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Being on the social perimeter is not only sad, it is dangerous. Our evolutionary model of the effects of perceived social isolation (loneliness) on the brain as well as a growing body of behavioral research suggests that loneliness promotes short-term self-preservation, including an increased implicit vigilance for social, in contrast to nonsocial, threats. However, this hypothesis has not been tested...
Forming and updating impressions about others is critical in everyday life and engages portions of the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (dMPFC), the posterior cingulate cortex (PCC) and the amygdala. Some of these activations are attributed to “mentalizing” functions necessary to represent people's mental states, such as beliefs or desires. Evolutionary psychology and developmental studies, however,...
Dysfunction of the dopaminergic system leads to motor, cognitive and motivational symptoms in brain disorders such as Parkinson's disease (PD). Moreover, the dopaminergic system plays an important role in social interactions. The dopaminergic input to the basal ganglia (BG) thought to integrate social cues during the planning and execution of voluntary movements remains, however, largely unexplored...
Studies on the neural bases of action perception have largely focused on the perception of individual actions. Little is known about perception of joint actions where two or more individuals coordinate their actions based on a shared intention. In this fMRI study we asked whether observing situations where two individuals act on a shared intention elicits a different neural response than observing...
This study examined whether the grouping of people into meaningful social scenes (e.g., two people having a chat) impacts the basic perceptual analysis of each partaking individual. To explore this issue, we measured neural activity using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while participants sex-categorized congruent as well as incongruent person dyads (i.e., two people interacting in a...
The observation of an action leads to the activation of the corresponding motor plan in the observer. This phenomenon of motor resonance has an important role in social interaction, promoting imitation, learning and action understanding. However, mirror responses not always have a positive impact on our behavior. An automatic tendency to imitate others can introduce interference in action execution...
Observing actions performed by others entails a subliminal activation of primary motor cortex reflecting the components encoded in the observed action. One of the most debated issues concerns the role of this output: Is it a mere replica of the incoming flow of information (kinematic coding), is it oriented to anticipate the forthcoming events (predictive coding) or is it aimed at responding in a...
In spite of considerable progress in the understanding of the neural mechanisms underlying the experience of empathy, the majority of previous investigations have focused on how we share negative affective states (and in particular pain) of others, whereas only few studies have targeted empathy for positive emotions. This bias has precluded addressing one of the central tenets of the shared representations...
People often spontaneously engage in copying each other's postures and mannerisms, a phenomenon referred to as behavioral mimicry. Social psychology experiments indicate that mimicry denotes an implicit affiliative signal flexibly regulated in response to social requirements. Yet, the mediating processes and neural underpinnings of such regulation are largely unexplored. The present functional magnetic...
Observing the pain of others has been shown to elicit greater activation in sensory and emotional areas of the brain suggested to represent a neural marker of empathy. This modulation of brain responses to others' pain is dependent on the race of the observed person, such that observing own-race people in pain is associated with greater activity in the anterior cingulate and bilateral insula cortices...
Biases to favour self-related information over information related to other people have been demonstrated across a range of both high- and low-level tasks, but it is unclear whether these tasks ‘tap’ the same types of self representation. Here we assess results from two patients with damage primarily to (i) left ventro-medial prefrontal (vmPFC) cortex and the insula (patient SC), and (ii) temporo-parietal...
Human interactions are guided by continuous communication among the parties involved, in which verbal communication plays a primary role. However, speech does not necessarily reveal to whom it is addressed, especially for young infants who are unable to decode its semantic content. To overcome such difficulty, adults often explicitly mark their communication as infant-directed. In the present study...
A person can be appraised as an individual or as a member of a social group. In the present study we tested whether the knowledge about social groups is represented independently of the living and non-living things. Patients with frontal and temporal lobe tumors involving either the left or the right hemisphere performed three tasks – picture naming, word-to-picture matching and picture sorting –...
Under theories of embodied emotion, exposure to a facial expression triggers facial mimicry. Facial feedback is then used to recognize and judge the perceived expression. However, the neural bases of facial mimicry and of the use of facial feedback remain poorly understood. Furthermore, gender differences in facial mimicry and emotion recognition suggest that different neural substrates might accompany...
Humans are intensively social primates, therefore many of their actions are dedicated to communication and interaction with other individuals. Despite the progress in understanding the cognitive and neural processes that allow humans to perform cooperative actions, in non-human primates only few studies have investigated the ability to interact with a partner in order to reach a common goal. These...
Understanding other people's point of view is crucial for successful social interaction but can be particularly challenging in situations where the other person's point view conflicts with our own view. Such situations require executive control processes that help us resist interference from our own perspective. In this study, we examined how domain-general these executive processes are. We report...
Social anxiety—the fear of social embarrassment and negative evaluation by others—ranks among people's worst fears, and it is often thought to impair task performance. We investigated the neurocognitive processes through which trait social anxiety relates to task performance, proposing a model of the joint contributions of reactive control, theoretically associated with conflict monitoring and activity...
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