Anders Silke, de Jong Roos, Beck Christian, Haynes John-Dylan, Ethofer Thomas
Social and Affective Neuroscience, Department of Neurology, Universität zu Lübeck, 23562 Luebeck, Germany;
Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience, Charité Universitätsmedizin Berlin, 10115 Berlin, Germany; Berlin Center for Advanced Neuroimaging, Charité Universitätsmedizin Berlin, 10117 Berlin, Germany; Berlin School of Mind and Brain, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, 10099 Berlin, Germany;
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2016 Apr 19;113(16):E2248-57. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1516191113. Epub 2016 Apr 4.
Being able to comprehend another person's intentions and emotions is essential for successful social interaction. However, it is currently unknown whether the human brain possesses a neural mechanism that attracts people to others whose mental states they can easily understand. Here we show that the degree to which a person feels attracted to another person can change while they observe the other's affective behavior, and that these changes depend on the observer's confidence in having correctly understood the other's affective state. At the neural level, changes in interpersonal attraction were predicted by activity in the reward system of the observer's brain. Importantly, these effects were specific to individual observer-target pairs and could not be explained by a target's general attractiveness or expressivity. Furthermore, using multivoxel pattern analysis (MVPA), we found that neural activity in the reward system of the observer's brain varied as a function of how well the target's affective behavior matched the observer's neural representation of the underlying affective state: The greater the match, the larger the brain's intrinsic reward signal. Taken together, these findings provide evidence that reward-related neural activity during social encounters signals how well an individual's "neural vocabulary" is suited to infer another person's affective state, and that this intrinsic reward might be a source of changes in interpersonal attraction.
能够理解他人的意图和情感是成功进行社交互动的关键。然而，目前尚不清楚人类大脑是否拥有一种神经机制，会促使人们被那些其心理状态易于理解的人所吸引。在此，我们表明，一个人在观察他人的情感行为时，对他人产生吸引力的程度会发生变化，而且这些变化取决于观察者对正确理解他人情感状态的信心。在神经层面，人际吸引力的变化可由观察者大脑奖赏系统的活动预测。重要的是，这些效应特定于个体观察者 - 目标对，无法用目标的一般吸引力或表现力来解释。此外，通过多体素模式分析（MVPA），我们发现观察者大脑奖赏系统中的神经活动会随着目标的情感行为与观察者对潜在情感状态的神经表征的匹配程度而变化：匹配度越高，大脑的内在奖赏信号就越大。综上所述，这些发现提供了证据，表明社交互动过程中与奖赏相关的神经活动标志着个体的“神经词汇”在推断他人情感状态方面的适配程度，并且这种内在奖赏可能是人际吸引力变化的一个来源。
