Geng Peiyao, Li Ping, Fan Cong, Zhang Mingming, Luo Wenbo, He Weiqi
Research Center of Brain and Cognitive Neuroscience, Liaoning Normal University, Dalian 116029, China.
Key Laboratory of Brain and Cognitive Neuroscience, Liaoning Province, Dalian 116029, China.
Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci. 2025 May 21;20(1). doi: 10.1093/scan/nsaf029.
The right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (rVLPFC) is a crucial region involved in modulating social exclusion. Although prior studies have focused primarily on how social exclusion influences the perception of single faces, the effect of social exclusion on the crowd emotional perception and the neural mechanisms remain elusive. The current research examined whether social exclusion causes a biased perception of crowd emotions, and whether this effect would be modulated by transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) over the rVLPFC. Participants were either socially included or excluded, while TMS stimulation was applied over the rVLPFC or the vertex. Next, they viewed sets of happy or disgusted faces and assessed the mean emotions of each set. Socially excluded participants overestimated the mean emotions for disgusted crowd faces compared to socially included participants, which was positively correlated with need threat. Compared to the vertex, stimulating the rVLPFC reduced socially excluded participants' biased perception of disgusted crowd faces. Moreover, stimulation of the rVLPFC decreased discrimination performance for crowd faces expressing disgust but increased it for happy crowd faces. The results provide a causal test for the role of rVLPFC in alleviating the biased perception of negative crowd emotions following social exclusion.
右侧腹外侧前额叶皮层（rVLPFC）是参与调节社会排斥的关键区域。尽管先前的研究主要集中在社会排斥如何影响对单张面孔的感知，但社会排斥对群体情绪感知的影响及其神经机制仍不清楚。当前的研究考察了社会排斥是否会导致对群体情绪的偏差感知，以及这种效应是否会受到rVLPFC经颅磁刺激（TMS）的调节。参与者被分为社会接纳组或社会排斥组，同时对rVLPFC或头顶进行TMS刺激。接下来，他们观看一组组开心或厌恶的面孔，并评估每组面孔的平均情绪。与社会接纳组参与者相比，社会排斥组参与者高估了厌恶群体面孔的平均情绪，这与需求威胁呈正相关。与刺激头顶相比，刺激rVLPFC减少了社会排斥组参与者对厌恶群体面孔的偏差感知。此外，刺激rVLPFC降低了对表达厌恶的群体面孔的辨别能力，但提高了对开心群体面孔的辨别能力。研究结果为rVLPFC在减轻社会排斥后对负面群体情绪的偏差感知中的作用提供了因果检验。
