Cognitive neuroscience of social emotions and implications for psychopathology: examining embarrassment, guilt, envy, and schadenfreude

The neural correlates of guilt highlight preclinical manifestations between bipolar and major depressive disorders

BACKGROUND

Over 25 % of bipolar disorder (BD) patients are misdiagnosed with major depressive disorder (MDD). An urgent need exists for a biomarker to differentiate BD from MDD. Various manifestations and intensities of maladaptive guilt processing might uniquely contribute to the pathogenesis of BD compared to MDD.

METHOD

This study adopted a first-person perspective guilt-provoking functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) task, respectively induced by painful and ambiguous scenarios in 111 individuals: 35 with remitted MDD, 38 with remitted bipolar I disorder (BD-I), and 38 matched controls.

RESULTS

A significant interaction between group and sense of agency in predicting guilt ratings for ambiguous, rather than painful, scenarios. The association between sense of agency and guilt was significant in MDD but not in BD-I patients or controls. Activation in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC), pregenual anterior cingulate cortex (pgACC), and right inferior parietal lobule (IPL) was higher in BD-I than MDD subjects in response to ambiguous scenarios, whereas these were comparable to painful ones. The correlation between guilt ratings and activation in the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC) to ambiguous scenarios was significant in MDD, but not in BD-I or controls. The results of the multivariate pattern classification analysis showed that in the ambiguous scenarios, the accuracy of using brain activation patterns in the dmPFC, pgACC, and IPL to distinguish between participants with MDD and BD-I was 70.0 %, 71.5 %, and 68.7 %, respectively. An additional test of the classification model, employing a combined mask of the three ROIs to distinguish between the two mood disorders in ambiguous scenarios, achieved an accuracy of 78.6 % and an AUC value of 0.84.

CONCLUSIONS

Subjective reports and neural correlates of guilt in ambiguous social situations, as well as a sense of agency, could provide to be a potential biomarker to help distinguish between BD-I and MDD even in the remitted stage.

Early environmental influences on the orbito-frontal cortex function and its effects on behavior

Early-life adversity during pre- and early post-natal phases can impact brain development and lead to maladaptive changes in executive behaviors. This increases the risk for a range of psychopathologies and physical diseases. Importantly, exposure to adversities during these periods is also linked to alterations in the orbito-frontal cortex (OFC) which is a key player in these executive functions. The OFC thus appears to be a central node in this association between early life stress and disease risk. Gaining a clear, and detailed understanding of the association between early life stress, OFC function, and executive behaviors, as well as the underlying mechanisms mediating this association is relevant to inform potential therapeutic interventions. In this paper, we begin by reviewing evidence linking early life adversities to 1) alterations in behaviors regulated by the OFC and 2) changes in OFC anatomy and function. We then present insights into the underlying mechanisms for these changes, stemming from early life adversity models, and highlight important future directions for this line of research.

How sexual objectification marks the brain: fMRI evidence of self-objectification and its harmful emotional consequences

Female Sexual Objectification refers to perceiving and treating women based on their body appearance. This phenomenon may serve as a precursor for dysfunctional behaviors, particularly among females prone to self-objectification and experiencing shame emotions. Understanding this challenging trajectory by disclosing its neural consequences may be crucial for comprehending extreme psychopathological outcomes. However, investigations in this sense are still scarce. The present study explores the neural correlates of female participants' experiences of being objectified and their relationship with self-objectification, emotional responses and individual dispositions in self-esteem, emotion regulation abilities and self-conscious emotion proneness. To this aim, 25 female participants underwent an fMRI experimental session while they were exposed to interpersonal encounters with objectifying or non-objectifying men. Participants' experienced emotions and levels of attention shifted toward their bodies (self-objectification) was reported after each interaction. The results revealed increased brain activity in objectifying contexts, impacting cortical (frontal, occipital and temporal cortex) and subcortical regions (thalamus, and hippocampus) involved in visual, emotion, and social processing. Remarkably, the inferior temporal gyrus emerged as a crucial neural hub associated in opposite ways with self-esteem and the self-conscious emotion of shame, highlighting its role in self-referential processing during social dynamics. This study points out the importance of adopting a neuroscientific perspective for a deeper understanding of sexual objectification, and to shed light on its possible neural consequences.

Neuroanatomical markers of social cognition in neglected adolescents

Growing up in neglectful households can impact multiple aspects of social cognition. However, research on neglect's effects on social cognition processes and their neuroanatomical correlates during adolescence is scarce. Here, we aimed to comprehensively assess social cognition processes (recognition of basic and contextual emotions, theory of mind, the experience of envy and Schadenfreude and empathy for pain) and their structural brain correlates in adolescents with legal neglect records within family-based care. First, we compared neglected adolescents (n = 27) with control participants (n = 25) on context-sensitive social cognition tasks while controlling for physical and emotional abuse and executive and intellectual functioning. Additionally, we explored the grey matter correlates of these domains through voxel-based morphometry. Compared to controls, neglected adolescents exhibited lower performance in contextual emotional recognition and theory of mind, higher levels of envy and Schadenfreude and diminished empathy. Physical and emotional abuse and executive or intellectual functioning did not explain these effects. Moreover, social cognition scores correlated with brain volumes in regions subserving social cognition and emotional processing. Our results underscore the potential impact of neglect on different aspects of social cognition during adolescence, emphasizing the necessity for preventive and intervention strategies to address these deficits in this population.

Lower class competence stereotypes of the upper class increase class conflict: mediation by intergroup envy and moderation by upward social mobility belief

Background

With increasing gaps between the rich and poor, potential risk factors for class conflict have attracted increasing attention from researchers. Although cognitive factors are known to be significant predictors of class-conflict behavior, limited attention has been paid to competence stereotypes of the upper class. When considering economic inequality, people pay more attention to competence stereotypes of the upper class, which may have adverse effects. This study aimed to investigate the relationship between competence stereotypes held by the lower class about the upper class and class conflict, and to test the mediating role of intergroup envy in this relationship and the moderating role of upward social mobility belief.

Methods

Data were collected from a convenience sample from a comprehensive university in China. Based on scores on subjective and objective class scales, 284 lower-class college students (103 males and 181 females) aged 18-24 were selected to participate (both their subjective and objective scores were lower than 3 points). Their endorsement of upper-class competence stereotypes, intergroup envy, upward social mobility beliefs, and class conflict were measured using a well-validated self-report questionnaire.

Results

The main data were analyzed using correlation analysis, the SPSS macro PROCESS (Model 7), and simple slope analysis. The results show a significant positive correlation between competence stereotypes held by lower-class college students toward the higher class and class conflict, and this connection was mediated by intergroup envy. Moreover, the indirect effect of intergroup envy on this link was moderated by upward social mobility beliefs; this effect was stronger for college students with lower upward social mobility beliefs.

Conclusion

This study broadens our understanding of how and when competence stereotypes among the lower class concerning the upper class are related to class conflict. Researchers and policymakers should pay special attention to competence stereotypes of the upper class, especially intergroup envy and class conflict among lower-class individuals with lower levels of upward social mobility beliefs.

Two Sides of the Same Coin in Female Borderline Personality Disorder: Self-Reported Guilt and Shame and Their Neurofunctional Correlates

OBJECTIVE

Patients with borderline personality disorder (BPD) report to be especially prone to social emotions like shame and guilt. At the same time, these emotions seem to play an important role in BPD pathology. The present study aimed to deepen the knowledge about the processes behind shame and guilt in patients with BPD.

