Golland Yulia, Levit-Binnun Nava, Hendler Talma, Lerner Yulia
Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya, Baruch Ivcher School of Psychology, Sagol Center for Brain and Mind, Herzliya, Israel.
Functional Brain Center, Wohl Institute for Advanced Imaging, Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center, Tel Aviv, Israel.
Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci. 2017 Aug 1;12(8):1249-1260. doi: 10.1093/scan/nsx049.
Emotional experiences are frequently shaped by the emotional responses of co-present others. Research has shown that people constantly monitor and adapt to the incoming social-emotional signals, even without face-to-face interaction. And yet, the neural processes underlying such emotional transmissions have not been directly studied. Here, we investigated how the human brain processes emotional cues which arrive from another, co-attending individual. We presented continuous emotional feedback to participants who viewed a movie in the scanner. Participants in the social group (but not in the control group) believed that the feedback was coming from another person who was co-viewing the same movie. We found that social-emotional feedback significantly affected the neural dynamics both in the core affect and in the medial pre-frontal regions. Specifically, the response time-courses in those regions exhibited increased similarity across recipients and increased neural alignment with the timeline of the feedback in the social compared with control group. Taken in conjunction with previous research, this study suggests that emotional cues from others shape the neural dynamics across the whole neural continuum of emotional processing in the brain. Moreover, it demonstrates that interpersonal neural alignment can serve as a neural mechanism through which affective information is conveyed between individuals.
情感体验常常受到在场他人情感反应的影响。研究表明，人们会持续监测并适应传入的社会情感信号，即使没有面对面的互动。然而，这种情感传递背后的神经过程尚未得到直接研究。在此，我们探究了人类大脑如何处理来自另一个共同观看者的情感线索。我们向在扫描仪中观看电影的参与者提供持续的情感反馈。社交组的参与者（而非对照组）相信反馈来自另一个正在共同观看同一部电影的人。我们发现，社会情感反馈显著影响了核心情感区域和内侧前额叶区域的神经动力学。具体而言，与对照组相比，这些区域的反应时间进程在接受者之间表现出更高的相似性，并且在社交组中与反馈的时间线表现出更强的神经同步性。结合先前的研究，本研究表明来自他人的情感线索塑造了大脑中整个情感处理神经连续体的神经动力学。此外，它还表明人际神经同步可以作为一种神经机制，通过它情感信息在个体之间得以传递。
