The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel.
Northeastern University, Boston, MA, United States.
Neuroimage. 2023 Mar;268:119879. doi: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2023.119879. Epub 2023 Jan 13.
Thirty years of neuroimaging reveal the set of brain regions consistently associated with pleasant and unpleasant affect in humans-or the neural reference space for valence. Yet some of humans' most potent affective states occur in the context of other humans. Prior work has yet to differentiate how the neural reference space for valence varies as a product of the sociality of affective stimuli. To address this question, we meta-analyzed across 614 social and non-social affective neuroimaging contrasts, summarizing the brain regions that are consistently activated for social and non-social affective information. We demonstrate that across the literature, social and non-social affective stimuli yield overlapping activations within regions associated with visceromotor control, including the amygdala, hypothalamus, anterior cingulate cortex and insula. However, we find that social processing differs from non-social affective processing in that it involves additional cortical activations in the medial prefrontal and posterior cingulum that have been associated with mentalizing and prediction. A Bayesian classifier was able to differentiate unpleasant from pleasant affect, but not social from non-social affective states. Moreover, it was not able to classify unpleasantness from pleasantness at the highest levels of sociality. These findings suggest that highly social scenarios may be equally salient to humans, regardless of their valence.
三十年的神经影像学研究揭示了一组与人类愉悦和不愉快情感始终相关的大脑区域，或者说是情感效价的神经参照空间。然而，人类最强烈的一些情感状态是在与他人交往的背景下产生的。之前的研究尚未区分情感刺激的社会性如何影响效价的神经参照空间。为了解决这个问题，我们对 614 项社会和非社会情感神经影像学对比进行了荟萃分析，总结了大脑中始终对社会和非社会情感信息产生激活的区域。我们证明，在文献中，社会和非社会情感刺激在与内脏运动控制相关的区域内产生重叠激活，包括杏仁核、下丘脑、前扣带皮层和脑岛。然而，我们发现，社会处理与非社会情感处理不同，它涉及内侧前额叶和后扣带的额外皮质激活，这些区域与心理化和预测有关。贝叶斯分类器能够区分不愉快和愉快的情感，但不能区分社会和非社会的情感状态。此外，它不能在最高层次的社会性上区分不愉快和愉快。这些发现表明，高度社会性的场景对人类来说可能同样引人注目，而不考虑其效价。