METHODS

Twenty patients with BPD and twenty healthy controls (HCs) took part in an experiment that induced shame and guilt by imagining scenarios during scanning using functional brain imaging. Participants also filled out self-report questionnaires and took part in diagnostic interviews.

RESULTS

BPD patients reported more proneness to guilt but not to shame than the HCs. There was no difference in the self-reported intensity rating of experimentally induced emotions between the groups. Between-group contrast of neural signals in the shame condition revealed a stronger activation of cingulate and fusiform gyrus for the BPD patients compared to the controls, and a more pronounced activation in the lingual gyrus and cuneus for the HCs. In the guilt condition, activation in the caudate nucleus, the fusiform gyrus, and the posterior cingulate cortex was stronger in BPD patients, while HC showed stronger activations in cuneus, lingual gyrus, and fronto-temporal regions.

CONCLUSIONS

Differences in the neuro-functional processes between BPD patients and HC were found, even though the two groups did not differ in their self-report of subjective proneness to guilt and emotional intensity of shame and guilt during the experiment. While the HCs may be engaged more by the emotional scenarios themselves, the BPD patients may be more occupied with cognitive regulatory and self-referential processing.

Emotion recognition in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis in a dynamic environment

OBJECTIVE

The aim of our study was to measure the ability of ALS patients to process dynamic facial expressions as compared to a control group of healthy subjects and to correlate this ability in ALS patients with neuropsychological, clinical and neurological measures of the disease.

METHODS

Sixty-three ALS patients and 47 healthy controls were recruited. All the ALS patients also underwent i) the Geneva Emotion Recognition Test (GERT) in which ten actors express 14 types of dynamic emotions in brief video clips with audio, ii) the Edimburgh Cognitive and Behavioral ALS Screen (ECAS) test; iii) the ALS Functional Rating Scale Revised (ALSFRS-R) and iv) the Medical Research Council (MRC) for the evaluation of muscle strength. All the healthy subjects enrolled in the study underwent the GERT.

RESULTS

The recognition of irritation and pleasure was significantly different between ALS patients and the control group. The amusement, despair, irritation, joy, sadness and surprise had been falsely recognized differently between the two groups. Specific ALS cognitive impairment was associated with bulbar-onset phenotype (OR = 14,3889; 95%CI = 3,96-52,16). No association was observed between false emotion recognition and cognitive impairment (F(1,60)=,56,971, p=,45,333). The number of categorical errors was significantly higher in the ALS patients than in the control group (27,66 ± 7,28 vs 17,72 ± 5,29; t = 8723; p = 0.001).

CONCLUSIONS

ALS patients show deficits in the dynamic processing of a wide range of emotions. These deficits are not necessarily associated with a decline in higher cognitive functions: this could therefore lead to an underestimation of the phenomenon.

Transcranial direct current stimulation suggests a causal role of the medial prefrontal cortex in learning social hierarchy

Social hierarchies can be inferred through observational learning of social relationships between individuals. Yet, little is known about the causal role of specific brain regions in learning hierarchies. Here, using transcranial direct current stimulation, we show a causal role of the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) in learning social versus non-social hierarchies. In a Training phase, participants acquired knowledge about social and non-social hierarchies by trial and error. During a Test phase, they were presented with two items from hierarchies that were never encountered together, requiring them to make transitive inferences. Anodal stimulation over mPFC impaired social compared with non-social hierarchy learning, and this modulation was influenced by the relative social rank of the members (higher or lower status). Anodal stimulation also impaired transitive inference making, but only during early blocks before learning was established. Together, these findings demonstrate a causal role of the mPFC in learning social ranks by observation.

Common and distinct equity preferences in children and adults

Fairness plays a crucial role in children's social life and has garnered considerable attention. However, previous research and theories primarily examined the development of children's fairness behaviors in the conflict between self-interest motivation and fairness-complying motivation, neglecting the influence of advantage-seeking motivation. Moreover, despite the well-established role of gain/loss frame in human decision-making, it remains largely unclear whether the framing effect modulates fairness behaviors in children. It was hypothesized that children would exhibit advantage-seeking motivation resulting in more selfish behaviors in the loss context. To examine the hypothesis, we combined an adapted dictator game and computational modeling to investigate various motivations underlying fairness behaviors of children in both loss and gain contexts and to explore the developmental directions by contrasting children and adults. In addition, the current design enabled the dissociation between fairness knowledge and behaviors by asking participants to decide for themselves (the first-party role) or for others (the third-party role). This study recruited a total of 34 children (9-10 years, Mage = 9.82, SDage = 0.38, 16 females) and 31 college students (Mage = 19.81, SDage = 1.40, 17 females). The behavioral results indicated that children behaved more selfishly in first-party and more fairly in third-party than adults, without any significant framing effects. The computational results revealed that both children and adults exhibited aversion to advantageous and disadvantageous inequity in third-party. However, they showed distinct preferences for advantageous inequity in first-party, with advantage-seeking preferences among children and aversion to advantageous inequity among adults. These findings contribute to a deeper understanding of children's social preferences and their developmental directions.

The positive and negative emotion functions related to loneliness: a systematic review of behavioural and neuroimaging studies

Loneliness is associated with high prevalences of major psychiatric illnesses such as major depression. However, the underlying emotional mechanisms of loneliness remained unclear. We hypothesized that loneliness originates from both decreases in positive emotional processing and increases in negative emotion processing. To test this, we conducted a systematic review of 29 previous studies (total participants n = 19 560, mean age = 37.16 years, female proportion = 59.7%), including 18 studies that included questionnaire measures of emotions only, and 11 studies that examined the brain correlates of emotions. The main findings were that loneliness was negatively correlated with general positive emotions and positively correlated with general negative emotions. Furthermore, limited evidence indicates loneliness exhibited negative and positive correlations with the brain positive (e.g. the striatum) and negative (e.g. insula) emotion systems, respectively, but the sign of correlation was not entirely consistent. Additionally, loneliness was associated with the structure and function of the brain emotion regulation systems, particularly the prefrontal cortex, but the direction of this relationship remained ambiguous. We concluded that the existing evidence supported a bivalence model of loneliness, but several critical gaps existed that could be addressed by future studies that include adolescent and middle-aged samples, use both questionnaire and task measures of emotions, distinguish between general emotion and social emotion as well as between positive and negative emotion regulation, and adopt a longitudinal design that allows us to ascertain the causal relationships between loneliness and emotion dysfunction. Our findings provide new insights into the underlying emotion mechanisms of loneliness that can inform interventions for lonely individuals.

Overactivation of posterior insular, postcentral and temporal regions during preserved experience of envy in autism

Social emotions are critical to successfully navigate in a complex social world because they promote self-regulation of behaviour. Difficulties in social behaviour are at the core of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). However, social emotions and their neural correlates have been scarcely investigated in this population. In particular, the experience of envy has not been addressed in ASD despite involving neurocognitive processes crucially compromised in this condition. Here, we used an fMRI adapted version of a well-validated task to investigate the subjective experience of envy and its neural correlates in adults with ASD (n = 30) in comparison with neurotypical controls (n = 28). Results revealed that both groups reported similarly intense experience of envy in association with canonical activation in the anterior cingulate cortex and the anterior insula, among other regions. However, in participants with ASD, the experience of envy was accompanied by overactivation of the posterior insula, the postcentral gyrus and the posterior superior temporal gyrus, regions subserving the processing of painful experiences and mentalizing. This pattern of results suggests that individuals with ASD may use compensatory strategies based on the embodied amplification of pain and additional mentalizing efforts to shape their subjective experience of envy. Results have relevant implications to better understand the heterogeneity of this condition and to develop new intervention targets.

