ABSTRACT Adolescence is marked by major changes in self-regulation, goal pursuit, and brain function. Regulatory focus theory (RFT) distinguishes between promotion and prevention self-regulatory systems, activated by ideal and ought goals, respectively. These systems have been studied in adults using fMRI; however, adolescent-specific patterns of activation are not yet well understood. In a normative adult sample, observed shared and unique regions of activation associated with idiographically assessed promotion vs. prevention priming, as well as variations in BOLD response depending on whether participants believed they were or were not making progress attaining the goal. In the present developmental extension, we examined whether adolescents exhibited neural activation patterns in response to ideal and ought priming consistent with adult findings. We measured brain activation during goal priming in 47 healthy adolescents (ages 13–17). Analyses revealed a linear increase in BOLD response to personally meaningful (vs. yoked control) goal-related adjectives across repeated priming blocks in regions including the medial prefrontal cortex, posterior cingulate cortex, and precuneus – regions associated with self-referential processing and regulatory focus. These results suggest that adolescents recruit neural circuits associated with self-relevant cognition in response to promotion and prevention goals.

ABSTRACT The explosion of digital media has emerged quickly from the convergence of technological advances, pandemic urgency, and cultural changes that have now taken hold in the daily life of people around the world. With cell phone, tablet and laptop devices as well as broad internet service available to an estimated two-thirds of the world’s population, the landscape of social interaction continues to change. “Social media” for personal, educational, business, health and other purposes is being used daily. With this shift, the field of social neuroscience has begun to consider both digital and in-person interactions. The hyperscanning technique lends itself well to this challenge and is beginning to be applied to study of varied social constructs as well as clinical samples. This special issue has assembled a set of papers specifically focused on hyperscanning as an informative approach to investigating digital vs. in-person interactions. Papers present conceptual, methodological, and primary data findings. Authors address issues of interpersonal stress regulation, shared and distinctive bodily and physiological characteristics of digital vs. in-person experiences, the effects of prior social interaction on emotional contagion, and the possible influence of BMI on neural synchrony during motor coordination.

ABSTRACT Schizophrenia is a severe psychiatric condition marked by social impairments. Given that social cognitive functioning strongly predicts life outcomes in schizophrenia, understanding its neurobiological basis is crucial. This study used receptor autoradiography to measure vasopressin 1a (AVPR1a) and oxytocin receptor (OXTR) densities in postmortem brain tissue from individuals with schizophrenia (N = 23) and matched controls (N = 18). We focused on the superior temporal sulcus, a region involved in social perception and often impaired in schizophrenia. AVPR1a binding densities exceeded those of OXTR. Notably, AVPR1a densities increased with age in females with schizophrenia, which may explain age-related changes in positive symptom severity (e.g. paranoia) in this group. Additionally, schizophrenia was associated with increased OXTR and a trend toward higher AVPR1a densities in the hypothalamus, a region central to oxytocin and vasopressin synthesis and stress response regulation. These findings suggest compensatory upregulation of nonapeptide receptor systems due to potentially reduced oxytocin and vasopressin release. Overall, our results highlight age- and sex-dependent alterations in receptor binding, providing insights into the neurobiology of social dysfunction in schizophrenia.

ABSTRACT As individuals increasingly engage in social interactions through digital mediums, understanding the neuroscientific underpinnings of such exchanges becomes a critical challenge and a valuable opportunity. In line with a second-person neuroscience approach, understanding the forms of interpersonal syntonisation that occur during digital interactions is pivotal for grasping the mechanisms underlying successful collaboration in virtual spaces. The hyperscanning paradigm, involving the simultaneous monitoring of the brains and bodies of multiple interacting individuals, seems to be a powerful tool for unravelling the neural correlates of interpersonal syntonisation in social exchanges. We posit that such approach can now open new windows on interacting brains’ responses even to digitally-conveyed social cues, offering insights into how social information is processed in the absence of traditional face-to-face settings. Yet, such paradigm shift raises challenging methodological questions, which should be answered properly to conduct significant and informative hyperscanning investigations. Here, we provide an introduction to core methodological issues dedicated to novices approaching the design of hyperscanning investigations of remote exchanges in natural settings, focusing on the selection of neuroscientific devices, synchronization of data streams, and data analysis approaches. Finally, a methodological checklist for devising robust hyperscanning studies on digital interactions is presented.

ABSTRACT The dissolving of social bonds is disruptive and leads to increased stress responsivity and a strong desire for reunion. The oxytocin (OXT) system is critical for the formation of social attachments, such as pair bonds, and is also involved in social recognition, social memory, and social vigilance. Therefore, long-term changes in the OXT system resulting from cohabitation and pair bonding may contribute to reunion-seeking behavior. Here, we employed social conditioned place preference (SCPP) and the forced swim test (FST) to examine sensitivity to partner-associated contexts and passive stress coping following a period of partner separation. We found that opposite-sex cohabitation led to SCPP formation only in male prairie voles with a strong preference for their partner, and this SCPP was maintained following short-term loss of a pair bonded partner. Furthermore, pair bonded males that were separated from their partner displayed more passive stress-coping than those that were not bonded to their lost partner, suggesting that differences in prairie vole mating tactics (i.e. formation of a bond or not) influence the behavioral response to partner separation. Finally, we found changes in OXTR binding that may reflect variation in loss-related behavioral phenotypes based on different mating strategies.

