Stephanie Cacioppo

Previous research has shown that specific goals and intentions influence a person’s allocation of social attention. From a neural viewpoint, a growing body of evidence suggests that the inferior fronto-parietal network, including the mirror neuron system, plays a role in the planning and the understanding of motor intentions. However, it is unclear whether and when the mirror neuron system plays a role in social intentions. Combining a behavioral task with electrical neuroimaging in 22 healthy male participants, the current study investigates whether the temporal brain dynamic of the mirror neuron system differs during two types of social intentions i.e., lust vs. romantic intentions. Our results showed that 62% of the stimuli evoking lustful intentions also evoked romantic intentions, and both intentions were sustained by similar activations of the inferior frontal gyrus and the inferior parietal lobule/angular gyrus for the first 432 ms after stimulus onset. Intentions to not love or not lust, on the other hand, were characterized by earlier differential activations of the inferior fronto-parietal network i.e., as early as 244 ms after stimulus onset. These results suggest that the mirror neuron system may not only code for the motor correlates of intentions, but also for the social meaning of intentions and its valence at both early/automatic and later/more elaborative stages of information processing.

Recent advances in neuroimaging offer an unprecedented window into the female sexual brain. The small samples and poor statistical power of individual functional magnetic resonance imaging studies have limited what can be gleaned about the systematic brain network that is involved in female sexual desire and female sexual dysfunction (eg, hypoactive sexual desire disorder [HSDD]). To quantitatively determine the brain network involved in HSDD. Systematic retrospective review and statistical meta-analysis of pertinent neuroimaging literature. Review of published literature on functional magnetic resonance imaging studies illustrating brain regions associated with female sexual desire and female HSDD. HSDD is associated with a specific fronto-limbic-parietal dysfunction characterized by (i) lower blood oxygen level-dependent responses in the sexual desire brain network and (ii) higher blood oxygen level-dependent responses in the self-referential brain network. The meta-analytic results are in line with a top-down neurofunctional model of HSDD in which inspecting, monitoring, and evaluating oneself (rather than sensory experience) before or during sexual activities interfere with sexual desire. These results raise new questions regarding the necessity and sufficiency of dysfunctional activation in the sexual desire and self-referential brain networks, whose answers bear on the development and evaluation of personalized treatments for HSDD. Cacioppo S. Neuroimaging of Female Sexual Desire and Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder. Sex Med Rev 2017;5:434-444.

Inferring intentions of others is one of the most intriguing issues in interpersonal interaction. Theories of embodied cognition and simulation suggest that this mechanism takes place through a direct and automatic matching process that occurs between an observed action and past actions. This process occurs via the reactivation of past self-related sensorimotor experiences within the inferior frontoparietal network (including the mirror neuron system) . The working model is that the anticipatory representations of others’ behaviors require internal predictive models of actions formed from pre-established, shared representations between the observer and the actor. This model suggests that observers should be better at predicting intentions performed by a familiar actor, rather than a stranger. However, little is known about the modulations of the intention brain network as a function of the familiarity between the observer and the actor. Here, we combined functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) with a behavioral intention inference task, in which participants were asked to predict intentions from three types of actors: A familiar actor (their significant other), themselves (another familiar actor), and a non-familiar actor (a stranger). Our results showed that the participants were better at inferring intentions performed by familiar actors than non-familiar actors and that this better performance was associated with greater activation within and beyond the inferior frontoparietal network i.e., in brain areas related to familiarity (e.g., precuneus). In addition, and in line with Hebbian principles of neural modulations, the more the participants reported being cognitively close to their partner, the less the brain areas associated with action self-other comparison (e.g., inferior parietal lobule), attention (e.g., superior parietal lobule), recollection (hippocampus), and pair bond (ventral tegmental area) were recruited, suggesting that the more a shared mental representation has been pre-established, the more neurons show suppression in their response to the presentation of information to which they are sensitive. These results suggest that the relation of performance to the extent of neural activation during intention understanding may display differential relationships based on the cognitive domain, brain region, and the cognitive interdependence between the observer and the actor.

Although a large number of fMRI studies have investigated the neural basis of empathy, little is known about its spatiotemporal dynamics. Moreover, most of the previous studies on empathy have focused on empathy for pain rather than empathy for positive emotions, such as happiness. In the present study, we addressed this question by investigating the spatiotemporal dynamics of different kinds of empathy by combining electrophysiological recordings with a behavioral priming empathy task involving negative and positive emotions. Electrical brain activity and behavioral data were analyzed from 30 subjects (12 males and 18 females). Half of the subjects performed a behavioral task on empathy for pain (EP task), while the other half performed a behavioral task on empathy for happiness (EH task). In each task, participants viewed prime photographs of either: 1) a stranger; or 2) a close friend (primes) followed by target photographs showing either a hand being hurt (or not; targets in the EP task), or a hand in happy circumstances (or not; targets in the EH task). In each task, participants were asked to judge the target situation and report whether they could feel the pain (in EP task) or the happiness (in the EH task), as a function of the primes i.e., either from the close friend’s or from the stranger’s perspective. Overall, our results suggest that taking the perspective of a close friend (compared to that of a stranger), as a prime stimulus, does have a dual-stage effect on empathy that is characterized by an early modulation for pain and later modulations for both pain and happiness. The early differences between friend and stranger primes for pain (but not for happiness) suggest that empathy for pain is an automatic process that has been socially learned and passed among friends. On the other hand, the later differences observed between stranger and friend primes suggest additional cognitive appraisal take place for both pain and happiness. Our results suggest that it takes more cognitive attentional efforts to judge a stranger’s happiness than a friend’s, whereas the opposite is true for pain.

Prior research has suggested that loneliness is associated with an implicit hypervigilance to social threats—an assumption in line with the evolutionary model of loneliness that indicates feeling socially isolated (or on the social perimeter) leads to increased attention and surveillance of the social world and an unwitting focus on self-preservation. Little is known, however, about the temporal dynamics for social threat (vs. nonsocial threat) in the lonely brains. We used high-density electrical neuroimaging and a behavioral task including social and nonsocial threat (and neutral) pictures to investigate the brain dynamics of implicit processing for social threat vs. nonsocial threat stimuli in lonely participants (N = 10), compared to nonlonely individuals (N = 9). The present study provides evidence that social threat images are differentiated from nonsocial threat stimuli more quickly in the lonely (~116 ms after stimulus onset) than nonlonely (~252 ms after stimulus onset) brains. That speed of threat processing in lonely individuals is in accord with the evolutionary model of loneliness. Brain source estimates expanded these results by suggesting that lonely (but not nonlonely) individuals showed early recruitment of brain areas involved in attention and self-representation.