Guilt in alcohol use: A systematic review

For decades, alcohol use disorder has been investigated in an attempt to understand its processes and implications. However, among all of the factors involved in alcohol use disorder, the role of guilt in alcohol use remains poorly explained, with many contradictory results. Therefore, the purpose of this review is to conduct a systematic analysis of the literature from 1990 to 2022 to review the studies investigating the link between guilt and alcohol consumption. Using the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) method, 31 studies were included in this review. The results of this work enable to highlight the plurality of guilt that has been studied in the literature. Grouped in two categories: state guilt and trait guilt, they seem to have diverse implications towards alcohol use or misuse. Guilt proneness seems to act as a protective factor towards alcohol use, except for the few studies conducted on a clinical population. Numerous studies indicated that state guilt is deleterious toward alcohol use, even if some results are contradictory. Furthermore, this work allows us to shed light on the limits of the studies currently carried out, and thus to propose new directions for future studies.

Moral Emotions and Their Brain Structural Correlates Across Neurodegenerative Disorders

BACKGROUND

Although social cognition is compromised in patients with neurodegenerative disorders such as behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD) and Alzheimer's disease (AD), research on moral emotions and their neural correlates in these populations is scarce. No previous study has explored the utility of moral emotions, compared to and in combination with classical general cognitive state tools, to discriminate bvFTD from AD patients.

OBJECTIVE

To examine self-conscious (guilt and embarrassment) and other-oriented (pity and indignation) moral emotions, their subjective experience, and their structural brain underpinnings in bvFTD (n = 31) and AD (n = 30) patients, compared to healthy controls (n = 37). We also explored the potential utility of moral emotions measures to discriminate bvFTD from AD.

METHODS

We used a modified version of the Moral Sentiment Task measuring the participants' accuracy scores and their emotional subjective experiences.

RESULTS

bvFTD patients exhibited greater impairments in self-conscious and other-oriented moral emotions as compared with AD patients and healthy controls. Moral emotions combined with general cognitive state tools emerged as useful measures to discriminate bvFTD from AD patients. In bvFTD patients, lower moral emotions scores were associated with lower gray matter volumes in caudate nucleus and inferior and middle temporal gyri. In AD, these scores were associated with lower gray matter volumes in superior and middle frontal gyri, middle temporal gyrus, inferior parietal lobule and supramarginal gyrus.

CONCLUSION

These findings contribute to a better understanding of moral emotion deficits across neurodegenerative disorders, highlighting the potential benefits of integrating this domain into the clinical assessment.

Behavioral Variant Frontotemporal Dementia and Social and Criminal Transgressions

OBJECTIVE

Behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD) is associated with social and criminal transgressions; studies from countries around the world have documented such behavior in persons with this condition. An overview and analysis of social and criminal transgressions in bvFTD and their potential neurobiological mechanisms can provide a window for understanding the relationship of antisocial behavior and the brain.

METHODS

This review evaluated the literature on the frequency of social and criminal transgressions in bvFTD and the neurobiological disturbances that underlie them.

RESULTS

There is a high frequency of transgressions among patients with bvFTD due to impairments in neurocognition, such as social perception, behavioral regulation, and theory of mind, and impairments in social emotions, such as self-conscious emotions and empathy. Additionally, there is significant evidence for a specific impairment in an innate sense of morality. Alterations in these neurobiological processes result from predominantly right-hemisphere pathology in frontal (ventromedial, orbitofrontal, inferolateral frontal), anterior temporal (amygdala, temporal pole), limbic (anterior cingulate, amygdala), and insular regions.

CONCLUSIONS

Overlapping disturbances in neurocognition, social emotions, and moral reasoning result from disease in the mostly mesial and right-sided frontotemporal network necessary for responding emotionally to others and for behavioral control. With increased sophistication in neurobiological interventions, future goals may be the routine evaluation of these processes among individuals with bvFTD who engage in social and criminal transgressions and the targeting of these neurobiological mechanisms with behavioral, pharmacological, and other interventions.

Consumer impulse buying behavior: the role of confidence as moderating effect

Many indicators have been proposed that can contribute to impulse buying. However, few studies have examined the role of social comparison in impulse buying, materialism, and negative affect, and even less is known about the underlying processes that may moderate these relationships. The objective of this study was to create a framework that included social comparison, materialism, negative affect, impulse buying, and the moderator variable confidence in Vietnamese e-commerce. A total of 249 completed questionnaires were received from young people who frequently shop online. The study used a structural model and experimentally analyzed the links between materialism, social comparison, impulse buying, and negative affect, and how the moderating variable confidence influenced these interactions. The study finds that social comparison has a significant influence on materialism but has no impact on negative affect. However, negative affect significantly influences impulse buying. Materialism also has an impact on negative affect and impulse buying. Additionally, confidence has a beneficial moderating effect on the relationship between social comparison and impulse buying as well as social comparison and materialism. The limitations and implications of both the scientific and managerial aspects of the study were also addressed. The results will improve marketers’ understanding of impulse buying behaviors by evaluating the connection between materialism and negative affect, which will allow them to plan effective marketing strategies to increase future impulse buying and profits.

Resilience in the Ranks: Trait Mindfulness and Self-Compassion Buffer the Deleterious Effects of Envy on Mental Health Symptoms among Public Safety Personnel

Public safety personnel (PSP) face frequent stressors that increase their risk of developing symptoms of depression and anxiety. In addition to being exposed to potentially traumatic events, PSP trainees may face a compounded risk of developing mental health symptoms, as their training environments are conducive to social comparisons and the resultant painful emotion of envy. Envy is associated with numerous negative health and occupational outcomes. Fortunately, there are several individual difference factors associated with increased emotional regulation, and such factors may offer resilience against the damaging mental health effects of envy. In this study, we examined the interplay between dispositional mindfulness, self-compassion, and dispositional envy in predicting job satisfaction, stress, experience of positive and negative emotions, subjective resilience, and symptoms of depression and anxiety in a sample of police trainees (n = 104). A substantial minority of trainees reported clinically significant symptoms of depression (n = 19:18.3%) and anxiety (n = 24:23.1%) in accordance with the cut-off scores on screening measures. Consistent with hypotheses, dispositional envy was associated with lower job satisfaction, greater stress, and greater anxiety and depression. Furthermore, envy was associated with higher negative emotions, lower positive emotions, and lower subjective resilience. Dispositional mindfulness and self-compassion were associated with greater job satisfaction, lower stress, and reduced symptoms of depression and anxiety. Moreover, mindfulness and self-compassion were both associated with lower negative emotions, higher positive emotions, and subjective resilience. The associations between envy and the relevant job and mental health outcomes were significantly diminished after controlling for mindfulness and self-compassion. This suggests that these protective traits may serve as transdiagnostic buffers to the effects of envy on mental health. The results of this study confirmed the damaging effects of envy and suggested the potential remediation of these effects through the cultivation of mindfulness and self-compassion.

