mapped for convergence. Reported LS/septal area activation was associated with prosocial processes including empathy, caregiving, trust, cooperation, and charitable decisions. LS activation was also associated with affiliative reward, sexual arousal, and affective states like guilt and gratitude, with alterations noted in depression. Coordinate-based mapping (where available) showed a tentative tendency toward left/anterior localization for social cognition-related activations in the left anterior septal area, though localization varied across studies due to anatomical and methodological challenges. Overall, the literature suggests the LS/septal area may contribute to multiple social-affective and motivational processes, but anatomical specificity remains uncertain. Despite challenges to measure LS function in humans, new neuroimaging techniques may elucidate LS function. This review highlights the LS as an underexplored but potentially critical structure for human socio-emotional and motivational processes, with clinical relevance for psychiatric conditions.
Sensory events resulting from our own actions typically evoke weaker neural responses than externally generated events, a phenomenon known as sensory attenuation. Whether this attenuation also occurs in social contexts-when the outcome of one's action is a reaction of an interaction partner, such as an emotional expression, remains unclear. This EEG study investigated whether causing a humanoid robot (iCub) to display emotional facial expressions leads to sensory attenuation in early visual processing, and whether emotional valence modulates this effect. Participants either chose an object to show to iCub, after which the robot displayed a happy or sad expression, or observed the same expressions triggered by the computer. We found reduced P1 amplitudes for self-generated happy expressions, reflecting sensory attenuation, whereas P1 responses to self-generated sad expressions did not differ from computer-generated sad expressions. Furthermore, higher empathy ratings toward the robot were associated with reduced P1 attenuation for sad expressions. Later components were also influenced by emotional valence (N170, P2, P3) and by whether the expressions were self- or computer-generated (N170, P3), without interaction. Our findings suggest that sensory attenuation can be modulated by the affective relevance of one's actions in social interactions, including interactions with artificial agents.
Emotional expressions play a central role in social communication. The dominant view assumes that emotional expression is a spontaneous consequence of affect. In everyday social life, however, individuals often suppress internally generated emotions. Here, we investigated the behavioral and neural mechanisms underlying decisions about emotional expression, based on the view that emotional expression constitutes a form of decision-making involving evaluation of social context, anticipation of interpersonal consequences, and consideration of social norms. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we scanned 40 participants (22 males, 18 females) while they decided whether to express or suppress their emotions in response to emotionally evocative scenarios. We found that decisions to express emotion were positively modulated by perceived valence and arousal. Valence was associated with activity in the inferior frontal cortex and middle temporal gyrus, whereas arousal was associated with activity in the fusiform and parahippocampal gyri. Moreover, decisions to withhold emotional expression were associated with increased activity in regions implicated in mentalizing and cognitive control, including the right temporoparietal junction and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. Together, these findings suggest that emotional expression reflects a decision-making process integrating affective and contextual information within neural systems supporting social cognition and cognitive control.
The decision to compete is a fundamental choice with significant real-world consequences, yet its underlying neural mechanisms remain poorly understood. This decision requires reasoning about others' abilities and comparing them to one's own-a process susceptible to overconfidence and heavily reliant on the right temporoparietal junction (rTPJ), a key hub for social cognition. Using transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS), we causally investigated the rTPJ's role in competitive willingness. Participants received anodal, cathodal, or sham stimulation over the rTPJ before choosing whether to enter a tournament. Modulating rTPJ activity bidirectionally altered competitive behavior: cathodal (inhibitory) stimulation significantly increased the willingness to compete, whereas anodal (excitatory) stimulation significantly decreased it. Mechanistically, these behavioral shifts were associated with changes in overconfidence-related beliefs; cathodal stimulation inflated overconfidence, while anodal stimulation reduced it. Furthermore, we replicated the classic gender gap and discovered a crucial pattern: the neuromodulatory effect appeared gender-specific in exploratory analyses, with cathodal stimulation boosting willingness in men and anodal suppressing it in women, though the interaction was non-significant. These findings provide the first causal evidence that the rTPJ is a key neural regulator of competitive choice, and its influence may fundamentally differ by gender, requiring future replication.
