Journal
NEUROIMAGE
Volume 238, Issue -, Pages -Publisher
ACADEMIC PRESS INC ELSEVIER SCIENCE
DOI: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2021.118258
Keywords
Social cognition; Mentalizing; fMRI; Representational similarity analysis
Funding
- National Institute of Mental Health [R01MH114904]
- National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program
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The study found that people use stable models of mental states across different individuals and contexts to understand the mental states of others.
Each individual experiences mental states in their own idiosyncratic way, yet perceivers can accurately under-stand a huge variety of states across unique individuals. How do they accomplish this feat? Do people think about their own anger in the same ways as another person's anger? Is reading about someone's anxiety the same as seeing it? Here, we test the hypothesis that a common conceptual core unites mental state representations across contexts. Across three studies, participants judged the mental states of multiple targets, including a generic other, the self, a socially close other, and a socially distant other. Participants viewed mental state stimuli in multiple modalities, including written scenarios and images. Using representational similarity analysis, we found that brain regions associated with social cognition expressed stable neural representations of mental states across both targets and modalities. Together, these results suggest that people use stable models of mental states across different people and contexts.
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