Differentiating distinct and converging neural correlates of types of systemic environmental exposures

Systemic environmental disadvantage relates to a host of health and functional outcomes. Specific structural factors have seldom been linked to neural structure, however, clouding understanding of putative mechanisms. Examining relations during childhood/preadolescence, a dynamic period of neurodevelopment, could aid bridge this gap. A total of 10,213 youth were recruited from the Adolescent Brain and Cognitive Development study. Self-report and objective measures (Census and Federal bureau of investigation metrics extracted using geocoding) of environmental exposures were used, including stimulation indexing lack of safety and high attentional demands, discrepancy indexing social exclusion/lack of belonging, and deprivation indexing lack of environmental enrichment. Environmental measures were related to cortical thickness, surface area, and subcortical volume regions, controlling for other environmental exposures and accounting for other brain regions. Self-report (|β| = .04-.09) and objective (|β| = .02-.06) environmental domains related to area/thickness in overlapping (e.g., insula, caudal anterior cingulate), and unique regions (e.g., for discrepancy, rostral anterior and isthmus cingulate, implicated in socioemotional functions; for stimulation, precuneus, critical for cue reactivity and integration of environmental cues; and for deprivation, superior frontal, integral to executive functioning). For stimulation and discrepancy exposures, self-report and objective measures showed similarities in correlate regions, while deprivation exposures evidenced distinct correlates for self-report and objective measures. Results represent a necessary step toward broader work aimed at establishing mechanisms and correlates of structural disadvantage, highlighting the relevance of going beyond aggregate models by considering types of environmental factors, and the need to incorporate both subjective and objective measurements in these efforts.

Socioeconomic status impacts cognitive and socioemotional processes in healthy ageing

Socioeconomic status (SES) negatively impacts cognitive and executive functioning in older adults, yet its effects on socioemotional abilities have not been studied in this population. Also, evidence on neurocognitive processes associated with ageing primarily comes from Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (WEIRD) populations, hindering the generalization of findings to persons from upper-middle- and low-middle-income countries, such as those of Latin America. Here, we compared the performance of low- and high-SES older adults from Argentina in cognitive state, executive functions, social cognition (emotion recognition and theory of mind), and counter-empathic social emotions (envy and Schadenfreude; displeasure at others' fortune and pleasure at others' misfortune, respectively). Subsequently, we developed a path analysis to test the relationship among those variables in a theoretically plausible model and tested the main paths via multiple regression analyses. Relative to the high-SES group, low-SES older adults showed poorer performance on all assessed domains. Convergent evidence from covariance analysis, path analysis, and linear regressions suggested that low-SES impact on socioemotional processes was not primary but mediated by cognitive and executive impairment. These findings offer the first characterization of SES impacts on cognitive and socioemotional processes in a non-WEIRD population and have relevant equity-related implications for brain health.

Different drives of herding: An exploratory study of motivations underlying social conformity

We often align our behaviors, attitudes, and opinions in line with a majority of others, a phenomenon known as "social conformity." A seminal framework has proposed that conformity behaviors are mainly driven by three fundamental motives: a desire to gain more information to be accurate, to obtain social approval from others, and to maintain a favorable self-concept. However, previous studies usually have interpreted conformity behaviors as driven by one motive or another, largely ignoring the fact that human behaviors could be concurrently induced by multiple and even conflicting motivations. Adopting a typical conformity paradigm widely used in previous studies, we explored distinct and concurrent motives underlying the same conformity behavior, combining personality and individual differences with more nuanced analyses of observed conformity behaviors. Our findings provide novel evidence to show that three motivations exist within a single conformity behavior, suggesting that multiple motivations drive the conformity concurrently. These findings provide a potential solution for the extensive debate about what drives human social conformity and help to better understand the conformity behavior in daily life.

Self-Conscious Emotions and the Right Fronto-Temporal and Right Temporal Parietal Junction

For more than two decades, research focusing on both clinical and non-clinical populations has suggested a key role for specific regions in the regulation of self-conscious emotions. It is speculated that both the expression and the interpretation of self-conscious emotions are critical in humans for action planning and response, communication, learning, parenting, and most social encounters. Empathy, Guilt, Jealousy, Shame, and Pride are all categorized as self-conscious emotions, all of which are crucial components to one’s sense of self. There has been an abundance of evidence pointing to the right Fronto-Temporal involvement in the integration of cognitive processes underlying the expression of these emotions. Numerous regions within the right hemisphere have been identified including the right temporal parietal junction (rTPJ), the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), and the inferior parietal lobule (IPL). In this review, we aim to investigate patient cases, in addition to clinical and non-clinical studies. We also aim to highlight these specific brain regions pivotal to the right hemispheric dominance observed in the neural correlates of such self-conscious emotions and provide the potential role that self-conscious emotions play in evolution.

The Effect of Malicious Envy on Schadenfreude When Schadenfreude Is Elicited Through Social Comparisons

Previous studies have investigated whether envy, particularly malicious envy, increases feelings of schadenfreude and whether this effect is evident in both gain and loss frames. However, as a social-comparison-based emotion, schadenfreude was not investigated through social comparisons in these previous studies. Thus, the present study aimed to investigate whether malicious envy influences schadenfreude when schadenfreude is elicited in the context of precise and ambiguous social comparisons. To address this issue, participants in the present study were asked to play a monetary game with several other players. In the experimental condition, participants gained less or lost more than the other player; in the control condition, both the participants and the player gained little or lost much. Subsequently, the participants observed that the player encountered a misfortune, that is, gained less or lost more money than the participant. The results showed that when participants knew the exact amount of monetary gained and lost by themselves and the other player (i.e., precise social comparisons), malicious envy increased feelings of schadenfreude only in the loss frame rather than in the gain frame. More importantly, malicious envy turned out to reduce feelings of schadenfreude in both gain and loss frames, when participants did not know the exact amount (i.e., ambiguous social comparisons). The findings provide novel evidence that malicious envy does not always increase schadenfreude particularly when schadenfreude is elicited through social comparisons.

Psychopathic traits mediate guilt-related anterior midcingulate activity under authority pressure

Coercive power has different effects on individuals, and which were unable to be fully addressed in Milgram’s famous studies on obedience to authority. While some individuals exhibited high levels of guilt-related anxiety and refused orders to harm, others followed coercive orders throughout the whole event. The lack of guilt is a well-known characteristic of psychopathy, and recent evidence portrays psychopathic personalities on a continuum of clustered traits, while being pervasive in a significant proportion in the population. To investigate whether psychopathic traits better explain discrepancies in antisocial behavior under coercion, we applied a virtual obedience paradigm, in which an experimenter ordered subjects to press a handheld button to initiate successive actions that carry different moral consequences, during fMRI scanning. Psychopathic traits modulated the association between harming actions and guilt feelings on both behavioral and brain levels. This study sheds light on the individual variability in response to coercive power.

Context-based interpersonal relationship modulates social comparison between outcomes: an event-related potential study

Social comparison is a common behavior that largely determines people's experience of decision outcome. Previous research has showed that interpersonal relationship plays a pivotal role in social comparison. In the current study, we investigated whether the manipulation of context-based relationship would affect participants' comparison of self-outcome and other-outcome. Participants first finished a trust game with likeable (dislikeable) partner and then they were involved in a gambling task and observed the outcomes for themselves and for partners. According to self-reports, participants were more satisfied with likeable partner's gains than losses only when they received gains, but they were always more satisfied with dislikeable player's losses compared to gains. Event-related potentials including the feedback-related negativity (FRN), P3 and late positive component (LPC) were sensitive to context-based relationship. Specifically, the prediction error signal (indexed by the FRN) was largest when participants received losses but dislikeable player received gains. Meanwhile, the P3 indicates that participants had stronger motivation to outperform dislikeable player. Finally, the LPC was larger when participants received the same outcomes with dislikeable players. In general, our results support the key point of the self-evaluation maintenance model that personal closeness modulates subjective sensitivity when drawing a comparison of one's outcomes with other's outcomes.

