Social cognitive and affective neuroscience
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Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci · Jun 2014
Neural correlates of mindfulness meditation-related anxiety relief.
Anxiety is the cognitive state related to the inability to control emotional responses to perceived threats. Anxiety is inversely related to brain activity associated with the cognitive regulation of emotions. Mindfulness meditation has been found to regulate anxiety. ⋯ Meditation-related activation in these regions exhibited a strong relationship to anxiety relief when compared to ATB. During meditation, those who exhibited greater default-related activity (i.e. posterior cingulate cortex) reported greater anxiety, possibly reflecting an inability to control self-referential thoughts. These findings provide evidence that mindfulness meditation attenuates anxiety through mechanisms involved in the regulation of self-referential thought processes.
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Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci · Jun 2014
Differential patterns of nucleus accumbens activation during anticipation of monetary and social reward in young and older adults.
Recent studies have reported inconsistent results regarding the loss of reward sensitivity in the aging brain. Although such an age effect might be due to a decline of physiological processes, it may also be a consequence of age-related changes in motivational preference for different rewards. Here, we examined whether the age effects on neural correlates of reward anticipation are modulated by the type of expected reward. ⋯ Region of interest analysis revealed an interaction effect of reward type and age group in the right NAcc: enhanced activation to cues of social reward was detected in the older subsample while enhanced activation to cues of monetary reward was detected in the younger subsample. Our results suggest that neural sensitivity to reward-predicting cues does not generally decrease with age. Rather, neural responses in the NAcc appear to be modulated by the type of reward, presumably reflecting age-related changes in motivational value attributed to different types of reward.
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Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci · Jun 2014
Experimental human endotoxemia enhances brain activity during social cognition.
Acute peripheral inflammation with corresponding increases in peripheral cytokines affects neuropsychological functions and induces depression-like symptoms. However, possible effects of increased immune responses on social cognition remain unknown. Therefore, this study investigated the effects of experimentally induced acute inflammation on performance and neural responses during a social cognition task assessing Theory of Mind (ToM) ability. ⋯ Social cognition performance was not affected by acute inflammation. However, altered neural activity was observed during the ToM task after LPS administration, reflected by increased responses in the fusiform gyrus, temporo-parietal junction, superior temporal gyrus and precuneus. The increased task-related neural responses in the LPS condition may reflect a compensatory strategy or a greater social cognitive processing as a function of sickness.
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Behavioral research has demonstrated an advantage for females compared with males in social information processing. However, little is known about sex-related differences in brain activation during understanding of self and others. In the current functional magnetic resonance imaging study, this was assessed in late adolescents (aged 18-19) and young adults (aged 23-25) when making appraisals of self and other as well as reflected self-appraisals. ⋯ The precuneus showed stronger activation in males compared with females specifically during appraisals of others. No differences between late adolescents and young adults were found. These results indicate that sex differences exist in the neural bases of social understanding.
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Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci · Apr 2014
Taking one's time in feeling other-race pain: an event-related potential investigation on the time-course of cross-racial empathy.
Using the event-related potential (ERP) approach, we tracked the time-course of white participants' empathic reactions to white (own-race) and black (other-race) faces displayed in a painful condition (i.e. with a needle penetrating the skin) and in a nonpainful condition (i.e. with Q-tip touching the skin). In a 280-340 ms time-window, neural responses to the pain of own-race individuals under needle penetration conditions were amplified relative to neural responses to the pain of other-race individuals displayed under analogous conditions. ⋯ In a 400-750 ms time-window, the difference between neural reactions to the pain of own-race individuals, localized in the middle frontal gyrus and other-race individuals, localized in the temporoparietal junction was reduced to nil. These findings support a functional, neural and temporal distinction between two sequential processing stages underlying empathy, namely, a race-biased stage of pain sharing/mirroring followed by a race-unbiased stage of cognitive evaluation of pain.