Mentalizing from self and friend perspectives: A naturalistic method for assessing neural similarity and relations with shared affect and social anxiety symptoms

This study used a naturalistic neuroscience method to examine relations between perspective, shared affect, social anxiety symptoms and neural similarity in mentalizing regions. Undergraduate students (N = 34, 85% White, 65% Women) came to the lab as platonic friend, same gender-identity pairs and engaged in a guided conversation while each of their views were recorded via mobile eye-trackers. Participants watched clips of the social interaction from both their own and their friend’s view while fMRI data were collected. After each clip, individuals rated their affect. Neural similarity was computed both in a classic sense (participants literally watched the same clip) and a perspective sense (participants both watched the self- or friend-view, making it the same moment but not the exact same clip). This created four conditions: Self Classic (self-view and friend’s friend-view), Friend Classic (friend-view and friend’s self-view), Self Perspective (self-view and friends’s self-view) and Friend Perspective (friend-view and friend’s friend-view). Participants self-reported their social anxiety symptoms and shared affect was computed from individual affect ratings. A multilevel model indicated that when dyads experienced more shared affect than their average, they exhibited more neural similarity during the Self Perspective compared to the Self Classic condition. Additionally, when dyads experienced less shared affect than their average, higher levels of social anxiety symptoms were related to more neural similarity during the Friend Perspective compared to the Self Classic condition. Our results suggest shared affect enhances neural similarity in social interactions and that social anxiety may alter this relation, potentially due to over-mentalizing.