Department of Cognitive and Biological Psychology, University of Tübingen, Friedrichstr. 21, 72072 Tübingen, Germany.
Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci. 2012 Apr;7(4):457-66. doi: 10.1093/scan/nsr029. Epub 2011 May 23.
Little is known about the time course of the mechanisms involved in the on-line processing of socio-emotional information. We used event-related brain potentials (ERPs) to investigate this issue using vignettes that described prototypical, social scenarios. An initial sentence established the social context and the following target sentence ended with a critical word that informed the reader of the character's socio-emotional response to the situation. Critical words that mismatched rather than matched with a character's expected feelings elicited a larger ERP negativity (N400) ~200-500 ms after word onset, followed by a larger frontal positivity. Dipole source modeling results indicated that an anterior temporal lobe source accounted for the N400-like effect, which we attribute to the increased demands of integrating general knowledge about social situations (e.g. scripts) with personal- and context-specific information. An additional mediofrontal source contributed to the later ERP effect and presumably reflects high-level mindreading functions. Together, these findings indicate that readers rapidly infer and evaluate on-line a character's likely socio-emotional response based on the prototypical information provided by the text.
关于在线处理社会情感信息所涉及的机制的时程，我们知之甚少。我们使用情境描述来研究这一问题，这些情境描述了典型的社会场景。一个初始句子建立了社会背景，随后的目标句子以一个关键单词结束，该单词告知读者角色对情况的社会情感反应。与角色的预期感觉不匹配而不是匹配的关键单词在单词出现后约 200-500 毫秒引发更大的事件相关电位负性（N400），随后是更大的额部正性。偶极子源建模结果表明，前颞叶源解释了类似于 N400 的效应，我们将其归因于整合关于社会情境（例如脚本）的一般知识与个人和情境特定信息的需求增加。额外的额中前源有助于稍后的 ERP 效应，可能反映了高级的心理阅读功能。总之，这些发现表明，读者根据文本提供的典型信息快速推断和评估角色的可能社会情感反应。
