Shenzhen Key Laboratory of Affective and Social Neuroscience, Center for Brain Disorders and Cognitive Neuroscience, School of Psychology, Shenzhen University, Shenzhen 518060, China.
Department of Biomedical Sciences, Cognitive Neuroscience Center, University Medical Center Groningen, University of Groningen, Groningen 9713AV, The Netherlands.
Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci. 2024 Oct 7;19(1). doi: 10.1093/scan/nsae060.
Social hierarchy is a typical feature of social organization. The ability to quickly recognize social hierarchy information is crucial for adapting to social contexts. Here, we adopted fast periodic visual stimulation with electroencephalography to assess the neural responses to social hierarchy during social competition and cooperation, respectively. Participants first learned hierarchical faces from a competitive game versus a cooperative game. We then sequentially presented the learned hierarchical faces with a specific frequency in a set of faces. Results showed that participants rated the inferior player as lower in the social hierarchy in the cooperative context compared to the competitive context, indicating that social context affects the judgment of others' rank. Moreover, higher neural responses to high and low-hierarchy faces versus medium-hierarchy faces were observed, suggesting rapid discrimination of social hierarchy from faces. Interestingly, rank-specific neural responses were more pronounced in the competitive context than in the cooperative context, indicating increased sensitivity to social hierarchy during social competition versus social cooperation. This study provides behavioral and neural evidence for rapid, automatic processing of social hierarchy information and for an increased sensitivity to such information in competitive versus cooperative social contexts.
社会等级结构是社会组织的一个典型特征。快速识别社会等级结构信息的能力对于适应社会环境至关重要。在这里，我们采用快速周期性视觉刺激结合脑电图技术，分别评估了社会竞争和合作情境下社会等级结构的神经反应。参与者首先从竞争游戏和合作游戏中学习等级面孔。然后，我们在一组面孔中以特定频率依次呈现学习过的等级面孔。结果表明，与竞争情境相比，合作情境下参与者认为劣势玩家的社会等级较低，这表明社会情境会影响对他人地位的判断。此外，与中等级别面孔相比，参与者对高等级和低等级面孔的神经反应更高，这表明可以从面孔中快速区分社会等级。有趣的是，与合作情境相比，竞争情境中特定等级的神经反应更为明显，这表明在社会竞争中比在社会合作中对社会等级的敏感性增加。这项研究提供了行为和神经学证据，证明了社会等级结构信息的快速、自动处理，以及在竞争社会情境中对这种信息的敏感性增加。
