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We appraise other people's emotions by combining multiple sources of information, including somatic facial/body reactions and the surrounding context. Wealthy literature revealed how people take into account contextual information in the interpretation of facial expressions, but the mechanisms mediating such influence still need to be duly investigated. Across two experiments, we mapped the neural representations of distinct (but comparably unpleasant) negative states, pain, and disgust, as conveyed by naturalistic facial expressions or contextual sentences. Negative expressions led to shared activity in the fusiform gyrus and superior temporal sulcus. Instead, pain contexts recruited the supramarginal, postcentral, and insular cortex, whereas disgust contexts triggered the temporoparietal cortex and hippocampus/amygdala. When pairing the two sources of information together, we found a higher likelihood of classifying an expression according to the sentence preceding it. Furthermore, networks specifically involved in processing contexts were re-enacted whenever a face followed said context. Finally, the perigenual medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) showed increased activity for consistent (vs inconsistent) face-context pairings, suggesting that it integrates state-specific information from the two sources. Overall, our study reveals the heterogeneous nature of face-context information integration, which operates both according to a state-general and state-specific principle, with the latter mediated by the perigenual medial prefrontal cortex. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, individuals were asked to perform costly actions to reduce harm to strangers, even while the general population, including authorities and experts, grappled with the uncertainty surrounding thenovel virus. Many studies have examined health decision-making by experts, but the study of lay, non-expert, individual decisionmaking on a stranger's health has been left to the wayside, as ordinary citizens are usually not tasked with such decisions. Methods: We sought to capture a snapshot of this specific choice behavior by administering two surveys to the general population in the spring of 2020, when much of the global community was subject to COVID-19-related restrictions, as well as uncertainty surrounding the virus. We presented study participants with fictitious diseases varying in severity that threatened oneself, a loved one or a stranger. Participants were asked to choose between treatment options that could either provide a sure, but mild improvement (sure option) or cure the affected person at a given probability of success (risky option). Results: Respondents preferred gambles overall, but risk-seeking decreased progressively with higher expected severity of disease. This pattern was observed regardless of the recipient's identity. Distinctions between targets emerged however whendecisions were conditioned on a treatment's monetary cost, with participants preferring cheaper options for strangers. Discussion: Overall, these findings provide a descriptive model of individual decision-making under risk for others; and inform on the limits of what can be asked of an individual in service to a stranger. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Embodied theories hold that understanding what another person is doing requires the observer to map that action directly onto his or her own motor representation and simulate it internally. The human motor system may, thus, be endowed with a "mirror matching" device through which the same motor representation is activated, when the subject is either the performer or the observer of another's action ("self-other shared representation"). It is suggested that understanding action verbs relies upon the same mechanism; this implies that motor responses to these words are automatic and independent of the subject of the verb. In the current study, participants were requested to read silently and decide on the syntactic subject of action and nonaction verbs, presented in first (1P) or third (3P) person, while TMS was applied to the left hand primary motor cortex (M1). TMS-induced motor-evoked potentials were recorded from hand muscles as a measure of cortico-spinal excitability. Motor-evoked potentials increased for 1P, but not for 3P, action verbs or 1P and 3P nonaction verbs. We provide novel demonstration that the motor simulation is triggered "only" when the conceptual representation of a word integrates the action with the self as the agent of that action. This questions the core principle of "mirror matching" and opens to alternative interpretations of the relationship between conceptual and sensorimotor processes.

Extensive neuroimaging literature suggests that understanding others' thoughts and emotions engages a wide network encompassing parietal, temporal and medial frontal brain areas. However, the causal role played by these regions in social inferential abilities is still unclear. Moreover very little is known about theory of mind deficits in brain tumours and whether potential anatomical substrates are comparable to those identified in functional MRI literature. This study evaluated the performance of 105 tumour patients, before and immediately after brain surgery, on a cartoon-based non-verbal task evaluating cognitive (intention attribution) and affective (emotion attribution) theory of mind, as well as a non-social control condition (causal inference). Across multiple analyses, we found converging evidence of a double dissociation between patients with right superior parietal damage, selectively impaired in intention attribution, and those with right anteromedial temporal lesion, exhibiting deficits only in emotion attribution. Instead, patients with damage to the frontal cortex were impaired in all kinds of inferential processes, including those from the non-social control conditions. Overall, our data provide novel reliable causal evidence of segregation between different aspects of the theory of mind network from both the cognitive and also the anatomical point of view. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The identification of reliable brain endophenotypes of autism spectrum disorders (ASD) has been hampered to date by the heterogeneity in the neuroanatomical abnormalities detected in this condition. To handle the complexity of neuroimaging data and to convert brain images in informative biomarkers of pathology, multivariate analysis techniques based on Support Vector Machines (SVM) have been widely used in several disease conditions. They are usually trained to distinguish patients from healthy control subjects by making a binary classification. Here, we propose the use of the One-Class Classification (OCC) or Data Description method that, in contrast to two-class classification, is based on a description of one class of objects only. This approach, by defining a multivariate normative rule on one class of subjects, allows recognizing examples from a different category as outliers. We applied the OCC to 314 regional features extracted from brain structural Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scans of young children