Neuroanatomy of complex social emotion dysregulation in adolescent offenders

Social emotions require the correct integration of emotional, cognitive, and social processes and are critical for complex social interactions. Adolescent criminal offenders (AOs) show abnormalities in the experience of basic emotions. However, most research has focused solely on basic emotions, neglecting complex social emotions that could be critical for social reintegration. The purpose of this study was to investigate the behavioral and neural correlates of social emotions (envy and Schadenfreude) in AOs. We explored the experience of complex social emotions, as well as their anatomical correlates, in AOs (n = 19) and a nonoffenders control group (NOs, n = 20). Additionally, we assessed the relationship between social emotions, executive functions (EFs), and fluid intelligence (FI). Structural brain imaging was obtained in all participants. The results showed that AOs had significantly lower envy and Schadenfreude ratings and exhibited lower performance in EFs compared with NOs. The measurement of EFs relied on the INECO frontal screening (IFS). Experiencing fewer social emotions was associated with diminished EFs but not with FI. Moreover, in AOs, reduced levels of envy and Schadenfreude were linked with reduced gray matter volumes in regions subserving mentalizing abilities (inferior parietal lobe and precuneus) and socioemotional processing (inferior and middle temporal regions), as well as key hubs of the executive frontoparietal network (inferior parietal lobule, orbital and rectus gyri). Additional analysis on the AOs revealed no associations between the type of crime and our variables of interest (EFs, FI and social emotions). Our findings are the first to provide evidence on abnormalities in the experience of social emotions in AOs that are associated with neurocognitive markers of social cognition and EFs. Understanding social emotions and their abnormalities (under-experience) as complex intertwined processes may have important future translational implications, including risk prediction for social adaptation/reintegration, sociocognitive targeted interventions, and skill training for social emotions in vulnerable populations.

Self-Conscious Emotion Processing in Autistic Adolescents: Over-Reliance on Learned Social Rules During Tasks with Heightened Perspective-Taking Demands May Serve as Compensatory Strategy for Less Reflexive Mentalizing

Autistic adolescents experience a secondary wave of social cognitive challenges which impact interpersonal success. We investigated self-conscious emotion (SCE) processing in autistic and neurotypical adolescents. Participants watched videos of peers acting embarrassed and proud and rated inferred and empathic SCEs. We compared intensity ratings across groups and conducted correlations with social cognitive abilities and autistic features. Autistic adolescents recognized SCEs and felt empathic SCEs; however, they made atypical emotion attributions when perspective-taking demands were high, which more strongly reflected the situational context. Atypical attributions were associated with perspective-taking difficulties and autistic feature intensity. An over-reliance on contextual cues may reflect a strict adherence to learned social rules, possibly compensating for less reflexive mentalizing, which may underlie interpersonal challenges in ASD.

A study on the embarrassment of senders who missend emojis with opposite meanings on social apps: taking WeChat as an example

With the increasing popularity of social apps, sending emojis has become a very common way of expressing one’s emotions. However, situations often arise when people send the wrong emoji by mistake, or sometimes even an emoji with an opposite meaning, which can cause embarrassment to the sender. Taking WeChat as an example, which is widely used in Chinese communities, this study summarizes 10 types of dialogue situations in which the meaning of an emoji is wrongly sent and 12 types of emotional components that are related to embarrassment. The purpose of this study was to analyze the extent to which the 12 emotional components that are associated with embarrassment actually explain what embarrassment is, as well as the different degrees of embarrassment among the different genders and age groups. The results showed that (1) among the emotional components of embarrassment, shame has the highest explanation degree for embarrassment; (2) males are more likely to be affected by embarrassment than females; and (3) users aged 18–25 and 26–30 years are more likely to be affected by embarrassment than those aged between 31 and 40 when they mistakenly send WeChat emojis. This study provides a reference value for their sustainable psychological impact on social app users.

Schadenfreude, malicious and benign envy are associated with low body mass index in restrictive-type anorexia nervosa

PURPOSE

According to the Cognitive-Interpersonal Maintenance Model of anorexia nervosa, social factors are involved in the maintenance and development of this disorder. Therefore, this study aimed to test whether patients with restrictive-type anorexia nervosa (AN-R) experience malicious envy (negative emotions associated with the wish that others lack their superior quality), benign envy (negative emotions associated with the desire to reach and obtain the others' superior quality) and Schadenfreude (pleasure at the misfortunes of others) with a higher intensity than healthy controls (HC).

METHODS

26 AN-R patients and 32 HC completed scenarios that aimed to induce envy and Schadenfreude and completed questionnaires measuring envy, self-esteem and social comparison.

RESULTS

AN-R patients reported more benign envy than HC. Interestingly, higher body mass index (BMI) was associated with less Schadenfreude, malicious and benign envy in AN-R only.

CONCLUSIONS

This study shows that AN-R patients present higher motivation to evolve when facing others' superior quality (i.e., benign envy). It also underlines the importance of considering social factors in the maintenance of AN-R and the role of BMI when examining emotions related to others' fortune.

LEVEL OF EVIDENCE

Level III, case-control analytic study.

Individual differences in envy experienced through perspective-taking involves functional connectivity of the superior frontal gyrus

Envy is the painful or resentful awareness of another’s advantage combined with a desire to possess that same advantage. Recent neuroscientific research has begun to shed light on the brain regions that process the experience of envy, including regions of the prefrontal cortex involved in emotional processing and social cognition. It is still unclear, however, which regions of the brain are functionally connected during the experience of envy. We recorded functional neuroimaging data while inducing simulated envy in participants, experienced through a perspective-taking hypothetical scenario task. In this task, participants took the perspective of a protagonist portrayed in a written description and compared themselves to either i) a self-similar/superior individual, ii) a self-dissimilar/superior individual, or iii) a self-dissimilar/average individual. During each comparison, participants also reported how much envy they experienced while taking the protagonists perspective. We demonstrate an inverse relationship in the connectivity of the left superior frontal gyrus to both the right supramarginal gyrus and the precuneus with respect to self-reported envy ratings across participants. In other words, we show that the greater the functional connectivity that the left superior frontal gyrus shares with the right supramarginal gyrus and precuneus, the less reported envy a participant experiences. Overall, our results are in line with previous research implicating the superior frontal gyrus in the reappraisal of negative emotions and extend these findings by showing this region is also involved in modulating the simulated experience of the social comparative, negative emotion of envy.

The temporal course of vicarious embarrassment: An electrophysiological study

Vicarious embarrassment as a social pain emotion has been studied from cognitive and neuroimaging perspectives. However, the dynamic time course of vicarious embarrassment remains unclear. We conducted an event-related potential (ERP) study to investigate the temporal dynamics of vicarious embarrassment and examine the role of perspective-taking in an emotional judgment task. The ERP results showed that vicarious embarrassment evoked more negative MFN (250-310 ms) and N400 (400-520 ms) components than the neutral condition over the frontal region. The time-frequency analysis results showed that, in the 200-1,600 ms time window, greater alpha power was elicited when participants imagined themselves rather than others in an awkward situation; in the 500-1,900 ms time window, for both groups, vicarious embarrassment involved greater theta oscillations than the neutral condition over the frontal region. These results extend previous findings that vicarious emotion involves mentalizing processes, and demonstrate that people first detect and evaluate the target's misconduct and negative outcomes and then experience the vicarious embarrassment.

