Article
Neurosciences
Mirjam C. M. Wever, Lisanne A. E. M. van Houtum, Loes H. C. Janssen, Wilma G. M. Wentholt, Iris M. Spruit, Marieke S. Tollenaar, Geert-Jan Will, Bernet M. Elzinga
Summary: Eye contact is crucial for the formation and maintenance of social relationships, particularly in parent-child bonds. However, the exact neural and affective mechanisms of eye contact in parent-child relationships are still unknown. This study introduces a task to evaluate parents' neural and affective responses to prolonged direct and averted gaze from their own child, an unfamiliar child, and an unfamiliar adult. The results indicate that prolonged direct gaze improves parents' mood and feelings of connectedness, especially with unfamiliar targets. Neuroimaging results reveal increased brain activity in certain regions when parents see their own child compared to seeing an unfamiliar child or adult. These findings highlight the importance of prolonged eye contact in affiliative processes and provide initial insights into its neural correlates.
Article
Neurosciences
Aidas Aglinskas, Scott L. Fairhall
Summary: The study investigates the cortical network responsible for person-knowledge and its relation to face perception. Participants were presented with famous names and performed various semantic access tasks. Results indicate that the non-perceptual extended subsystem coordinates regions associated with internalized cognition, while prefrontal regions show different coordination patterns.
Article
Behavioral Sciences
Miina Looke, Orsolya Kanizsar, Cecile Guerineau, Paolo Mongillo, Lieta Marinelli
Summary: The ability of dogs to visually track moving objects, even when temporarily invisible, has been explored in two experiments. Results indicate that dogs require prior experience to form expectations about the timing of reappearance, suggesting the use of a low-level mechanism for visual tracking.
Article
Neurosciences
Miriam E. Weaverdyck, Mark A. Thornton, Diana Tamir
Summary: The study found that people use stable models of mental states across different individuals and contexts to understand the mental states of others.
Article
Neurosciences
Junaid S. Merchant, Diana Alkire, Elizabeth Redcay
Summary: Social interactions are crucial for human development, yet there is limited understanding of their underlying neurocognitive mechanisms. This study used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate the brain response during social interactions in children. The results showed similar neural patterns in the temporal poles during mentalizing and peer interactions, suggesting a neurocognitive link between the two. However, other social brain regions exhibited different responses to interactive peers and abstract characters. These findings highlight the importance of studying social-cognitive processes using interactive paradigms.
HUMAN BRAIN MAPPING
(2022)
Article
Psychiatry
Tobias Kube, Karoline Korfer, Jenny Riecke, Julia A. Glombiewski
Summary: This study examined how people adjust their pain expectations when they anticipate a decrease in pain compared to when it is unexpected. The results showed that perceived pain intensity was lower when participants anticipated a decrease in pain and they also adjusted their pain expectations more in this condition. Additionally, experiencing larger discrepancies between expected and experienced pain was associated with increased pain tolerance and ability to cope with pain at a one-week follow-up.
JOURNAL OF PSYCHOSOMATIC RESEARCH
(2022)
Article
Psychology, Multidisciplinary
Wenwu Dai, Zhaolan Li, Ning Jia
Summary: The research aims to investigate the cue sources and cue utilization patterns of social mentalizing during two-person interactions. The results of the experiments showed that self-performance and other performance are significant cues utilized by individuals during social mentalizing.
JOURNAL OF INTELLIGENCE
(2023)
Article
Psychiatry
Wladimir Tantchik, Melissa J. Green, Yann Quide, Susanne Erk, Sebastian Mohnke, Carolin Wackerhagen, Nina Romanczuk-Seiferth, Heike Tost, Kristina Schwarz, Carolin Moessnang, Danilo Bzdok, Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg, Andreas Heinz, Henrik Walter
Summary: This study aimed to replicate previous findings of mentalizing impairment and altered neural responses in schizophrenia, and to investigate its association with domain-general cognitive impairment. The results showed no significant group differences in mentalizing network activation between schizophrenia patients and healthy controls. Verbal intelligence was found to be positively associated with activation of the medial prefrontal cortex, a key region of the mentalizing network. This suggests that verbal intelligence is an important confounding variable in group comparisons and should be considered in future studies on the neural correlates of mentalizing dysfunction in schizophrenia.
SCHIZOPHRENIA RESEARCH
(2023)
Article
Psychology, Developmental
Brittany S. Cassidy, Colleen Hughes, Anne C. Krendl
Summary: Older adults show reduced mentalizing capacities during person perception, which may affect their ability to differentiate outgroup members.
