Müller-Pinzler Laura, Rademacher Lena, Paulus Frieder M, Krach Sören
Social Neuroscience Lab, Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, University of Lübeck, Ratzeburger Allee 160, D-23538 Lübeck, Germany; Frieder M. Paulus and Sören Krach contributed equally to this work.
Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci. 2016 Mar;11(3):466-75. doi: 10.1093/scan/nsv130. Epub 2015 Oct 29.
Social closeness is a potent moderator of vicarious affect and specifically vicarious embarrassment. The neural pathways of how social closeness to another person affects our experience of vicarious embarrassment for the other's public flaws, failures and norm violations are yet unknown. To bridge this gap, we examined the neural response of participants while witnessing threats to either a friend's or a stranger's social integrity. The results show consistent responses of the anterior insula (AI) and anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), shared circuits of the aversive quality of affect, as well as the medial prefrontal cortex and temporal pole, central structures of the mentalizing network. However, the ACC/AI network activation was increased during vicarious embarrassment in response to a friend's failures. At the same time, the precuneus, a brain region associated with self-related thoughts, showed a specific activation and an increase in functional connectivity with the shared circuits in the frontal lobe while observing friends. This might indicate a neural systems mechanism for greater affective sharing and self-involvement while people interact with close others that are relevant to oneself.
社会亲近感是替代性情感尤其是替代性尴尬情绪的有力调节因素。与他人的社会亲近感如何影响我们对他人公开的缺陷、失败和违反规范行为产生的替代性尴尬体验，其神经通路尚不清楚。为了填补这一空白，我们研究了参与者在目睹对朋友或陌生人社会诚信的威胁时的神经反应。结果显示，前脑岛（AI）和前扣带回皮质（ACC）有一致的反应，这是情感厌恶性质的共享回路，以及内侧前额叶皮质和颞极，即心理化网络的核心结构。然而，在因朋友的失败而产生替代性尴尬时，ACC/AI网络的激活增强。与此同时，楔前叶是一个与自我相关思维有关的脑区，在观察朋友时，它表现出特定的激活，并且与额叶共享回路的功能连接增加。这可能表明，当人们与与自己相关的亲近他人互动时，存在一种更强的情感分享和自我参与的神经系统机制。