The unique social sense of puerperium: Increased empathy and Schadenfreude in parents of newborns

Pregnancy and puerperium are typified by marked biobehavioral changes. These changes, which are traceable in both mothers and fathers, play an important role in parenthood and may modulate social cognition abilities. However, the latter effects remain notably unexplored in parents of newborns (PNs). To bridge this gap, we assessed empathy and social emotions (envy and Schadenfreude) in 55 PNs and 60 controls (childless healthy participants without a romantic relationship or sexual intercourse in the previous 48 hours). We used facial electromyography to detect physiological signatures of social emotion processing. Results revealed higher levels of affective empathy and Schadenfreude in PNs, the latter pattern being accompanied by increased activity of the corrugator suppercilii region. These effects were not explained by potential confounding variables (educational level, executive functioning, depression, stress levels, hours of sleep). Our novel findings suggest that PNs might show social cognition changes crucial for parental bonding and newborn care.

He had it Comin': ERPs Reveal a Facilitation for the Processing of Misfortunes to Antisocial Characters

Human sociality and prosociality rely on social and moral feelings of empathy, compassion, envy, schadenfreude, as well as on the preference for prosocial over antisocial others. We examined the neural underpinnings of the processing of lexical input designed to tap into these type of social feelings. Brainwave responses from 20 participants were measured as they read sentences comprising a randomly delivered ending outcome (fortunate or unfortunate) to social agents previously profiled as prosocial or antisocial individuals. Fortunate outcomes delivered to prosocial and antisocial agents aimed to tap into empathy and envy/annoying feelings, respectively, whereas unfortunate ones into compassion for prosocial agents and schadenfreude for antisocial ones. ERP modulations in early attention-capture (100-200 ms), semantic fit (400 ms), and late reanalysis processes (600 ms) were analyzed. According to the functional interpretation of each of these event-related electrophysiological effects, we conclude that: 1) a higher capture of attention is initially obtained in response to any type of outcome delivered to a prosocial versus an antisocial agent (frontal P2); 2) a facilitated semantic processing occurs for unfortunate outcomes delivered to antisocial agents (N400); and 3) regardless of the protagonist's social profile, an increased later reevaluation for overall unfortunate versus fortunate outcomes takes place (Late Positive Potential). Thus, neural online measures capture a stepwise unfolding impact of social factors during language comprehension, which include a facilitated processing of misfortunes when they happen to occur to antisocial peers (i.e., schadenfreude).

Not intended, still embarrassed: Social anxiety is related to increased levels of embarrassment in response to unintentional social norm violations

Background:

Social anxiety disorder (SAD) is associated with altered social norm (SN) processing: SAD-patients rate stories on SN violations as more inappropriate and more embarrassing than healthy participants, with the most prominent effect for stories on unintentional SN violations (i.e. committing a blunder). Until now it’s unknown how levels of social anxiety (SA) are related to ratings of SN violations in the general population, in which SA-symptoms are present at a continuum. More insight in this relationship could improve our understanding of the symptom profile of SAD. Therefore, we investigated the relation between ratings of SN violations and SA-levels in the general population.

Methods:

Adults and adolescents (n = 87) performed the revised Social Norm Processing Task (SNPT-R) and completed self-report questionnaires on social anxiety. Repeated-measures ANCOVAs were used to investigate the effect of SA on the ratings of inappropriateness and embarrassment.

Results:

As hypothesized, participants with higher SA-levels rated SN violations as more inappropriate and more embarrassing. Whereas participants with low-to-intermediate SA-levels rated unintentional SN violations as less embarrassing than intentional SN violations, participants with high SA-levels (z-score SA ≥ 1.6) rated unintentional SN violations as equally embarrassing as intentional SN violations.

Conclusion:

These findings indicate that increased embarrassment for unintentional SN violations is an important characteristic of social anxiety. These high levels of embarrassment are likely related to the debilitating concern of socially-anxious people that their skills and behavior do not meet expectations of others, and to their fear of blundering. This concern might be an important target for future therapeutic interventions.

Vicarious Embarrassment or "Fremdscham": Overendorsement in Frontotemporal Dementia

OBJECTIVE

The experience of embarrassment signals violations in social norms, and impairment in this social emotion may underlie much of the social dysfunction in behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD). The authors investigated whether impaired self-awareness of embarrassment may distinguish patients with bvFTD early in the course of disease from healthy control subjects (HCs).

METHODS

Self-reported embarrassment was examined among 18 patients with early bvFTD and 23 HCs by using the 36-item Embarrassability Scale, which includes items of situations eliciting embarrassment for oneself ("self-embarrassment") and embarrassment for others ("vicarious embarrassment"). The two study groups were also compared with the Social Norms Questionnaire (SNQ). The analyses included correlations of SNQ results (total score, violations or "break" errors, and overendorsement of social rules or "overadhere" errors) with Embarrassability Scale scores.

RESULTS

Patients with bvFTD did not differ from HCs on total or self-embarrassment scores but did have significantly higher vicarious embarrassment scores. Unlike in the HC group, reports of vicarious embarrassment did not differ from reports of self-embarrassment among patients in the bvFTD group. The Embarrassability Score further correlated with overadherence to norms on the SNQ.

CONCLUSIONS

In the presence of social dysfunction and emotional blunting, these findings suggest that patients with bvFTD rely on their own perspective for a rule-based application of social norms in reporting vicarious embarrassment. The assessment of reports of embarrassment for others may indicate an early and previously unrecognized clinical measure for detecting bvFTD.

Bullying victimization in typically developing and clinical high risk (CHR) adolescents: A multimodal imaging study

BACKGROUND

Bullying has been shown to increase the risk of developing a psychotic disorder. To date, no studies have examined brain behavior relationships within the context of bullying victimization in clinical high-risk (CHR) youth, a group characterized by both gray and white matter abnormalities. The present study employed multimodal neuroimaging to examine possible neural mechanisms associated with bullying victimization.

METHODS

CHR and healthy volunteers underwent clinical interviews, parent reports and MRI scans. Regions of interest (ROIs) were picked based on sensitivity to environmental stress, including hippocampal, amygdala, and orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) structural ROIs, and uncinate fasciculus white matter integrity.

RESULTS

CHR individuals were more exposed to bullying victimization than healthy volunteers, and bullying was associated with depressive symptoms across the whole sample. CHR individuals exhibited smaller volumes in OFC, but not in other ROIs. Increased bullying exposure was associated with lower medial OFC volumes in CHR and HV groups independently. Results ought to be interpreted as preliminary, as they did not survive correction at the whole brain level.

DISCUSSION

Bullying victimization may affect or be affected by volumetric OFC differences in both healthy and CHR individuals. However, given CHR showed greater exposure to bullying as well as underlying vulnerability (e.g. lower volumes), results also point to etiological clues and novel intervention targets, though future replication is needed in better powered samples.

Influence of emotional complexity on the neural substrates of affective theory of mind

Affective theory of mind (ToM) depends on both the decoding of emotional expressions and the reasoning on emotional mental states from social situations. While previous studies characterized the neural substrates underlying these processes, it remains unclear whether the nature of the emotional state inferred from others can influence the brain activation associated with affective ToM. In the present study, we focused on two types of emotions: basic emotions (BEs) (e.g., anger and surprise), which are innate and universal and self‐conscious emotions (e.g., pride and embarrassment), which correspond to a special class of emotions involving the self and including a representation of one's relative reactions to internal and external standards. Specifically, we used an ecological functional MRI paradigm, on 21 healthy young subjects, to compare brain activations during the decoding of and the reasoning on others' self‐conscious, basic and neutral mental states. Our results showed that compared to neutral states, the inference of self‐conscious and basic emotional states from others elicited more activation in several core regions of affective ToM. Direct comparisons between emotional conditions revealed more activation for self‐conscious than BEs in the right temporoparietal junction during the reasoning process and in left middle occipital regions during the decoding process. Further analyses using a localizer task showed that the extrastriate body area was more recruited for decoding others' self‐conscious versus BEs, which emphasize the importance of body clues to properly infer these emotions. Using an original task allowing for an ecological assessment of the affective ToM, these results demonstrate that the complexity of the emotion inferred to others can influence the recruitment of ToM network. This study also validates the use of our task as an ecological tool to assess the affective ToM, constituting an avenue for the characterization of ToM impairments in neurological conditions.