ABSTRACT We investigated neural correlates of Emotion Recognition Accuracy (ERA) using the Assessment of Contextualized Emotions (ACE). ACE infuses context by presenting emotion expressions in a naturalistic group setting and distinguishes between accurately perceiving intended emotions (signal), and bias due to perceiving additional, secondary emotions (noise). This social perception process is argued to induce perspective taking in addition to pattern matching in ERA. Thirty participants were presented with an fMRI-compatible adaptation of the ACE consisting of blocks of neutral and emotional faces in single and group-embedded settings. Participants rated the central character’s expressions categorically or using scalar scales in consequent fMRI scans. Distinct brain activations were associated with the perception of emotional vs. neutral faces in the four conditions. Moreover, accuracy and bias scores from the original ACE task performed on another day were associated with brain activation during the scalar (vs. categorical) condition for emotional (vs. neutral) faces embedded in group. These findings suggest distinct cognitive mechanisms linked to each type of emotional rating and highlight the importance of considering cognitive bias in the assessment of social emotion perception.

ABSTRACT The neurobiology of typical moral cognition involves the interaction of frontal, limbic, and temporoparietal networks. There is still much to be understood mechanistically about how moral processing is disrupted; such understanding is key to combating antisociality. Neuroscientific models suggest a key role for attention mechanisms in atypical moral processing. We hypothesized that attention-bias toward alcohol cues in alcohol use disorder (AUD) leads to a failure to properly engage with morally relevant stimuli, reducing moral processing. We recruited patients with AUD (n = 30) and controls (n = 30). During functional magnetic resonance imaging, participants viewed pairs of images consisting of a moral or neutral cue and an alcohol or neutral distractor. When viewing moral cues paired with alcohol distractors, individuals with AUD had lower medial prefrontal cortex engagement; this pattern was also seen for left amygdala in younger iAUDs. Across groups, individuals had less engagement of middle/superior temporal gyri. These findings provide initial support for AUD-related attention bias interference in sociomoral processing. If supported in future longitudinal and causal study designs, this finding carries potential societal and clinical benefits by suggesting a novel, leverageable mechanism and in providing a cognitive explanation that may help combat persistent stigma.

ABSTRACT Uncertainty is unavoidable, and maladaptive responses to uncertainty may underlie the etiology and maintenance of psychopathology. A general tendency to associate uncertainty with aversive consequences, a type of covariation bias, can amplify aversive emotional experiences. To address questions about uncertainty during emotion regulation, we examined the Late Positive Potential (LPP) – an electrocortical marker of attention to and appraisal of motivationally relevant emotional stimuli – during a task designed to measure the effect of covariation bias and its emotional response consequences. Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded while participants (N = 52) were presented with a pre-stimulus cue that either conveyed information about the valence of an upcoming emotional image, or left them in ambiguity. We replicated findings that demonstrate expectancy biases in a priori and online expectancies of emotion-eliciting images, as well as in a posteriori estimates for concurrence of uncertainty cues and aversive images. Moreover, we demonstrate a novel finding that uncertainty cues amplify the LPP in response to subsequent aversive emotional stimuli. These findings advance research by conjoining existing emotion regulation research on the LPP with study of the effects of uncertainty on emotional appraisal and highlight the importance of accounting for stimulus uncertainty in emotion regulation research.

ABSTRACT Mentalizing is defined as the ability to attribute mental states to oneself and others. In the context of parental behavior, parents’ tendency to comment on their child’s mental activities refers to the concept of mind-mindedness (MM). MM has been positively associated with various developmental outcomes in children, notably their own ability to mentalize, known as theory of mind (ToM). Although parental (MM) and child (ToM) mentalizing have important implications during childhood, their associations with children’s neural structures are largely unknown. Among 62 mother-child dyads, maternal MM was rated from free-play sequences when children were aged 1 year, child ToM was assessed using a first-order false-belief task at 4 years of age, and structural MRI images were acquired at 10 years of age. Maternal MM was positively associated with gray matter volumes (GMV) in the dorsal prefrontal cortex and the superior temporal pole. Child ToM abilities were positively associated with GMV in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex. Though cortical regions associated with MM and ToM showed no anatomical overlap, many are functionally connected through a neural network highly involved in self-referential strategies for mentalizing. These findings suggest that MM and ToM may contribute to distinct sub-processes that collectively support social cognition development.

ABSTRACT Children with autism often have difficulty with Theory of Mind (ToM), the ability to infer mental states, and pragmatic skills, the contextual use of language. Neuroimaging research suggests ToM and pragmatic skills overlap, as the ability to understand another’s mental state is a prerequisite to interpersonal communication. To our knowledge, no study in the last decade has examined this overlap further. To assess the emerging consensus across neuroimaging studies of ToM and pragmatic skills in autism, we used coordinate-based activation likelihood estimation (ALE) analysis of 35 functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) studies (13 pragmatic skills, 22 ToM), resulting in a meta-analysis of 1,295 participants (647 autistic, 648 non-autistic) aged 7 to 49 years. Group difference analysis revealed decreased left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG) activation in autistic participants during pragmatic skills tasks. For ToM tasks, we found reduced anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC), and temporoparietal junction (TPJ) activation in autistic participants. Collectively, both ToM and pragmatic tasks showed activation in IFG and superior temporal gyrus (STG) and a reduction in left hemispheric activation in autistic participants. Overall, the findings underscore the cognitive and neural processing similarities between ToM and pragmatic skills, and their underlying neurobiological differences in autism.