ABSTRACT

Purpose

In research to assess emotions from biometric signals, participants are asked to evaluate the emotions they subjectively experienced to confirm whether the assumed emotions were actually elicited. However, the evaluation of emotion may influence the biometric signals related to the emotion itself. While such evaluative processes may function as a form of emotion regulation, which is known to modulate emotional experiences, the neural mechanisms and effects of evaluation itself remain unclear. Specifically, the temporal dynamics of how these evaluations affect emotion‐related brain activity in electroencephalography (EEG) have not been investigated. Based on theories of emotional processing and self‐focused attention, we hypothesized that emotion evaluations would enhance emotional processing as reflected in frontal alpha asymmetry (FAA) through both immediate attentional effects and sustained self‐focused attention.

Method

We measured a 29‐channel EEG in 40 healthy participants who were presented with unpleasant and highly arousing images. Participants were assigned to either an experimental group that performed the task with subjective evaluation followed by without subjective evaluation, or a control group that performed the task without subjective evaluation twice. This design allowed us to examine both immediate effects of evaluation and its lasting influence on subsequent emotional processing.

Finding

The results revealed that FAA was significantly lower during emotional evaluation compared to conditions without subjective evaluation, particularly during stimulus processing (300–500 ms). This early modulation suggests that evaluation automatically engages attentional processes, may reflect enhanced negative emotional processing as well as the activation of behavioral inhibition system through self‐focused attention.

Conclusion

This study demonstrates that the emotional evaluation procedure itself can significantly alter early emotion‐related brain activity, providing insights into how self‐focused emotional evaluation engages both emotional and motivational processes. These findings suggest the need for methodological reconsiderations in EEG emotion estimation studies.

<p>So-called ‘mismatch accounts’ propose that, rather than arising from a socio-cognitive deficit present in autistic people, mentalising difficulties are the product of a mismatch in neurotype between interaction partners. Although this idea has grown in popularity over the recent years, there is currently only limited empirical evidence to support mismatch theories. Moreover, the social model of disability such theories are grounded in demands a culturally situated view of social interaction, yet research on mentalising and/or autism is largely biased towards western countries, with little knowledge on how successful mentalising is defined differently, and how tools to assess socio-cognitive ability compare, across cultures. Using a widely employed mentalising task, the current study investigated and compared the bi-directional mentalising performance of British and Japanese autistic and non-autistic adults and assessed observer-agent kinematic similarity as a potential dimension along which mismatches may occur between neurotypes. Participants were asked to depict various mental state- and action-based interactions by moving two triangles across a touch-screen device, before viewing and interpreting stimuli generated by other participants. In the UK sample, our results replicate a seminal prior study in showing poorer mentalising abilities in non-autistic adults for animations generated by the autistic group. Crucially, the same pattern did not emerge in the Japanese sample, where there were no mentalising differences between the two groups. Limitations of the current study include that efforts to match all samples within and across cultures in terms of IQ, gender and age were not successful for all comparisons, but control analyses suggest this did not affect our results. Furthermore, any performance differences were found for both the mental state- and action-based conditions, mirroring prior work and raising questions about the domain-specificity of the employed task. Our results add support for a paradigm shift in the autism literature, moving beyond deficit-based models and towards acknowledging the inherently relational nature of social interaction. We further discuss how our findings suggest limited cultural transferability of common socio-cognitive measures rather than superior mentalising abilities in Japanese autistic adults, underscoring the need for more cross-cultural research and the development of culturally sensitive scientific and diagnostic tools.</p>

Previous studies suggested that self-focused attention (SFA), implicated in social anxiety disorder (SAD), correlates with heightened activity in the right frontopolar area (rFPA), which is the right prefrontal cortex just behind the forehead. Transcranial static magnetic field stimulation (tSMS) is a non-invasive brain stimulation method capable of temporarily suppressing brain function beneath the magnet. We explored whether tSMS on individuals with tendencies toward SAD elicited (1) suppressing rFPA activation during the resting-state and (2) reducing SFA during a subsequent speech task. Twenty-three university students with social anxiety performed two speech tasks. Between tasks, the tSMS group received neodymium magnet stimulation while the sham group received fake magnet stimulation on the rFPA for 20 min. Resting-state rFPA activities was measured using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), while SFA (body sensations and observer perspective), field perspective, and detached mindfulness (DM) perspective were assessed via questionnaires during both speech tasks. The observer perspective means SFA to self-imagery from others’ viewpoint, while the field and DM perspectives mean appropriately focusing on the external environment. The results indicated that tSMS intervention decreased rFPA activity from pre- to post-intervention rest. Then, tSMS reduced SFA to bodily sensations and increased DM perspective from pre- to post-intervention speech, especially in those with high levels of social anxiety. Furthermore, tSMS enhanced the field perspective regardless of social anxiety tendency. The results suggest that tSMS may suppress overactivity in rFPA, reduce SFA to body sensation, and increase adaptive attention in highly socially anxious individuals. Our study suggests the possibility of the clinical application of tSMS for treating SAD.

Abstract

The strategies for social interaction between strangers differ from those between acquaintances, whereas the differences in neural basis of social interaction have not been fully elucidated. In this study, we examined the geometrical properties of interpersonal neural networks in pairs of strangers and acquaintances during antiphase joint tapping. Dual electroencephalogram (EEG) of 29 channels per participant was measured from 14 strangers and 13 acquaintance pairs.Intra-brain synchronizations were calculated using the weighted phase lag index (wPLI) for intra-brain electrode combinations, and inter-brain synchronizations were calculated using the phase locking value (PLV) for inter-brain electrode combinations in the theta, alpha, and beta frequency bands. For each participant pair, electrode combinations with larger wPLI/PLV than their surrogates were defined as the edges of the neural networks. We calculated global efficiency, local efficiency, and modularity derived from graph theory for the combined intra- and inter-brain networks of each pair. In the theta band networks, stranger pairs showed larger local efficiency than acquaintance pairs, indicating that the two brains of stranger pairs were more densely connected. Hence, weak social ties require extensive social interactions and result in high efficiency of information transfer between neighbors in neural network.