Mentalizing about emotion and its relationship to empathy

Mentalizing involves the ability to predict someone else''s behavior based on their belief state. More advanced mentalizing skills involve integrating knowledge about beliefs with knowledge about the emotional impact of those beliefs. Recent research indicates that advanced mentalizing skills may be related to the capacity to empathize with others. However, it is not clear what aspect of mentalizing is most related to empathy. In this study, we used a novel, advanced mentalizing task to identify neural mechanisms involved in predicting a future emotional response based on a belief state. Subjects viewed social scenes in which one character had a False Belief and one character had a True Belief. In the primary condition, subjects were asked to predict what emotion the False Belief Character would feel if they had a full understanding about the situation. We found that neural regions related to both mentalizing and emotion were involved when predicting a future emotional response, including the superior temporal sulcus, medial prefrontal cortex, temporal poles, somatosensory related cortices (SRC), inferior frontal gyrus and thalamus. In addition, greater neural activity in primarily emotion-related regions, including right SRC and bilateral thalamus, when predicting emotional response was significantly correlated with more self-reported empathy. The findings suggest that predicting emotional response involves generating and using internal affective representations and that greater use of these affective representations when trying to understand the emotional experience of others is related to more empathy.     

The overlap between false belief and spatial reorientation in the temporo-parietal junction: The role of input modality and task

Neuroimaging research has demonstrated that the temporo-parietal junction (TPJ) is activated when unexpected stimuli appear in spatial reorientation tasks as well as during thinking about the beliefs of other people triggered by verbal scenarios. While the role of potential common component processes subserved by the TPJ has been extensively studied to explain this common activation, the potential confounding role of input modality (spatial vs. verbal) has been largely ignored. To investigate the role of input modality apart from task processes, we developed a novel spatial false belief task based on moving shapes. We explored the overlap in TPJ activation across this novel task and traditional tasks of spatial reorientation (Posner) and verbal belief (False Belief vs. Photo stories). The results show substantial overlap across the same spatial input modality (both reorientation and false belief) as well as across the common task process (verbal and spatial belief), but no triple overlap. This suggests the potential for an overarching function of the TPJ, with some degree of specialization in different subregions due to modality, function and connectivity. The results are discussed with respect to recent theoretical models of the TPJ.     

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) item analysis of empathy and theory of mind

In contrast to conventional functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) analysis across participants, item analysis allows generalizing the observed neural response patterns from a specific stimulus set to the entire population of stimuli. In the present study, we perform an item analysis on an fMRI paradigm (EmpaToM) that measures the neural correlates of empathy and Theory of Mind (ToM). The task includes a large stimulus set (240 emotional vs. neutral videos to probe empathic responding and 240 ToM or factual reasoning questions to probe ToM), which we tested in two large participant samples (N = 178, N = 130). Both, the empathy‐related network comprising anterior insula, anterior cingulate/dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, inferior frontal gyrus, and dorsal temporoparietal junction/supramarginal gyrus (TPJ) and the ToM related network including ventral TPJ, superior temporal gyrus, temporal poles, and anterior and posterior midline regions, were observed across participants and items. Regression analyses confirmed that these activations are predicted by the empathy or ToM condition of the stimuli, but not by low‐level features such as video length, number of words, syllables or syntactic complexity. The item analysis also allowed for the selection of the most effective items to create optimized stimulus sets that provide the most stable and reproducible results. Finally, reproducibility was shown in the replication of all analyses in the second participant sample. The data demonstrate (a) the generalizability of empathy and ToM related neural activity and (b) the reproducibility of the EmpaToM task and its applicability in intervention and clinical imaging studies.     

Neural similarity between mentalizing and live social interaction during the transition to adolescence

Social interactions are essential for human development, yet little neuroimaging research has examined their underlying neurocognitive mechanisms using socially interactive paradigms during childhood and adolescence. Recent neuroimaging research has revealed activity in the mentalizing network when children engage with a live social partner, even when mentalizing is not required. While this finding suggests that social‐interactive contexts may spontaneously engage mentalizing, it is not a direct test of how similarly the brain responds to these two contexts. The current study used representational similarity analysis on data from 8‐ to 14‐year‐olds who made mental and nonmental judgments about an abstract character and a live interaction partner during fMRI. A within‐subject, 2 (Mental/Nonmental) × 2 (Peer/Character) design enabled us to examine response pattern similarity between conditions, and estimate fit to three conceptual models of how the two contexts relate: (1) social interaction and mentalizing about an abstract character are represented similarly; (2) interactive peers and abstract characters are represented differently regardless of the evaluation type; and (3) mental and nonmental states are represented dissimilarly regardless of target. We found that the temporal poles represent mentalizing and peer interactions similarly (Model 1), suggesting a neurocognitive link between the two in these regions. Much of the rest of the social brain exhibits different representations of interactive peers and abstract characters (Model 2). Our findings highlight the importance of studying social‐cognitive processes using interactive approaches, and the utility of pattern‐based analyses for understanding how social‐cognitive processes relate to each other.     