The relation between attentional control and visual working memory (vWM) has previously been studied with transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS). For example, it has been shown that rhythmic TMS (rhTMS) can enhance attentional control and, consequently, vWM performance, by boosting prefrontal theta rhythm power. However, it remains unclear if the rhTMS protocol used to improve attentional control for neutral valence distractors can do the same for emotional distractors. Moreover, attentional control can be applied in different ways, either by amplifying relevant stimulus representation or by inhibiting distractor processing. In this study, we used rhTMS to increase theta power over the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex in 19 healthy participants during a visual change-detection task. Auditory distractors with neutral and angry prosodies were heard during the task. Electroencephalography was used to measure theta power, contralateral delay activity, which indexes visual item maintenance, and the auditory P2, which indexes distractor processing. rhTMS boosted theta power and improved vWM accuracy compared to the sham condition. Theta boost was associated with lower emotional distractor processing, but not better maintenance. Our results indicate that the mechanism for attentional control of emotional auditory distractors in the vWM context is based on inhibition rather than amplification of relevant items.
Emotional narratives invite listeners into shared cognitive-emotional spaces, yet whether and how a listener's motivational state shapes this convergence remains unknown. Understanding this question is central to accounts of emotional communication, which assume shared processing but rarely examine the individual and contextual factors that modulate it. We recorded magnetoencephalogram (MEG) from 61 participants who listened to anger and fear narratives after an approach or avoidance motivation induction. Source-level intersubject correlation (ISC) of oscillatory envelopes was computed across seven frequency bands in 72 cortical regions, providing spectral specificity unavailable to hemodynamic ISC. Approach motivation enhanced beta-band ISC in left-lateralized temporal networks, and theta ISC bilaterally, consistent with sharpened top-down predictive engagement. Fear narratives produced higher alpha-band ISC than anger narratives in the right-lateralized temporal-parietal regions and the left orbitofrontal cortex, indicating a dissociable sensory-attentional mechanism. Trait behavioral inhibition predicted reduced beta synchrony with the group, particularly when emotional content conflicted with the listener's motivational orientation. Motivational conflict also uniquely sustained shared processing across the narrative, favoring an engagement account over a fluency account. These findings reveal that shared neural processing during emotional narrative comprehension is simultaneously shaped by motivational state, narrative emotion, and dispositional threat sensitivity through parallel oscillatory channels.
Attenuation of neural responses to self- versus externally generated stimuli is widely considered an implicit marker of the Sense of Agency and often interpreted within predictive processing and comparator frameworks. Agency is thought to arise from the integration of multiple cues, including action-effect timing and outcome predictability. How these factors jointly shape electrophysiological correlates of agency remains unclear. In this study, we manipulated the temporal relationship and pitch congruency of sounds generated by button presses to examine their effects on explicit agency judgments and event-related potentials. Sounds were presented up to 120 ms before/after actions, allowing investigation of action-effect proximity irrespective of temporal order and electrophysiological correlates of illusory agency perception. Temporal proximity and outcome congruency strongly influenced agency judgments. While the typical order of action preceding effect was critical, participants reported illusory agency when congruent sounds preceded actions by up to 60 ms, consistent with predictive accounts. Neurally, sounds preceding actions elicited an N200 mismatch response, congruent outcomes evoked a late positive orienting response, and P2 attenuation occurred for temporally proximal events regardless of order. These findings support cue integration accounts by showing that temporal structure and predictability jointly shape agency judgments and their electrophysiological signatures.
Racial-category information in faces is visually and socially salient, and is rapidly extracted by the human brain. Yet, its electrophysiological encoding remains unclear. Event-related potentials findings are mixed, reporting contradictory effects of race on neural responses. To inform this debate, we used fast periodic visual stimulation (FPVS), an alternative objective and implicit method to measure neural face categorization. In Experiment 1, Western European participants viewed a 6 Hz stream of same- or other-race faces with periodic oddball faces from the alternate race. Results showed no above-noise-level race discrimination responses. In Experiment 2, oddball faces were embedded in object streams, presented upright or inverted, to test whether race modulates face categorization. Neural face categorization responses were above noise level for both same- and other-race faces. Importantly, while upright stimuli showed similar responses to both races, inversion selectively reduced responses to same-race faces, resulting in stronger neural responses to other-race faces. These findings suggest that face inversion affects neural responses based on visual expertise with face categories. Overall, our results demonstrate that racial-category information is robustly indexed by FPVS, highlighting this method as a powerful neurofunctional tool to study social vision.
