Human Brain Mapping Unit at Instituto Pluridisciplinar, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Paseo Juan XXIII 1, 28040, Madrid, Spain.
Center for Human Evolution and Behavior, UCM-ISCIII, Avd/ Monforte de Lemos, 5, Madrid, 28029, Spain.
Cogn Affect Behav Neurosci. 2020 Apr;20(2):356-370. doi: 10.3758/s13415-020-00773-w.
Human sociality and prosociality rely on social and moral feelings of empathy, compassion, envy, schadenfreude, as well as on the preference for prosocial over antisocial others. We examined the neural underpinnings of the processing of lexical input designed to tap into these type of social feelings. Brainwave responses from 20 participants were measured as they read sentences comprising a randomly delivered ending outcome (fortunate or unfortunate) to social agents previously profiled as prosocial or antisocial individuals. Fortunate outcomes delivered to prosocial and antisocial agents aimed to tap into empathy and envy/annoying feelings, respectively, whereas unfortunate ones into compassion for prosocial agents and schadenfreude for antisocial ones. ERP modulations in early attention-capture (100-200 ms), semantic fit (400 ms), and late reanalysis processes (600 ms) were analyzed. According to the functional interpretation of each of these event-related electrophysiological effects, we conclude that: 1) a higher capture of attention is initially obtained in response to any type of outcome delivered to a prosocial versus an antisocial agent (frontal P2); 2) a facilitated semantic processing occurs for unfortunate outcomes delivered to antisocial agents (N400); and 3) regardless of the protagonist's social profile, an increased later reevaluation for overall unfortunate versus fortunate outcomes takes place (Late Positive Potential). Thus, neural online measures capture a stepwise unfolding impact of social factors during language comprehension, which include a facilitated processing of misfortunes when they happen to occur to antisocial peers (i.e., schadenfreude).
人类的社会性和亲社会行为依赖于同理心、同情心、嫉妒、幸灾乐祸等社会和道德情感，以及对亲社会行为的偏好。我们研究了处理旨在挖掘这些社会情感的词汇输入的神经基础。20 名参与者在阅读句子时测量了脑电波反应，这些句子包含随机呈现的结局（幸运或不幸），这些结局是针对之前被描述为亲社会或反社会个体的社会代理人的。对亲社会和反社会代理人的幸运结果旨在分别挖掘同理心和嫉妒/烦恼的感觉，而对亲社会代理人的不幸结果则挖掘同情心，对反社会代理人的不幸结果则挖掘幸灾乐祸的感觉。分析了早期注意捕获（100-200 毫秒）、语义适合（400 毫秒）和晚期重新分析过程（600 毫秒）的 ERP 调制。根据这些事件相关的电生理效应的每个功能解释，我们得出结论：1）与反社会代理人相比，任何类型的结果传递给亲社会代理人都会最初引起更高的注意力捕获（额部 P2）；2）反社会代理人收到不幸结果时，语义处理会更加顺畅（N400）；3）无论主角的社会形象如何，对不幸结果的重新评估都会增加（晚期正波）。因此，神经在线测量捕捉到语言理解过程中社会因素的逐步展开影响，包括当不幸发生在反社会同伴身上时，对不幸的处理更加顺畅（即幸灾乐祸）。