with ASD (21 males and 20 females) and control subjects (20 males and 20 females), matched on age [range: 22-72 months of age; mean = 49 months] and non-verbal intelligence quotient (NVIQ) [range: 31-123; mean = 73]. We demonstrated that a common pattern of features characterize the ASD population. The OCC SVM trained on the group of ASD subjects showed the following performances in the ASD vs. controls separation: the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) was 0.74 for the male and 0.68 for the female population, respectively. Notably, the ASD vs. controls discrimination results were maximized when evaluated on the subsamples of subjects with NVIQ ≥ 70, leading to AUC = 0.81 for the male and AUC = 0.72 for the female populations, respectively. Language regions and regions from the default mode network--posterior cingulate cortex, pars opercularis and pars triangularis of the inferior frontal gyrus, and transverse temporal gyrus--contributed most to distinguishing individuals with ASD from controls, arguing for the crucial role of these areas in the ASD pathophysiology. The observed brain patterns associate preschoolers with ASD independently of their age, gender and NVIQ and therefore they are expected to constitute part of the ASD brain endophenotype. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rejections of unfair offers in the ultimatum game (UG) are commonly assumed to reflect negative emotional arousal mediated by the anterior insula and medial prefrontal cortex. We aimed to disentangle those neural mechanisms associated with direct personal involvement (‘I have been treated unfairly’) from those associated with fairness considerations, such as the wish to discourage unfair behavior or social norm violations (‘this person has been treated unfairly’). For this purpose, we used fMRI and asked participants to play the UG as responders either for themselves (myself) or on behalf of another person (third party). Unfair offers were equally often rejected in both conditions. Neuroimaging data revealed a dissociation between the medial prefrontal cortex, specifically associated with rejections in the myself condition, thus confirming its role in self-related emotional responses, and the left anterior insula, associated with rejections in both myself and third-party conditions, suggesting a role in promoting fair behavior also toward third parties. Our data extend the current understanding of the neural substrate of social decision making, by disentangling the structures sensitive to direct emotional involvement of the self from those implicated in pure fairness considerations. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Structural and functional studies have shown that schizophrenia is often associated with frontolimbic abnormalities in the prefrontal and mediotemporal regions. It is still unclear, however, if such dysfunctional interaction extends as well to relay regions such as the thalamus and the anterior insula. Here, we measured gray matter volumes of five right-hemisphere regions in 68 patients with schizophrenia and 77 matched healthy subjects. The regions were amygdala, thalamus, and entorhinal cortex (identified as anomalous by prior studies on the same population) and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and anterior insula (isolated by voxel-based morphometry analysis). We used structural equation modeling and found altered path coefficients connecting the thalamus to the anterior insula, the amygdala to the DLPFC, and the entorhinal cortex to the DLPFC. In particular, patients exhibited a stronger thalamus-insular connection than healthy controls. Instead, controls showed positive entorhinal-DLPFC and negative amygdalar-DLPFC connections, both of which were absent in the clinical population. Our data provide evidence that schizophrenia is characterized by an impaired right-hemisphere network, in which intrahemispheric communication involving relay structures may play a major role in sustaining the pathophysiology of the disease. Hum Brain Mapp, 2012. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Neuropsychological studies suggest that the human brain is endowed with two body representations: the body schema (BS), coding the orientation of one's body parts in space, and the body structural description (BSD), coding the location of body parts relative to a standard body.Weused fMRI to disentangle the neural mechanisms underlying these putatively distinct body representations. Participants saw an arm or a pot's handle (stimulus: arm, handle) rotated at different angles (angle: 30 -150°). If the stimulus was an arm, subjects were instructed to imagine (1) rotating their own arm until it matched the stimulus orientation (comparing the seen arm to their own) or (2) seeing the stimulus moving toward its appropriate position on a simultaneously presented human body [comparing the arm to the one of a standard body (strategy: motor, visual imagery)]. If the stimulus was a handle, subjects were instructed to imagine (1) placing the handle on its appropriate position on a simultaneously presented pot or (2) seeing it moving toward its pot's position. The analysis of the interaction stimulus × strategy revealed activation of left secondary somatosensory cortex (SII), specifically when comparing the stimulus arm to one's own. The analysis of the parameters describing the linear effect of angle revealed that neural activity of left posterior intraparietal sulcus was modulated by the stimulus's rotation, but only when relating the arm to a standard body. The results associate BS and BSD with differential neural substrates, thereby suggesting that these are independent body representations, and furthermore extend current concepts of SII function. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous studies have found that distracting someone through a challenging activity leads to hypoalgesia, an effect mediated by parietal and prefrontal processes. Other studies suggest that challenging activities affect the ability to regulate one's aching experiences, due to the partially common neural substrate between cognitive control and pain at the level of the medial prefrontal cortex. We investigated the effects of distraction and cognitive control on pain by delivering noxious stimulations during or after a Stroop paradigm (requiring high cognitive load) or a neutral condition. We found less-intense and unpleasant subjective pain ratings during (compared to after) task execution. This hypoalgesia was associated with enhanced activity at the level of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and the posterior parietal cortex, which also showed negative connectivity with the insula. Furthermore, multivariate pattern analysis revealed that distraction altered the neural response to pain, by making it more similar to that associated with previous Stroop tasks. All these effects were independent of the nature of the task, which, instead, led to a localized neural modulation around the anterior cingulate cortex. Overall, our study underscores the role played by two facets of human executive functions, which exert an independent influence on the neural response to pain., (© The Author(s) 2023. Published by Oxford University Press.)