The heartbeat-evoked potential (HEP) is an implicit, electrophysiological marker of cortical heartbeat processing and interoception, with increasing clinical relevance. However, on the scalp, HEP are low-amplitude signals mixed with cardiac field artefacts (CFA), requiring signal processing pipelines to separate HEP from CFA. This review evaluates current analytical approaches and addresses methodological gaps in HEP pipelines. A scoping review of the literature was conducted focusing on previously published HEP studies. This was to extract HEP processing methods and parameters used in EEG (199 included papers) and MEG (8 included papers). Parameters investigated included the HEP window, filters, baseline correction window, epoch timeframes, minimum RR intervals, epoch amplitude rejection threshold, and CFA removal. EEG and MEG studies revealed clear heterogeneity and variability in the methods used to derive HEP. These clear inconsistencies in HEP parameter use and reporting would appear to challenge the level replicability between studies. In order to ensure reproducibility and transparency, publications should report critical values for reliable HEP extraction, emphasising the need for standardised methods to enhance study comparability and reproducibility.
Visually threatening stimuli often carry ambiguous meanings. For example, a gun can be used against an individual as a threat or on their behalf as protection. Experience with such ambiguous stimuli can reshape their neural representations. Yet little is known about how this reorganization unfolds during adolescence, when neural circuits supporting flexible contextual processing are still maturing. This study created a safety-relevant context in which visually threatening stimuli (animals, weapons) acquired meanings related to personal safety, with animals signaling danger and weapons conferring protection. Using 7 T fMRI, we measured neural responses in 33 adolescents (MAge = 14.88 years, 19 females) during passive viewing before (pre-task) and after (post-task) the safety experience. At post-task, protection stimuli elicited greater activation in regions associated with contextual updating and memory retrieval, whereas threat stimuli showed more restricted changes. Both stimulus types showed greater pre-task activation in regions supporting visual processing and stimulus-driven attention, consistent with heightened vigilance toward novel stimuli. Multivoxel pattern classification analysis indicated representational updating for both protection and threat, and convergent neural patterns for stimuli matched in safety value at post-task. These findings provide a framework for understanding how threatening stimuli can be neurally updated as signals of safety following relevant experience.
Successful cooperation requires efficient integration of self and other-related information. Whether hyperbaric oxygen intervention improves cooperative performance under high-altitude hypoxic conditions, and whether such effects depend on interpersonal neural coordination, remains unclear. In this randomized crossover study, 62 dyads completed a cooperative task under both hyperbaric oxygen intervention and high-altitude hypoxic conditions while undergoing functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) hyperscanning. We examined whether hyperbaric oxygen intervention enhanced cooperative performance and whether this effect was associated with interpersonal trust and inter-brain synchrony (IBS). High-trust dyads exhibited greater hyperbaric-oxygen-related cooperation gains. Increases in medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) IBS predicted improvements in cooperation success rate and cooperation efficiency, and both associations were moderated by interpersonal trust: positive associations were observed only in high-trust dyads. Pseudo-dyad analyses further indicated that this effect reflected real interpersonal interaction rather than shared task structure. These findings suggest that the cooperative benefits of hyperbaric oxygen intervention are not uniform but depend on interpersonal relationship quality. mPFC IBS may constitute an important neural correlate of hyperbaric-oxygen-related cooperation gains in high-trust dyads.
Socioemotional skills emerge from coordinated behavioral, autonomic, and neural processes that continue to reorganize across development, yet how these systems jointly support emotion processing and mental health remains unclear. Using a naturalistic movie-watching paradigm, we integrated behavioral, cardiac, and fMRI measures in children (6-14 years) and adults (18-29 years), alongside independent ratings of experienced valence and arousal. Across age groups, positive and negative emotional content elicited changes in subjective experience, heart rate, and corticolimbic activity, including the amygdala, hippocampus, and prefrontal cortex. Despite these shared patterns, group differences emerged. Children reported more positive affect, showed larger heart-rate deceleration, and exhibited stronger recruitment of thalamic and lateral prefrontal regions, areas previously linked to sensory integration and cognitive control. Adults, in contrast, showed greater activation in hippocampal and posterior midline regions, which have previously been associated with memory and self-referential appraisal. During negative emotional content specifically, children preferentially engaged medial prefrontal regions, whereas adults engaged lateral prefrontal regions. Importantly, in adults but not children, models combining behavioral, cardiac, and neural indices explained substantially more variance in internalizing symptoms than any single modality alone. Together, these findings demonstrate that socioemotional experiences evoke coordinated behavioral, autonomic, and neural responses across development, while also revealing age-group differences in their organization and associations with mental well-being.
