Social interactions often involve encountering inconsistent information about social others. We conducted a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study to comprehensively investigate voxel-wise temporal dynamics showing how impressions are anchored and/or adjusted in response to inconsistent social information. The participants performed a social impression task inside an fMRI scanner in which they were shown a male face, together with a series of four adjectives that described the depicted person's personality traits, successively presented beneath the image of the face. Participants were asked to rate their impressions of the person at the end of each trial on a scale of 1 to 8 (where 1 is most negative and 8 is most positive). We established two hypothetical models that represented two temporal patterns of voxel activity: Model 1 featured decreasing patterns of activity towards the end of each trial, anchoring impressions to initially presented information, and Model 2 showed increasing patterns of activity toward the end of each trial, where impressions were being adjusted using new and inconsistent information. Our data-driven model fitting analyses showed that the temporal activity patterns of voxels within the ventral anterior cingulate cortex, medial orbitofrontal cortex, posterior cingulate cortex, amygdala, and fusiform gyrus fit Model 1 (i.e., they were more involved in anchoring first impressions) better than they did Model 2 (i.e., showing impression adjustment). Conversely, voxel-wise neural activity within dorsal ACC and lateral OFC fit Model 2 better than it did Model 1, as it was more likely to be involved in processing new, inconsistent information and adjusting impressions in response. Our novel approach to model fitting analysis replicated previous impression-related neuroscientific findings, furthering the understanding of neural and temporal dynamics of impression processing, particularly with reference to functionally segmenting each region of interest based on relative involvement in impression anchoring as opposed to adjustment.

Emotional labor, characterized by a dysfunctional type of emotional regulation called surface acting, has detrimental psychological consequences on employees, including depression and social anxiety. Because such disorders exhibit psychological characteristics manifested through brain activation, previous studies have succeeded in distinguishing individuals with depression and social anxiety from healthy controls using their functional connectivity characteristics. However, it has not been established whether the functional connectivity characteristics associated with emotional labor are distinguishable. Thus, we obtained resting-state fMRI data from participants in the emotion labor (EL) group and control (CTRL) group, and we subjected their whole-brain functional connectivity matrices to a linear support vector machine classifier. Our analysis revealed that the EL and CTRL groups could be successfully distinguished on the basis of individuals' connectivity patterns, and confidence in the classification was correlated with the scores on the depression and social anxiety scales. These results are expected to provide insight on the neurobiological characteristics of emotional labor and enable the sorting of employees undergoing adverse emotional labor utilizing neurobiological observations.

The process model of emotion regulation suggests that cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression engage at different time points in the regulation process. Although multiple brain regions and networks have been identified for each strategy, no articles have explored changes in network characteristics or network connectivity over time. The present study examined (a) the whole-brain network and six other resting-state networks, (b) their modularity and global efficiency, which is an index of the efficiency of information exchange across the network, (c) the degree and betweenness centrality for 160 brain regions to identify the hub nodes with the most control over the entire network, and (d) the intra-network and inter-network functional connectivity (FC). Such investigations were performed using a traditional large-scale FC analysis and a relatively recent sliding window correlation analysis. The results showed that the right inferior orbitofrontal cortex was the hub region of the whole-brain network for both strategies. The present findings of temporally altering functional activity of the networks revealed that the default mode network (DMN) activated at the early stage of reappraisal, followed by the task-positive networks (cingulo-opercular network and fronto-parietal network), emotion-processing networks (the cerebellar network and DMN), and sensorimotor network (SMN) that activated at the early stage of suppression, followed by the greater recruitment of task-positive networks and their functional connection with the emotional response-related networks (SMN and occipital network). This is the first study that provides neuroimaging evidence supporting the process model of emotion regulation by revealing the temporally varying network efficiency and intra- and inter-network functional connections of reappraisal and suppression.

Although the concept of “common sense” is often taken for granted, judging whether behavior or knowledge is common sense requires a complex series of mental processes. Additionally, different perceptions of common sense can lead to social conflicts. Thus, it is important to understand how we perceive common sense and make relevant judgments. The present study investigated the dynamics of neural representations underlying judgments of what common sense is. During functional magnetic resonance imaging, participants indicated the extent to which they thought that a given sentence corresponded to common sense under the given perspective. We incorporated two different decision contexts involving different cultural perspectives to account for social variability of the judgments, an important feature of common sense judgments apart from logical true/false judgments. Our findings demonstrated that common sense versus non-common sense perceptions involve the amygdala and a brain network for episodic memory recollection, including the hippocampus, angular gyrus, posterior cingulate cortex, and ventromedial prefrontal cortex, suggesting integrated affective, mnemonic, and social functioning in common sense processing. Furthermore, functional connectivity multivariate pattern analysis revealed that interactivity among the amygdala, angular gyrus, and parahippocampal cortex reflected representational features of common sense perception and not those of non-common sense perception. Our study demonstrated that the social memory network is exclusively involved in processing common sense and not non-common sense. These results suggest that intergroup exclusion and misunderstanding can be reduced by experiencing and encoding long-term social memories about behavioral norms and knowledge that act as common sense of the outgroup.