Epistemic Mistrust: A Crucial Aspect of Mentalization in People with a History of Abuse?

I explore the development of implicit mentalizing, its roots in internal working models of early attachment relationships and how these contribute to the emergence of epistemic trust. I discuss the respective contributions of caregiver sensitivity and congruent ‘marking’ to the development of secure attachment and epistemic trust. I discuss the ways in which early relational trauma and sexual abuse directly contribute to the emergence of epistemic mistrust and the implications of this for the role of mentalizing in psychotherapy.     

Believing androids – fMRI activation in the right temporo-parietal junction is modulated by ascribing intentions to non-human agents

Attributing mind to interaction partners has been shown to increase the social relevance we ascribe to others’ actions and to modulate the amount of attention dedicated to them. However, it remains unclear how the relationship between higher-order mind attribution and lower-level attention processes is established in the brain. In this neuroimaging study, participants saw images of an anthropomorphic robot that moved its eyes left- or rightwards to signal the appearance of an upcoming stimulus in the same (valid cue) or opposite location (invalid cue). Independently, participants’ beliefs about the intentionality underlying the observed eye movements were manipulated by describing the eye movements as under human control or preprogrammed. As expected, we observed a validity effect behaviorally and neurologically (increased response times and activation in the invalid vs. valid condition). More importantly, we observed that this effect was more pronounced for the condition in which the robot’s behavior was believed to be controlled by a human, as opposed to be preprogrammed. This interaction effect between cue validity and belief was, however, only found at the neural level and was manifested as a significant increase of activation in bilateral anterior temporoparietal junction.     

Increases in brain activity during social competition predict decreases in working memory performance and later recall

In our fMRI experiment, participants completed a learning task in both a noncompetitive and a socially competitive learning environment. Despite reporting a preference for completing the task while competing, participants remembered significantly more during the task and later recalled more from the noncompetitive learning environment. Furthermore, during working memory maintenance, there was performance‐related deactivation in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) and the precuneus/PCC. During feedback presentation, there was greater activation in the mPFC and the precuneus/PCC while competing. Differential activation in the precuneus/PCC predicted worse later recall for information learned competitively. Since previous research suggests that the mPFC is involved in social‐referencing, while the precuneus/PCC is implicated in off‐task thoughts, our results suggest that receiving feedback regarding competition produces more activation in brain regions implicated in social interaction, as well as task distraction. While competition may make a task more enjoyable, the goal of winning may distract from maximizing performance. Hum Brain Mapp 38:457–471, 2017. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Do implicit and explicit belief processing share neural substrates?

Humans rely on their ability to infer another person's mental state to understand and predict others' behavior (“theory of mind,” ToM). Multiple lines of research suggest that not only are humans able to consciously process another person's belief state, but also are able to do so implicitly. Here we explored how general implicit belief states are represented in the brain, compared to those substrates involved in explicit ToM processes. Previous work on this topic has yielded conflicting results, and thus, the extent to which the implicit and explicit ToM systems draw on common neural bases is unclear. Participants were presented with “Sally‐Anne” type movies in which a protagonist was falsely led to believe a ball was in one location, only for a puppet to later move it to another location in their absence (false‐belief condition). In other movies, the protagonist had their back turned the entire time the puppet moved the ball between the two locations, meaning that they had no opportunity to develop any pre‐existing beliefs about the scenario (no‐belief condition). Using a group of independently localized explicit ToM brain regions, we found greater activity for false‐belief trials, relative to no‐belief trials, in the right temporoparietal junction, right superior temporal sulcus, precuneus, and left middle prefrontal gyrus. These findings extend upon previous work on the neural bases of implicit ToM by showing substantial overlap between this system and the explicit ToM system, suggesting that both abilities might recruit a common set of mentalizing processes/functional brain regions. Hum Brain Mapp 38:4760–4772, 2017. © 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Evidence for social working memory from a parametric functional MRI study

Keeping track of various amounts of social cognitive information, including people's mental states, traits, and relationships, is fundamental to navigating social interactions. However, to date, no research has examined which brain regions support variable amounts of social information processing ("social load"). We developed a social working memory paradigm to examine the brain networks sensitive to social load. Two networks showed linear increases in activation as a function of increasing social load: the medial frontoparietal regions implicated in social cognition and the lateral frontoparietal system implicated in nonsocial forms of working memory. Of these networks, only load-dependent medial frontoparietal activity was associated with individual differences in social cognitive ability (trait perspective-taking). Although past studies of nonsocial load have uniformly found medial frontoparietal activity decreases with increasing task demands, the current study demonstrates these regions do support increasing mental effort when such effort engages social cognition. Implications for the etiology of clinical disorders that implicate social functioning and potential interventions are discussed.