Hierarchical cognitive control supports flexible behavior guided by abstract goals; however, how emotional information modulates the underlying neural dynamics across hierarchy levels remains unclear. To fill this gap, we designed emotional and non-emotional hierarchical cognitive control paradigms, with hierarchical demands manipulated by varying abstraction levels of task rules. Forty-one participants performed the experiment, with electroencephalography (EEG) and eye-tracking data simultaneously recorded. By aligning EEG with eye-tracking data through time-locked analyses, we characterized oscillatory dynamics of each hierarchy level, integrating single-frequency (power spectral density, PSD) and cross-frequency (phase-amplitude coupling, PAC) features. Results showed that increasing hierarchical demands enhanced PSD across multiple frequency bands in both emotional and non-emotional contexts. Both contexts also exhibited enhanced narrowband delta-beta PAC with increasing abstraction. Importantly, emotional hierarchical demands additionally elicited PAC patterns beyond those in non-emotional contexts, such as delta-alpha and alpha-beta couplings. Topographical clustering revealed that emotion-related PAC activity predominated in fronto-parietal and temporo-occipital regions. These findings suggest that while the brain utilizes general neural dynamics for processing abstract goals, emotional demands recruit additional neural resources to support it. Beyond elucidating how the brain integrates affect with abstract cognitive events, this study offers potential neurodynamic signatures and intervention targets for affective and cognitive disorders.
The transition to parenthood is associated with heightened neural responsiveness to infant cues, particularly to one’s own infant. Yet it remains unclear how this sensitivity changes with caregiving experience. Magnetoencephalography was recorded from 16 first time mothers viewing images of their own infant, an unfamiliar infant, and an unfamiliar adult at two timepoints spanning infancy and early toddlerhood. We examined early orbitofrontal activity (~140 ms), structural face encoding (M170, ~170 ms), and later motivated attention indexed by the late positive potential (LPP, ~300–600 ms). Source-level brain data were analyzed with a depth-weighted minimum-norm estimate. Results showed that early LPP responses in the fusiform cortex and late LPP responses in fusiform and occipital regions were larger for own infant faces at the first session but decreased to the level of other faces by the second session. In contrast, early orbitofrontal activity and M170 responses were not modulated by face type or session, and M170 responses showed high temporal stability. These findings indicate that neural activity associated with motivated attention to one’s own infant attenuates across early motherhood, whereas early responses reflecting perceptual and affective processes remain stable. The findings provide longitudinal evidence for changes in maternal neural reactivity to one’s own infant.
Perceptions of humanness are deeply intertwined with social norms, yet the specific theoretical link between humanness and gender normativity, a primary form of social normativity, remains insufficiently understood. Across four studies (N = 686), we investigated whether humanized faces are implicitly processed as more gender-normative. Study 1 (n = 400) revealed that higher humanness ratings predicted stronger femininity evaluations for female faces and stronger masculinity evaluations for male faces. Study 2 (n = 161), employing a drawing projective test, demonstrated that highly humanized mental prototypes exhibited more gender-typed traits. In Study 3 (n = 92), mouse-tracking revealed that lower Maximum Deviation (MD), an indicator of greater decisional certainty, was linked to evaluations consistent with gender schemas. Study 4 (n = 25) provided electrophysiological evidence: in masculinity-evaluation tasks, low-humanness female faces elicited enhanced N170 and LPP amplitudes, indicating increased structural encoding and motivated attention. In femininity-evaluation tasks, low-humanness faces evoked larger P300, suggesting counter-stereotypic processing. Collectively, these findings demonstrate that humanness perception reinforces gender normativity, as reflected in distinct neural signatures.
Little is known about the neurocognitive underpinnings of forming social connections. In this study, we tested whether default mode network (DMN) inter-brain synchrony (which prior work has linked to interpersonal alignment, or "seeing eye-to-eye") predicts feelings of connection during conversations. Seventy pairs of strangers engaged in shallow or deep conversations while brain activity was measured with functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS). Stranger dyads in the deep condition felt more connected than those in the shallow condition. Greater feelings of connection were associated with increased DMN synchrony, with the right temporoparietal junction (TPJ) subregion of the DMN emerging as the strongest individual predictor across regression analyses and machine learning classification. These findings suggest that DMN synchrony in general and TPJ synchrony in particular may play a key role in strangers coming to "see eye-to-eye" during face-to-face interactions and feeling more socially connected.
