He Zhouzhou, Vannucci Anna, Meyer Meghan L, Tottenham Nim
Department of Psychology, Columbia University, United States.
Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci. 2025 Jul 22. doi: 10.1093/scan/nsaf074.
Mentalizing-the process of thinking about others' and one's own thoughts and feelings-is ubiquitous and consequential. Traditionally, researchers have examined how the brain supports mentalizing. Here, we ask what content knowledge the brain relies on to mentalize. Based on converging evidence from developmental, cognitive, and social-affective neurosciences, we suggest that the socio-affective knowledge gained from early attachment relationships provide the basis for such content knowledge. Moreover, we suggest that this attachment relationship-generated schematized knowledge is represented in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) and accessed during mentalizing. In this paper, we (1) describe mPFC activity during early caregiving experiences to demonstrate its encoding of the affective meaning of parent-child interaction episodes; (2) extrapolate from research on memory consolidation in the cognitive neurosciences to propose how regularities across parent-child interactions become abstracted into an attachment schema in the mPFC; (3) discuss the functionality of mPFC-coordinated representations of attachment schemas for predicting the social world. Long recognized by attachment theory, our integrative perspective prompts researchers to neuroscientifically examine whether the social relationship with one's caregiver builds attachment knowledge that in turns forms the basis for mentalizing.
心理化——思考他人和自己的思想及情感的过程——无处不在且至关重要。传统上，研究人员探究的是大脑如何支持心理化。在此，我们要问大脑依赖何种内容知识来进行心理化。基于来自发展神经科学、认知神经科学和社会情感神经科学的趋同证据，我们认为从早期依恋关系中获得的社会情感知识为此类内容知识提供了基础。此外，我们认为这种由依恋关系产生的图式化知识表征于内侧前额叶皮质（mPFC）中，并在心理化过程中被调用。在本文中，我们（1）描述早期照料经历中的mPFC活动，以证明其对亲子互动情节情感意义的编码；（2）从认知神经科学中关于记忆巩固的研究进行推断，提出亲子互动中的规律是如何在mPFC中被抽象为一种依恋图式的；（3）讨论mPFC协调的依恋图式表征对于预测社会世界的功能。依恋理论早已认识到这一点，我们的综合观点促使研究人员从神经科学角度审视与照料者的社会关系是否构建了依恋知识，而这种知识又反过来构成心理化的基础。
