Melbourne Neuropsychiatry Centre, Department of Psychiatry, The University of Melbourne and Melbourne Health, Victoria 3052, Australia.
Orygen, Melbourne, Victoria 3052, Australia.
Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci. 2020 Nov 6;15(9):941-949. doi: 10.1093/scan/nsaa121.
Self-referential and social processing are often engaged concurrently in naturalistic judgements and elicit activity in overlapping brain regions. We have termed this integrated processing 'self-other referential processing' and developed a task to measure its neural correlates. Ninety-eight healthy young people aged 16-25 (M = 21.5 years old, 67% female) completed our novel functional magnetic resonance imaging task. The task had two conditions, an active self-other referential processing condition in which participants rated how much they related to emotional faces and a control condition. Rating relatedness required thinking about oneself (self-referential processing) and drawing a comparison to an imagined other (social processing). Self-other referential processing elicited activity in the default mode network and social cognition system; most notably in the 'core self' regions of the medial prefrontal cortex and posterior cingulate cortex. Relatedness and emotional valence directly modulated activity in these core self areas, while emotional valence additionally modulated medial prefrontal cortex activity. This shows the key role of the medial prefrontal cortex in constructing the 'social-affective self'. This may help to unify disparate models of medial prefrontal cortex function, demonstrating its role in coordinating multiple processes-self-referential, social and affective processing-to allow the self to exist in a complex social world.
自我参照和社会处理通常在自然判断中同时进行，并在重叠的大脑区域中引发活动。我们将这种综合处理称为“自我-他人参照处理”，并开发了一种测量其神经相关性的任务。98 名年龄在 16-25 岁的健康年轻人（M=21.5 岁，67%为女性）完成了我们的新型功能磁共振成像任务。该任务有两种条件，一种是主动自我-他人参照处理条件，参与者在该条件下对他们与情绪面孔的相关性进行评分；另一种是控制条件。评分相关性需要考虑自我（自我参照处理）并与想象中的他人进行比较（社会处理）。自我-他人参照处理引发了默认模式网络和社会认知系统的活动；特别是在前内侧前额叶皮层和后扣带回皮层的“核心自我”区域。相关性和情绪效价直接调节这些核心自我区域的活动，而情绪效价还调节了前内侧前额叶皮层的活动。这表明了前内侧前额叶皮层在构建“社会情感自我”中的关键作用。这可能有助于统一不同的前内侧前额叶皮层功能模型，证明其在协调自我参照、社会和情感处理等多个过程中的作用，以允许自我在复杂的社会世界中存在。
