Holbrook Colin, Iacoboni Marco, Gordon Chelsea, Proksch Shannon, Balasubramaniam Ramesh
Department of Cognitive and Information Sciences, University of California, Merced, CA 95343, USA.
Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences, Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior, David Geffen School of Medicine, University of California, Los Angeles, CA 90024, USA.
Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci. 2020 Dec 24;15(12):1361-1367. doi: 10.1093/scan/nsaa153.
Research indicates that the posterior medial frontal cortex (pMFC) functions as a 'neural alarm' complex broadly involved in registering threats and helping to muster relevant responses. Holbrook and colleagues investigated whether pMFC similarly mediates ideological threat responses, finding that downregulating pMFC via transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) caused (i) less avowed religious belief despite being reminded of death and (ii) less group bias despite encountering a sharp critique of the national in-group. While suggestive, these findings were limited by the absence of a non-threat comparison condition and reliance on sham rather than control TMS. Here, in a pre-registered replication and extension, we downregulated pMFC or a control region (MT/V5) and then primed participants with either a reminder of death or a threat-neutral topic. As mentioned previously, participants reminded of death reported less religious belief when pMFC was downregulated. No such effect of pMFC downregulation was observed in the neutral condition, consistent with construing pMFC as monitoring for salient threats (e.g. death) and helping to recruit ideological responses (e.g. enhanced religious belief). However, no effect of downregulating pMFC on group bias was observed, possibly due to reliance on a collegiate in-group framing rather than a national framing as in the prior study.
研究表明，内侧额叶后皮质（pMFC）起着“神经警报”复合体的作用，广泛参与威胁的登记并有助于召集相关反应。霍尔布鲁克及其同事调查了pMFC是否同样介导意识形态威胁反应，发现通过经颅磁刺激（TMS）下调pMFC会导致：（i）尽管被提醒死亡，但公开宣称的宗教信仰减少；（ii）尽管遇到对国家内群体的尖锐批评，但群体偏见减少。尽管这些发现具有启发性，但由于缺乏非威胁比较条件以及依赖伪刺激而非对照TMS，其受到了限制。在此，在一项预先注册的重复和扩展研究中，我们下调了pMFC或一个对照区域（MT/V5），然后用死亡提醒或威胁中性主题对参与者进行启动。如前所述，当pMFC下调时，被提醒死亡的参与者报告的宗教信仰较少。在中性条件下未观察到pMFC下调的此类效应，这与将pMFC解释为监测突出威胁（如死亡）并有助于招募意识形态反应（如增强的宗教信仰）一致。然而，未观察到下调pMFC对群体偏见有影响，这可能是由于依赖大学内群体框架而非先前研究中的国家框架。