AGING NEUROPSYCHOLOGY AND COGNITION
(2021)
Article
Psychology, Developmental
Amalia M. Skyberg, Stefen Beeler-Duden, Alison M. Goldstein, Christina A. Gancayco, Angeline S. Lillard, Jessica J. Connelly, James P. Morris
Summary: Mentalizing is an essential cognitive function that allows individuals to understand the mental states and intentions of others. This ability develops in childhood and is influenced by cognitive functioning, social environment, and biological factors. Through a developmental neuroimaging epigenetic approach, this study found that OXTRm levels are associated with neural responses and social skills in middle childhood.
DEVELOPMENTAL COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCE
(2022)
Article
Psychology, Clinical
Beatriz Catoira, Frank Van Overwalle, Peter Van Schuerbeek, Hubert Raeymaekers, Elien Heleven, Kris Baetens, Natacha Deroost, Chris Baeken
Summary: Research on the role of the cerebellum in social behavior and its connection to social mentalizing is in its early stages. Social mentalizing involves the ability to attribute mental states to others, and is thought to rely on social action sequences stored in the cerebellum. To investigate this further, we used cerebellar transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) on 23 healthy participants in an MRI scanner, and measured their brain activity while performing a task that required generating sequences involving false and true beliefs, social routines, and non-social events. The results showed that stimulation reduced task performance and decreased brain activation in mentalizing areas, particularly for true belief sequences. These findings support the role of the cerebellum in the mentalizing network and belief mentalizing, advancing our understanding of its involvement in social sequences.
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF CLINICAL AND HEALTH PSYCHOLOGY
(2023)
Article
Neurosciences
Suhas Vijayakumar, Egbert Hartstra, Rogier B. Mars, Harold Bekkering
Summary: Successful social interaction requires humans to predict others' behavior by generating internal models of others based on previous observations. Applying learned group knowledge in predicting individual behavior relies on both a network of regions commonly referred to as the mentalizing network, and a network of regions implicated in representing social knowledge, with different brain areas catering to different functions.
SOCIAL COGNITIVE AND AFFECTIVE NEUROSCIENCE
(2021)
Article
Psychology, Biological
John P. Powers, Nadia Kako, Daniel N. McIntosh, Kateri McRae
Summary: This study aims to investigate how cognitive context can impact emotion regulation through cognitive reappraisal. By introducing an additional mentalizing instruction, we found that the mentalizing instruction did not directly affect the performance of reappraisal, but it interacted with reappraisal at the neural level. The results suggest that mentalizing and reappraisal do engage shared neurocognitive resources, but this overlap may lead to competition rather than facilitation of emotion regulation.
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PSYCHOPHYSIOLOGY
(2022)
Article
Communication
Annie L. Zhang, Hang Lu
Summary: This study explores the effects of two humor styles - pure humor and satire - on audiences' Twitter engagement intentions and attitudes toward mRNA Covid-19 vaccines. The results showed that both pure humor and satire increased audience's expectancy violation and subsequently decreased both outcomes compared to a no humor tweet. Superiority as an individual trait also moderated the relationship between humor styles and both expectancy violation and Twitter engagement. These findings broaden our understanding of different humor styles in science communication on Twitter.
SCIENCE COMMUNICATION
(2022)
Article
Psychology, Clinical
Mark A. Straccia, Adam R. Teed, Perri L. Katzman, Kevin M. Tan, Michael H. Parrish, Michael R. Irwin, Naomi Eisenberger, Matthew D. Lieberman, Benjamin A. Tabak
Summary: Although there are theoretical grounds, this study fails to demonstrate the effects of oxytocin (OT) and vasopressin (AVP) on social cognition in healthy individuals, suggesting that the impact of these neuropeptides may be more limited than initially assumed.
PSYCHOLOGICAL MEDICINE
(2023)
Article
Neurosciences
Jose Sanchez-Bornot, Roberto C. Sotero, J. A. Scott Kelso, Ozguer Simsek, Damien Coyle
Summary: This study proposes a multi-penalized state-space model for analyzing unobserved dynamics, using a data-driven regularization method. Novel algorithms are developed to solve the model, and a cross-validation method is introduced to evaluate regularization parameters. The effectiveness of this method is validated through simulations and real data analysis, enabling a more accurate exploration of cognitive brain functions.
