Default egocentrism: an MVPA approach to overlap in own and others' socio-political attitudes.

Understanding the socio-political attitudes of other people is a crucial skill, yet the neural mechanisms supporting this capacity remain understudied. This study used multivariate pattern analysis to examine patterns of activity in the default mode network (DMN) while participants assessed their own attitudes and the attitudes of other people. Classification analyses indicated that common patterns in DMN regions encode both own and others' support across a variety of contemporary socio-political issues. Moreover, cross-classification analyses demonstrated that a common coding of attitudes is implemented at a neural level. This shared informational content was associated with a greater perceived overlap between own attitude positions and those of others (i.e. attitudinal projection), such that higher cross-classification accuracy corresponded with greater attitudinal projection. This study thus identifies a possible neural basis for egocentric biases in the social perception of individual and group attitudes and provides additional evidence for self/other overlap in mentalizing.

The Zoom solution: Promoting effective cross-ideological communication online.

The rise of ideological polarization in the U.S. over the past few decades has come with an increase in hostility on both sides of the political aisle. Although communication and compromise are hallmarks of a functioning society, research has shown that people overestimate the negative affect they will experience when viewing oppositional media, and it is likely that negative forecasts lead many to avoid cross-ideological communication (CIC) altogether. Additionally, a growing ideological geographic divide and online extremism fueled by social media audiences make engaging in CIC more difficult than ever. Here, we demonstrate that online video-chat platforms (i.e., Zoom) can be used to promote effective CIC among ideologically polarized individuals, as well as to better study CIC in a controlled setting. Participants (n = 122) had a face-to-face CIC over Zoom, either privately or publicly with a silent ingroup audience present. Participant forecasts about the interaction were largely inaccurate, with the actual conversation experience found to be more positive than anticipated. Additionally, the presence of an ingroup audience was associated with increased conflict. In both conditions, participants showed preliminary signs of attitude moderation, felt more favorable toward the outgroup, and felt more informed about the issue after the CIC. These results suggest that face-to-face CIC's are generally positive and beneficial for polarized individuals, and that greater effects may be achieved through private conversations, as opposed to more public social media-like interactions. Future researchers studying ideological conflict may find success using similar Zoom paradigms to bring together ideologically diverse individuals in controlled lab settings.

Giving to others and neural processing during adolescence.

Adolescence is marked by an increased sensitivity to the social environment as youth navigate evolving relationships with family, friends, and communities. Prosocial behavior becomes more differentiated such that older adolescents increasingly give more to known others (e.g., family, friends) than to strangers. This differentiation may be linked with changes in neural processing among brain regions implicated in social decision-making. A total of 269 adolescents from 9-15 and 19-20 years of age completed a decision-making task in which they could give money to caregivers, friends, and strangers while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Giving to caregivers and friends (at a cost to oneself) increased with age, but giving to strangers remained lower and stable across age. Brain regions implicated in cognitive control (dorsolateral and ventrolateral prefrontal cortex) showed increased blood-oxygen-level-dependent (BOLD) activation with increasing age across giving decisions to all recipients; regions associated with reward processing (ventral striatum and ventral tegmental area) showed increased activation across all ages when giving to all recipients. Brain regions associated with social cognition were either not active (dorsomedial prefrontal cortex) or showed reduced activation (temporal parietal junction and posterior superior temporal sulcus) when giving to others across all ages. Findings have implications for understanding the role of brain development in the increased complexity of social decision-making during adolescence.

The comfort in touch: Immediate and lasting effects of handholding on emotional pain.

Consoling touch is a powerful form of social support that has been repeatedly demonstrated to reduce the experience of physical pain. However, it remains unknown whether touch reduces emotional pain in the same way that it reduces physical pain. The present research sought to understand how handholding with a romantic partner shapes experiences of emotional pain and comfort during emotional recollection, as well as how it shapes lasting emotional pain associated with emotional experiences. Participants recalled emotionally painful memories or neutral memories with their partners, while holding their partner's hand or holding a squeeze-ball. They additionally completed a follow-up survey to report how much emotional pain they associated with the emotional experiences after recalling them in the lab with their partners. Although consoling touch did not reduce emotional pain during the task, consoling touch increased feelings of comfort. Moreover, participants later recalled emotional memories that were paired with touch as being less emotionally painful than those that were not paired with touch. These findings suggest that touch does not decrease the immediate experience of emotional pain and may instead support adaptive processing of emotional experiences over time.

Neural reference groups: a synchrony-based classification approach for predicting attitudes using fNIRS.

Social neuroscience research has demonstrated that those who are like-minded are also 'like-brained.' Studies have shown that people who share similar viewpoints have greater neural synchrony with one another, and less synchrony with people who 'see things differently.' Although these effects have been demonstrated at the 'group level,' little work has been done to predict the viewpoints of specific 'individuals' using neural synchrony measures. Furthermore, the studies that have made predictions using synchrony-based classification at the individual level used expensive and immobile neuroimaging equipment (e.g. functional magnetic resonance imaging) in highly controlled laboratory settings, which may not generalize to real-world contexts. Thus, this study uses a simple synchrony-based classification method, which we refer to as the 'neural reference groups' approach, to predict individuals' dispositional attitudes from data collected in a mobile 'pop-up neuroscience' lab. Using functional near-infrared spectroscopy data, we predicted individuals' partisan stances on a sociopolitical issue by comparing their neural timecourses to data from two partisan neural reference groups. We found that partisan stance could be identified at above-chance levels using data from dorsomedial prefrontal cortex. These results indicate that the neural reference groups approach can be used to investigate naturally occurring, dispositional differences anywhere in the world.