Vrticka Pascal, Andersson Frédéric, Sander David, Vuilleumier Patrik
University of Geneva, and University Medical Center of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland.
Soc Neurosci. 2009;4(5):384-401. doi: 10.1080/17470910902941793. Epub 2009 Jul 27.
Every day we encounter new people, interact with them, and form person impressions based on quick and automatic inferences from minimal contextual information. Previous studies have identified an extensive network of brain areas involved in familiar face recognition, but there is little evidence to date concerning the neural bases of negative vs. positive person impressions. In the present study, participants were repeatedly exposed to 16 unfamiliar face identities within a pseudo-interactive game context to generate a perception of either "friends" or "foes". Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was then performed during an old/new memory task to assess any difference in brain responses to these now familiar face identities, relative to unfamiliar faces. Importantly, whereas facial expressions were always emotional (either smiling or angry) during the encoding phase, they were always neutral during the memory task. Our results reveal that several brain regions involved in familiar face recognition, including fusiform cortex, posterior cingulate gyrus, and amygdala, plus additional areas involved in motivational control such as caudate and anterior cingulate cortex, were differentially modulated as a function of a previous encounter, and generally more activated when faces were perceived as "foes" rather than "friends". These findings underscore that a key dimension of social judgments, based on past impressions of who may be supportive or hostile, may lead to long-lasting effects on memory for faces and thus influence affective reactions to people during a subsequent encounter even in a different (neutral) context.
每天我们都会遇到新的人，与他们互动，并根据从最少的情境信息中快速自动得出的推断形成对人的印象。先前的研究已经确定了一个广泛的大脑区域网络参与熟悉面孔的识别，但迄今为止，关于负面与正面人物印象的神经基础几乎没有证据。在本研究中，参与者在一个伪互动游戏情境中反复接触16个不熟悉的面孔身份，以产生“朋友”或“敌人”的认知。然后在一个旧/新记忆任务中进行功能磁共振成像（fMRI），以评估相对于不熟悉的面孔，大脑对这些现在熟悉的面孔身份的反应是否存在差异。重要的是，虽然在编码阶段面部表情总是情绪化的（微笑或愤怒），但在记忆任务中它们总是中性的。我们的结果表明，几个参与熟悉面孔识别的大脑区域，包括梭状回、后扣带回和杏仁核，以及其他参与动机控制的区域，如尾状核和前扣带回皮质，会根据之前的接触情况受到不同的调节，并且当面孔被视为“敌人”而不是“朋友”时，通常会有更强的激活。这些发现强调，基于过去对谁可能支持或怀有敌意的印象，社会判断的一个关键维度可能会对面孔记忆产生持久影响，从而影响在随后的相遇中对他人的情感反应，即使是在不同的（中性）情境中。
