The University of Queensland, School of Psychology, Qld 4072, Australia.
Neuropsychologia. 2012 Jul;50(8):2114-20. doi: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2012.05.014. Epub 2012 May 17.
The present study aimed to uncover the neural activity associated with specific in-group and out-group word related stimuli, to examine the neuroanatomical basis of group membership concept representation, and investigate to what extent neural processes represent 'in-group' differently from 'out-group'. Participants' brain activity was measured with functional MRI while they had to categorize social, in-group and out-group words and non-social, living and non-living words. The results showed that a network of brain regions previously identified as the 'social brain', including the cortical midline structures, tempo-parietal junction and the anterior temporal gyrus showed enhanced activation for social words versus non-social words. Crucially, the processing of in-group words compared to the out-group words activated a specific network including the ventral medial prefrontal and anterior and dorsal cingulate cortex. These regions correspond to a neural network previously identified as the 'personal self'. Our results suggest that the 'social' and 'personal self' are closely related and that we derive our self image from the groups we belong to.
本研究旨在揭示与特定内群体和外群体词相关刺激相关的神经活动，以检验群体成员概念表示的神经解剖学基础，并探讨神经过程在多大程度上对内群体的表示与外群体不同。研究中，参与者的大脑活动是通过功能磁共振成像来测量的，他们需要对社会、内群体和外群体词以及非社会、生物和非生物词进行分类。结果表明，先前被确定为“社会大脑”的一组脑区，包括皮质中线结构、颞顶联合区和前颞叶，在处理社会词时比处理非社会词时表现出更强的激活。至关重要的是，与外群体词相比，内群体词的处理激活了一个包括腹内侧前额叶和前扣带和背侧扣带皮层的特定网络。这些区域与先前确定的“个人自我”的神经网络相对应。我们的结果表明，“社会”和“个人自我”是密切相关的，我们从所属的群体中获得自我形象。
