Wednesday, Jun 28: 10:30 AM - 11:45 AM
Oral Sessions
Wednesday, June 28, 2017, 10:30-11:45
Vancouver Convention Centre
Room: Room 220-222
Chair
Michael Beauchamp, Baylor College of Medicine
Presentations
Complex social interactions probably emerge from different yet interacting neural systems. However, the field of social neuroscience has been fragmented into highly specialized, rarely cross-referenced topics ranging from basic face recognition to abstract mentalizing about others' intentions. The present study hence provides a first systematic reconciliation by computing a data-driven brain atlas of social cognitive capacities.
Presenter
Daniel Alcalá-López, RWTH
Individuals with a history of migration and their offspring must cope with a variety of post-migration challenges, including an increased health risk for psychiatric disorders. Current research assumes interpersonal difficulties to cause social stress and thus lead to susceptibility to mental illness – possibly mediated through difficulties in communication or prejudice from the host side. However, neuroimaging studies have only recently begun to investigate interpersonal mechanisms in multiple communicating subjects and to develop novel readouts for functional brain responses in social neuroscience and psychiatry towards biomarkers for diagnosis and treatment (Meyer-Lindenberg and Tost 2012, Schilbach 2016).
We have previously provided methods for the investigation of neural mechanisms underlying interpersonal relationships (fMRI-hyperscanning; Bilek, Ruf et al. 2015, Bilek et al., submitted). In this study, these biomarkers of human social interaction are applied within a cross-cultural setting.
Presenter
Edda Bilek, Central Institute of Mental Health, Heidelberg University
Personality as a key feature of inter-individual differences affects all aspects of life, including affective, social, executive and memory functioning [3,4,6]. Task-based fMRI studies investigated personality and brain activity in association to each of these domains; however, since personality traits are enduring across situations [2], it is possible that they relate to many brain systems, not detected by task-based fMRI. The investigation of functional connectivity in resting state conditions might therefore help in capturing the intrinsic and complex neural architecture underlying personality [1]. A recent study [7] showed a sexual dimorphism in brain structure-personality relationships, with associations revealed only in males. In females, brain connectivity rather than structure, might thus play a stronger role in light of personality. Therefore, we aimed to predict scores of the five-factor personality model (openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, neuroticism) [2] from resting-state functional connectivity (RS-FC) in meta-analytically defined brain networks, and tested how these predictions are modulated by gender.
Presenter
Alessandra Nostro, Heinrich-Heine University
Primates continuously decode complex visual scenes into material entities, such as agents, their movements, and their interactions (Grahe and Bernieri, 1999, Ambady et al., 2000). Social interactions and their meaning are quickly recognized by monkeys: they understand grooming, play, and fight, infer social rank from interactions, and utilize this knowledge to recruit allies (Cheney et al., 1986, Bergman et al., 2003). While this understanding is a core cognitive component in primates (Grahe and Bernieri, 1999, Spelke and Kinzler, 2007) and is particularly vulnerable to social pathologies (Kennedy and Adolphs, 2012), little is known about the neural circuitry that underlies it.
Presenter
Julia Sliwa, The Rockefeller University
Although distinguishing the self from others is a key aspect of social behavior, whether the representation of the self is unique has been debated for decades. Substantial behavioral evidence suggests that mental processes of the self are different from those of others, we respond faster to our own face than faces of others (Keenan et al., 1999; Ma et al., 2010), remember self-related items better (Klein et al., 1989) and enhance attention to and perceptual salience of self-related information (Brédart et al., 2006; Sui et al., 2012). The behavioral findings drive neuroimaging studies to search unique neural representations of the self, which, however, reported evidence for specific but also shared representations of the self and significant others (Heatherton et al., 2006; Zhu et al., 2007). Thus it remains unclear whether and how the self is represented in the human brain in a distinctive fashion. The present study used the form of multivoxel pattern analysis (MVPA) known as representational similarity analysis (RAS) to examine the unique neural representations of the self.
Presenter
Yina Ma, Beijing Normal University
The ultimate goal of the NIMH's Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) [1] is a multidimensional approach to precision medicine for psychiatry [2]. This includes a diagnostic system based on core criteria, yet the correspondence of RDoC domain definitions to existing neurobiological data has not been fully established. Evolution from an organizational framework to diagnostic implementation necessitates characterizing how RDoC domains map onto the healthy human brain. RDoC designates social processing as one of five domains of mental function, and is fractionated into four constructs (Fig. 1): affiliation and attachment, social communication, perception of self, and perception of others. Our present objective was to unpack these social processing constructs from a data-driven perspective in order to: (1) investigate the feasibility of neuroimaging task classification under RDoC domain definitions, (2) ascertain if the RDoC framework corresponds to different or overlapping social brain regions using brain meta-analysis, (3) evaluate the correspondence between the specialized function-structure relationships of the social brain across all domains of brain function and social task themes.
Presenter
Emily Boeving, M.Sc., Florida International University