Neural, physiological and behavioural correlates of empathy for pain in Tourette syndrome.

Persons with Tourette syndrome show altered social behaviours, such as echophenomena and increased personal distress in emotional situations. These symptoms may reflect an overactive mirror neuron system, causing both increased automatic imitation and a stronger tendency to share others' emotions. To test this, we measured the individual level of echophenomena with a video protocol and experimentally induced empathy for pain in 21 participants with Tourette syndrome and 25 matched controls. In the empathy for pain paradigm, pictures of hands and feet in painful or neutral situations were presented, while we measured participants' EEG and skin conductance response. Changes in somatosensory mu suppression during the observation of the pictures and pain ratings were compared between groups, and correlations were calculated with the occurrence of echophenomena, self-reported empathy and clinical measures. Our Tourette syndrome sample showed significantly more echophenomena than controls, but the groups showed no behavioural differences in empathic abilities. However, controls, but not patients with Tourette syndrome, showed the predicted increased mu suppression when watching painful compared to neutral actions. While echophenomena were present in all persons with Tourette syndrome, the hypothesis of an overactive mirror neuron system in Tourette syndrome could not be substantiated. On the contrary, the Tourette syndrome group showed a noticeable lack of mu attenuation in response to pain stimuli. In conclusion, we found a first hint of altered processing of others' emotional states in a brain region associated with the mirror neuron system.

Effects of social presence on behavioral, neural, and physiological aspects of empathy for pain.

In mediated interactions (e.g. video calls), less information is available about the other. To investigate how this affects our empathy for one another, we conducted an electroencephalogram study, in which 30 human participants observed 1 of 5 targets undergoing painful electric stimulation, once in a direct interaction and once in a live, video-mediated interaction. We found that observers were as accurate in judging others' pain and showed as much affective empathy via video as in a direct encounter. While mu suppression, a common neural marker of empathy, was not sensitive to others' pain, theta responses to others' pain as well as skin conductance coupling between participants were reduced in the video-mediated condition. We conclude that physical proximity with its rich social cues is important for nuanced physiological resonance with the other's experience. More studies are warranted to confirm these results and to understand their behavioral significance for remote social interactions.

Social Context and Rejection Expectations Modulate Neural and Behavioral Responses to Social Feedback.

When meeting other people, some are optimistic and expect to be accepted by others, whereas others are pessimistic and expect mostly rejections. How social feedback is evaluated in situations that meet or do not meet these biases and how people differ in their response to rejection and acceptance depending on the social situation are unknown. In this study, participants experienced rejection and acceptance by peers in two different social contexts, one with high (negative context) and the other with low probability of rejection (positive context). We examined how the neural and behavioral responses to rejection are altered by this context and whether it depends on the individual's sensitivity to rejection. Behavioral results show that, on average, people maintain an optimistic bias even when mostly experiencing rejection. Importantly, personality differences in rejection sensitivity affected both prior expectations to be rejected in the paradigm and the extent to which expectations changed during the paradigm. The context also strongly modulated ERPs and theta responses to rejection and acceptance feedback. Specifically, valence effects on neural responses were enhanced in the negative context, suggesting a greater relevance to monitor social feedback in such a situation. Moreover, midfrontal theta predicted how expectations were changed in response to prediction errors, stressing a role for theta in learning from social feedback. Surprisingly, interindividual differences in rejection sensitivity did not affect neural responses to feedback. Our results stress the importance of considering the interaction between subjective expectations and the social context for behavioral and neural responses to social rejection.

Low competitive status elicits aggression in healthy young men: behavioural and neural evidence.

Winners are commonly assumed to compete more aggressively than losers. Here, we find overwhelming evidence for the opposite. We first demonstrate that low-ranking teams commit more fouls than they receive in top-tier soccer, ice hockey and basketball men's leagues. We replicate this effect in the laboratory, showing that male participants deliver louder sound blasts to a rival when placed in a low-status position. Using neuroimaging, we characterize brain activity patterns that encode competitive status as well as those that facilitate status-dependent aggression in healthy young men. These analyses reveal three key findings. First, anterior hippocampus and striatum contain multivariate representations of competitive status. Second, interindividual differences in status-dependent aggression are linked with a sharper status differentiation in the striatum and with greater reactivity to status-enhancing victories in the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex. Third, activity in ventromedial, ventrolateral and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is associated with trial-wise increases in status-dependent aggressive behaviour. Taken together, our results run counter to narratives glorifying aggression in competitive situations. Rather, we show that those in the lower ranks of skill-based hierarchies are more likely to behave aggressively and identify the potential neural basis of this phenomenon.

Oxytocin reduces the link between neural and affective responses after social exclusion.

Being socially excluded triggers negative emotional and behavioral reactions. We examined the influence of oxytocin on the processing of social exclusion. To this end, intranasal oxytocin or placebo were administered in a double-blind trial to 90 females while neurophysiological and emotional reactions to exclusion in a Cyberball game were assessed. In the placebo group a positive correlation was found between self-reports of rejection and late positive potential (LPP) amplitude when being omitted in the game. This correlation was absent in the oxytocin group. No main effects of oxytocin on the self-reports of rejection or the LPP in exclusion trials were found. The hypothesis that oxytocin exacerbates feeling rejected after social exclusion via enhancing the salience of social cues could not be confirmed. However, our results show that the link between neural and affective reactions to social exclusion is eliminated by oxytocin. This mechanism might explain how oxytocin enacts its multiple influences on behavior.