Mean diffusivity related to rule-breaking guilt: the Macbeth effect in the sensorimotor regions

Guilt, a self-conscious emotion, includes self-focused role taking and also correlates with other-oriented role-taking. Excess guilt proneness might be relevant to obsessive compulsive disorders. The white matter (WM) neural correlates of the degree of guilt have not yet been determined. We hypothesized that the WM structures involved in feelings of guilt are associated with social and moral cognition (inferior parietal lobule [IPL], prefrontal cortex [PFC], and cingulate), and aimed to visualize this using diffusion MRI. We investigated the association between regional WM structures (WM volume, and fractional anisotropy, and mean diffusivity [MD]), and feelings of guilt in 1196 healthy, young students using MRI and the Guilty Feeling Scale, which comprises interpersonal situation (IPS; guilt from hurting friends) and rule-breaking situation (RBS; deontological guilt) scores. The primary novel finding presented here is that MD in the right somatosensory and motor cortices from arm to hand were positively correlated with RBS scores. Further, consistent with our hypothesis, RBS scores were positively correlated with MD in the same regions. These results would be predicted by the Macbeth effect, an obsession with dirt leading to hand-washing rituals resulting from guilt, made famous by the Shakespearian character Lady Macbeth. “What, will these hands ne’er be clean?” William Shakespeare (Shakespeare, 1606) Macbeth.

Linking resting-state networks and social cognition in schizophrenia and bipolar disorder

Individuals with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder show alterations in functional neural connectivity during rest. However, resting-state network (RSN) disruptions have not been systematically compared between the two disorders. Further, the impact of RSN disruptions on social cognition, a key determinant of functional outcome, has not been studied. Forty-eight individuals with schizophrenia, 46 with bipolar disorder, and 48 healthy controls completed resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging. An atlas-based approach was used to examine functional connectivity within nine RSNs across the cortex. RSN connectivity was assessed via nonparametric permutation testing, and associations with performance on emotion perception, mentalizing, and emotion management tasks were examined. Group differences were observed in the medial and lateral visual networks and the sensorimotor network. Individuals with schizophrenia demonstrated reduced connectivity relative to healthy controls in all three networks. Individuals with bipolar disorder demonstrated reduced connectivity relative to controls in the medial visual network and connectivity within this network was significantly positively correlated with emotion management. In healthy controls, connectivity within the medial and lateral visual networks positively correlated with mentalizing. No significant correlations were found for either visual network in schizophrenia. Results highlight the role of altered early visual processing in social cognitive deficits in both schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. However, individuals with bipolar disorder appear to compensate for disrupted visual network connectivity on social cognitive tasks, whereas those with schizophrenia do not. The current study adds clarity on the neurophysiology underlying social cognitive deficits that result in impaired functioning in serious mental illness.

Contributions of Social Neuroscience in the Study of Schadenfreude, Social Cognition and Emotion Intergroup: Integrative Review

The present article is a bibliographic research on the integrative literature review mode, on social neuroscience, social cognition and Schadenfreude in intergroup relations. The objective was to identify an understanding of how social neuroscience could contribute and offer new insights into the Social Cognition (eg: stereotypes, prejudice, social comparison), the Schadenfreude and neural process in social interactions. From the criteria of location and selection, 28 articles published in the databases PubMed, Web of Science and SCIELO between 2006 and 2015 were retrieved, using keywords: Schadenfreude and Social Cognition, Schadenfreude and Brain, Schadenfreude and Neural, Schadenfreude and Neuro, Schadenfreude and Intergroup relation. Generally, such articles are descriptive and qualitative, and they developed mostly with the samples that showed no pathology or disease in samples. A link it showed between the Schadenfreude and the neural interface, as well as social cognition and neuronal relationship with the aim of understanding how interact in a social context. It is perceived from the approach on the subject a better understanding of social behavior in real life through neurocognitive mechanisms offering evidence in the relationship between Schadenfreude, social neuroscience and social cognition.

One MRI-compatible tDCS session attenuates ventromedial cortical perfusion when exposed to verbal criticism: The role of perceived criticism

Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) is a potential treatment strategy for mood and anxiety disorders, but how this application may influence emotional processes, and whether this is related to individual characteristics, is not well understood. It has been proposed that perceived criticism (PC) may represent a vulnerability factor for the development of such mental illnesses. To decipher whether neural mechanisms of action of tDCS potentially differ depending on PC status (low vs. high), we evaluated mood and brain perfusion before and after applying MRI-compatible tDCS, and after participants were exposed to verbal criticism in the scanner. Experimental design 30 healthy nondepressed females were included in a sham-controlled crossover MRI-compatible tDCS study. Brain perfusion was measured by means of arterial spin labeling (ASL) before and after tDCS applied to the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), and after hearing criticism. Before the experiment, all participants provided a rating of PC in their closest environment. Principal observations at the behavioral level, criticism made participants angrier. This was unrelated to the active or sham stimulation. After being criticized, females scoring high on PC had significantly decreased brain perfusion in the pregenual anterior cingulate cortex (pgACC) and medioprefrontal cortex (mPFC), after active tDCS but not sham. The decrease in pgACC/mPFC perfusion points to a significant impact of tDCS in brain areas related to stress responses and self-referential processes, especially in females scoring high on PC, which has been shown to be related to vulnerability for mood and anxiety disorders.

Age and the experience of strong self-conscious emotion

OBJECTIVES

It remains unclear whether there are age-related changes in the experience of strong self-conscious emotion, such as shame, guilt, pride and embarrassment. Because shame and guilt figure prominently in the aetiology of depressive symptoms and other mental health problems, a better understanding of how age affects the strong experience of these two negative self-conscious emotions is of particular importance.

METHODS

Thirty younger, 30 middle-aged and 30 older adults were compared on standardised cognitive assessments, in addition to an interview-based measure that assessed whether there are age differences in the likelihood of strongly experiencing four different types of self-conscious emotion within the past five years (shame, guilt, embarrassment and pride).

RESULTS

The three groups did not differ in their likelihood of reporting an event that strongly elicited the positive self-conscious emotion of pride. However, older adults were more likely to report sources of pride that were other (as opposed to self) focused. Older adults were also less likely to report experiencing events that elicited all three negative self-conscious emotions, in particular, shame.

CONCLUSIONS

Strong negative self-conscious emotion, and in particular shame, appears to be experienced less by older than younger adults.