We investigated the neural representation of reward probability recognition and its neural connectivity with other regions of the brain. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we used a simple guessing task with different probabilities of obtaining rewards across trials to assay local and global regions processing reward probability. The results of whole brain analysis demonstrated that lateral prefrontal cortex, inferior parietal lobe, and postcentral gyrus were activated during probability-based decision making. Specifically, the higher the expected value was, the more these regions were activated. Fronto-parietal connectivity, comprising inferior parietal regions and right lateral prefrontal cortex, conjointly engaged during high reward probability recognition compared to low reward condition, regardless of whether the reward information was extrinsically presented. Finally, the result of a regression analysis identified that cortico-subcortical connectivity was strengthened during the high reward anticipation for the subjects with higher cognitive impulsivity. Our findings demonstrate that interregional functional involvement is involved in valuation based on reward probability and that personality trait such as cognitive impulsivity plays a role in modulating the connectivity among different brain regions.

This study addresses the relationship between individual differences regarding self-concept, measured by Self Concept Clarity (SCC) scale and Relational-Interdependent Self-Construal and relationships (RISC) scale, and diverse affective consequences after choice behavior. We hypothesized that lower self-concept clarity and higher relational interdependence would be related to increased susceptibility to choice context–for example, how a choice set is constructed based on one’s initial preference. We examined how variations in a choice set can produce different affective consequences after making choices, and investigated the underlying neural mechanism using fMRI. In this experiment, participants first rated their preferences for art posters, and made a series of choices from a presented set. After the choice task, they completed post-choice measures including preferences for the chosen posters, as well as measures of their self-concept clarity and relational interdependence. Our behavioral results demonstrated that when participants faced more conflicting choice context, self-concept clarity was related to more positive affective consequences after choice, whereas relational interdependence was correlated with a lower second-rated attractiveness of the chosen option. The neuroimaging analysis of choice-making revealed that self-concept clarity and the degree of their relational interdependence served as modulators in shaping how one perceives and experiences the same decision-making process. These results have theoretical and practical importance in that it is one of the first studies investigating the influence of the individual differences regarding self-concept on value-based decision making process among diverse choice set contexts.

그동안 학습과 기억이 과거의 경험에 의해 구성된다는 측면이 강조되어왔으나, 최근의 연구들은 이들 인지과정이 미래의 보상물을 최대화하는 목표를 달성하기 위해 이루어짐을 조명하였다. 본 개관 논문은 이와 관련된 연구를 소개하고 목표지향적 학습과 기억에 대하여 논의하고자 한다. 먼저 강화 학습에서 내적 모형 기반 학습, 즉 상위 차원의 목표를 달성하기 위해 즉각적인 보상을 가져오지 않음에도 불구하고 특정한 행동을 취하는 과정이 이루어지고, 또한 직접적 강화를 받지 않은 대상으로의 일반화 및 유추가 일어나 미래의 적응적 행동을 가져옴을 보여준 연구들을 소개한다. 또한 위와 같은 목표지향적 학습 과정의 신경학적 기제를 탐색한 연구들을 개관하고, 선조체의 도파민 신호를 기반으로 한 과정이 기억 과정에 역시 영향을 미칠 수 있음을 논의한다. 특히, 기억이 과거의 경험을 모두 동일한 수준으로 부호화하고 인출하는 과정이 아니라, 상위 수준의 목표에 맞춘 의사결정과정의 결과임을 보여주는 연구들을 소개한다. 이러한 연구들은 미래에 얻게 될 보상 정보가 역향적으로 현재의 인지처리에 영향을 줄 수 있음을 시사한다.

Procrastination is an irrational choice to delay high-priority work in order to avoid its unpleasantness, despite the fact that the negativity will not cease if the work still remains undone. We hypothesized that (1) people underestimate the future negativity (i.e., delay neutralization) and (2) in order to complete work in a timely manner, one should project oneself into the future so as to recognize that the negativity associated with an activity does not diminish over time. Especially, negative future thinking that is unrelated to the consequence was hypothesized to reduce delay neutralization of negativity. In the present study, undergraduate students made a series of choices between delayed-but-longer and immediate-but-shorter assignment by employing an inter-temporal choice paradigm. We tracked how positive and negative episodic future thinking influenced the degree to which negativity is neutralized over time (Experiment 1). Following this, we confined the experimental condition to negative thinking about the future (Experiment 2). Participants neutralized negativity involved in assignment as a function of time, suggesting that procrastination arises from the delay neutralization of the negativity. Critically, such neutralization was significantly reduced when participants imagined a negative future event, but this did not occur when they imagined a positive future event (Experiment 1), or when participants did not think about the future (Experiment 1, 2). Our findings suggest that, prior to making a decision between work and indulgence, imagining negative future events can be an effective way to reduce the neutralization of delayed negativity and, in turn, procrastination.