Department of General Systems Studies, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, The University of Tokyo, 3-8-1 Komaba, Meguro-ku, Tokyo 153-8902, Japan.
Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci. 2006 Sep;1(2):149-57. doi: 10.1093/scan/nsl020.
Along with expanding the understanding of the human 'social brain', a new challenge for neuroscience is to elucidate the nature of individual differences in social competence. Here we report a neural index of gender difference in empathy-related processing in a complex social situation. Using electroencephalography, we measured the neural activity of perceptions to one's own and another's monetary gain or loss, while individuals played a 'competitive' two-person gambling game, in which one's monetary gain resulted in the other's loss. The medial-frontal negativity (MFN), a component within 300 ms latency reflecting an emotional categorization of the event, showed a significant gender difference in perceiving an opponent's, but not a self-performed outcome. When females perceive the opponent's outcomes, the MFN was elicited, indicating that another's loss was categorized as negative, even though it resulted in a benefit to them. On the contrary, the males did not elicit discernable MFN to the opponent's outcomes. Together with the fact that the affect score has a negative linear correlation with the MFN, this indicated that the MFN was sensitive to socio-emotional processing. These results suggest that individual differences in complex social behavior result from rapid neural activity in response to external stimuli.
随着人类“社会大脑”理解的不断扩展，神经科学面临的新挑战是阐明社交能力个体差异的本质。在这里，我们报告了一种在复杂社会情境中同理心相关处理的性别差异的神经指标。我们使用脑电图测量了个体在进行“竞争”二人赌博游戏时对自身和他人金钱得失的感知的神经活动，在该游戏中，一个人的金钱收益导致另一个人的损失。在 300 毫秒潜伏期内反映事件情感分类的内侧额负（MFN）成分在感知对手的结果时表现出显著的性别差异，而不是感知自身的结果。当女性感知到对手的结果时，会引发 MFN，表明即使这对她们有利，但另一个人的损失被归类为负面。相反，男性对对手的结果没有引发可识别的 MFN。再加上情感评分与 MFN 呈负线性相关的事实，这表明 MFN 对社会情感处理很敏感。这些结果表明，复杂社会行为的个体差异源于对外界刺激的快速神经活动。