Social comparison in the brain: A coordinate-based meta-analysis of functional brain imaging studies on the downward and upward comparisons

Social comparison is ubiquitous across human societies with dramatic influence on people's well-being and decision making. Downward comparison (comparing to worse-off others) and upward comparison (comparing to better-off others) constitute two types of social comparisons that produce different neuropsychological consequences. Based on studies exploring neural signatures associated with downward and upward comparisons, the current study utilized a coordinate-based meta-analysis to provide a refinement of understanding about the underlying neural architecture of social comparison. We identified consistent involvement of the ventral striatum and ventromedial prefrontal cortex in downward comparison and consistent involvement of the anterior insula and dorsal anterior cingulate cortex in upward comparison. These findings fit well with the "common-currency" hypothesis that neural representations of social gain or loss resemble those for non-social reward or loss processing. Accordingly, we discussed our findings in the framework of general reinforcement learning (RL) hypothesis, arguing how social gain/loss induced by social comparisons could be encoded by the brain as a domain-general signal (i.e., prediction errors) serving to adjust people's decisions in social settings. Although the RL account may serve as a heuristic framework for the future research, other plausible accounts on the neuropsychological mechanism of social comparison were also acknowledged. Hum Brain Mapp 39:440-458, 2018. © 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

A lesion model of envy and Schadenfreude: legal, deservingness and moral dimensions as revealed by neurodegeneration

The study of moral emotions (i.e. Schadenfreude and envy) is critical to understand the ecological complexity of everyday interactions between cognitive, affective, and social cognition processes. Most previous studies in this area have used correlational imaging techniques and framed Schadenfreude and envy as unified and monolithic emotional domains. Here, we profit from a relevant neurodegeneration model to disentangle the brain regions engaged in three dimensions of Schadenfreude and envy: deservingness, morality, and legality. We tested a group of patients with behavioural variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD), patients with Alzheimer’s disease, as a contrastive neurodegeneration model, and healthy controls on a novel task highlighting each of these dimensions in scenarios eliciting Schadenfreude and envy. Compared with the Alzheimer’s disease and control groups, patients with bvFTD obtained significantly higher scores on all dimensions for both emotions. Correlational analyses revealed an association between envy and Schadenfreude scores and greater deficits in social cognition, inhibitory control, and behaviour disturbances in bvFTD patients. Brain anatomy findings (restricted to bvFTD and controls) confirmed the partially dissociable nature of the moral emotions’ experiences and highlighted the importance of socio-moral brain areas in processing those emotions. In all subjects, an association emerged between Schadenfreude and the ventral striatum, and between envy and the anterior cingulate cortex. In addition, the results supported an association between scores for moral and legal transgression and the morphology of areas implicated in emotional appraisal, including the amygdala and the parahippocampus. By contrast, bvFTD patients exhibited a negative association between increased Schadenfreude and envy across dimensions and critical regions supporting social-value rewards and social-moral processes (dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, angular gyrus and precuneus). Together, this study provides lesion-based evidence for the multidimensional nature of the emotional experiences of envy and Schadenfreude. Our results offer new insights into the mechanisms subsuming complex emotions and moral cognition in neurodegeneration. Moreover, this study presents the exacerbation of envy and Schadenfreude as a new potential hallmark of bvFTD that could impact in diagnosis and progression.

Contenido experiencial y aspectos valorativos asociados a la envidia benigna y maligna en estudiantes universitarios de Córdoba, Argentina

La envidia es una emoción que surge de la comparación social ascendente. Estudios recientes evidencian la existencia de dos tipos cualitativamente diferentes de envidia: benigna y maligna. Así, esta investigación se propuso evaluar el contenido experiencial y el patrón valorativo asociados a los dos tipos de envidia en una muestra de estudiantes universitarios de Córdoba, Argentina. Se utilizó el método de reconstrucción del día para recabar información sobre experiencias de envidia. Los resultados evidenciaronla existencia de dos tipos de envidia que se distinguen a partir de los aspectos valorativos de merecimiento, poder propio y estado situacional. Además, se observó que la experiencia de envidia benigna desencadena inspiración y motiva a felicitar al envidiado.

How embarrassing! The behavioral and neural correlates of processing social norm violations

Social norms are important for human social interactions, and violations of these norms are evaluated partly on the intention of the actor. Here, we describe the revised Social Norm Processing Task (SNPT-R), a paradigm enabling the study of behavioral and neural responses to intended and unintended social norm violations among both adults and adolescents. We investigated how participants (adolescents and adults, n = 87) rate intentional and unintentional social norm violations with respect to inappropriateness and embarrassment, and we examined the brain activation patterns underlying the processing of these transgressions in an independent sample of 21 adults using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI). We hypothesized to find activation within the medial prefrontal cortex, temporo-parietal cortex and orbitofrontal cortex in response to both intentional and unintentional social norm violations, with more pronounced activation for the intentional social norm violations in these regions and in the amygdala. Participants' ratings confirmed the hypothesis that the three types of stories are evaluated differently with respect to intentionality: intentional social norm violations were rated as the most inappropriate and most embarrassing. Furthermore, fMRI results showed that reading stories on intentional and unintentional social norm violations evoked activation within the frontal pole, the paracingulate gyrus and the superior frontal gyrus. In addition, processing unintentional social norm violations was associated with activation in, among others, the orbitofrontal cortex, middle frontal gyrus and superior parietal lobule, while reading intentional social norm violations was related to activation in the left amygdala. These regions have been previously implicated in thinking about one's self, thinking about others and moral reasoning. Together, these findings indicate that the SNPT-R could serve as a useful paradigm for examining social norm processing, both at the behavioral and the neural level.

Interfering with activity in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex via TMS affects social impressions updating

In our everyday social interactions we often need to deal with others' unpredictable behaviors. Integrating unexpected information in a consistent representation of another agent is a cognitively demanding process. Several neuroimaging studies point to the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) as a critical structure in mediating social evaluations. Our aim here was to shed light on the possible causal role of the mPFC in the dynamic process of forming and updating social impressions about others. We addressed this issue by suppressing activity in the mPFC by means of 1 Hz offline transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) prior to a task requiring participants to evaluate other agents' trustworthiness after reading about their social behavior. In two different experiments, we found that inhibiting activity in the mPFC increased perceived trustworthiness when inconsistent information about one agent's behavior was provided. In turn, when only negative or positive behaviors of a person were described, TMS over the mPFC did not affect judgments. Our results indicate that the mPFC is causally involved in mediating social impressions updating-at least in cases in which judgment is uncertain due to conflicting information to be processed.

The Social Neuroscience of Interpersonal Emotions

In our daily lives, we constantly engage in reciprocal interactions with other individuals and represent ourselves in the context of our surrounding social world. Within social interactions, humans often experience interpersonal emotions such as embarrassment, shame, guilt, or pride. How interpersonal emotions are processed on the neural systems level is of major interest for social neuroscience research. While the configuration of laboratory settings in general is constraining for emotion research, recent neuroimaging investigations came up with new approaches to implement socially interactive and immersive scenarios for the real-life investigation of interpersonal emotions. These studies could show that among other brain regions the so-called mentalizing network, which is typically involved when we represent and make sense of others' states of mind, is associated with interpersonal emotions. The anterior insula/anterior cingulate cortex network at the same time processes one's own bodily arousal during such interpersonal emotional experiences. Current research aimed to explore how we make sense of others' emotional states during social interactions and investigates the modulating factors of our emotional experiences during social interactions. Understanding how interpersonal emotions are processed on the neural systems level may yield significant implications for neuropsychiatric disorders that affect social behavior such as social anxiety disorders or autism.

Machine learning algorithm accurately detects fMRI signature of vulnerability to major depression

Standard functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) analyses cannot assess the potential of a neuroimaging signature as a biomarker to predict individual vulnerability to major depression (MD). Here, we use machine learning for the first time to address this question. Using a recently identified neural signature of guilt-selective functional disconnection, the classification algorithm was able to distinguish remitted MD from control participants with 78.3% accuracy. This demonstrates the high potential of our fMRI signature as a biomarker of MD vulnerability.