Psychological and neural correlates of social affect and cognition in narcissism: A multimethod study of self-reported traits, experiential states, and behavioral and brain indicators.

"Lack of empathy" is a diagnostic criterion of narcissism, but the nature of interpersonal functioning in narcissism is still being debated. Both, empathy and narcissism, are multidimensional constructs, and their relation might depend upon contextual factors. We investigated social affect and cognition in narcissism spanning self-reported traits and experiential states (Ecological Momentary Assessment) as well as behavioral and brain indicators (task-related functional magnetic resonance imaging). N = 140 individuals were selected to cover the full dimensional range of grandiose and vulnerable narcissism, including their constituent self-regulatory dimensions of agentic, antagonistic, and neurotic narcissism. Grandiose narcissism was associated with lower social affect at almost all analysis levels. The associations can be attributed to antagonistic self-regulatory dynamics, and are associated with lower brain activation during subjective experiencing of social affect in regions of the salience network. Social cognition was habitually lowered but not impaired in antagonistic narcissism. Our findings do not support a general "lack of empathy." (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

How do bipolar disease states affect positive and negative emotion processing? Insights from a meta-analysis on the neural fingerprints of emotional processing.

BACKGROUND: Functional magnetic resonance imaging studies on emotion processing in patients with bipolar disorder (BD) show hyperactivity of limbic-striatal brain areas and hypoactivity in inferior frontal areas compared to healthy participants. However, heterogeneous results in patients with different disease states and different valences of emotional stimuli have been identified. METHODS: To integrate previous results and elucidate the impact of disease state and stimulus valence, we conducted a systematic literature search for journal articles in the Web of Science Core Collection including MEDLINE databases and employed a coordinate-based-meta-analysis of functional-MRI studies comparing emotion processing in BD-patients with healthy participants using seed-based d mapping (SDM) to test for between-subjects-effects. We included 31 studies published before 11/2022 with a total of N = 766 BD-patients and N = 836 controls. RESULTS: Patients with BD showed hyperactivated regions involved in salience processing of emotional stimuli (e.g., the bilateral insula) and hypoactivation of regions associated with emotion regulation (e.g., inferior frontal gyrus) during emotion processing, compared to healthy participants. A more detailed descriptive analysis revealed a hypoactive (anterior) insula in manic BD-patients specifically for negative in comparison to positive emotion processing. DISCUSSION: This meta-analysis corroborates the overall tenor of existing literature that patients with BD show an increased emotional reactivity (hyperactivity of salience-processing regions) together with a lower (cognitive) control (hypoactivity of brain areas associated with emotion regulation) over emotional states. Our analysis suggests reduced interoceptive processing of negative stimuli in mania, pointing out the need for longitudinal within-subject analyses of emotion processing.

Interactions within the social brain: Co-activation and connectivity among networks enabling empathy and Theory of Mind.

Empathy and Theory of Mind (ToM) have classically been studied as separate social functions, however, recent advances demonstrate the need to investigate the two in interaction: naturalistic settings often blur the distinction of affect and cognition and demand the simultaneous processing of such different stimulus dimensions. Here, we investigate how empathy and ToM related brain networks interact in contexts wherein multiple cognitive and affective demands must be processed simultaneously. Building on the findings of a recent meta-analysis and hierarchical clustering analysis, we perform meta-analytic connectivity modeling to determine patterns of task-context specific network changes. We analyze 140 studies including classical empathy and ToM tasks, as well as complex social tasks. For studies at the intersection of empathy and ToM, neural co-activation patterns included areas typically associated with both empathy and ToM. Network integration is discussed as a means of combining mechanisms across unique behavioral domains. Such integration may enable adaptive behavior in complex, naturalistic social settings that require simultaneous processing of a multitude of different affective and cognitive information.

The Social Connectome - Moving Toward Complexity in the Study of Brain Networks and Their Interactions in Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience.

Over the past 150 years of neuroscientific research, the field has undergone a tremendous evolution. Starting out with lesion-based inference of brain function, functional neuroimaging, introduced in the late 1980s, and increasingly fine-grained and sophisticated methods and analyses now allow us to study the live neural correlates of complex behaviors in individuals and multiple agents simultaneously. Classically, brain-behavior coupling has been studied as an association of a specific area in the brain and a certain behavioral outcome. This has been a crucial first step in understanding brain organization. Social cognitive processes, as well as their neural correlates, have typically been regarded and studied as isolated functions and blobs of neural activation. However, as our understanding of the social brain as an inherently dynamic organ grows, research in the field of social neuroscience is slowly undergoing the necessary evolution from studying individual elements to how these elements interact and their embedding within the overall brain architecture. In this article, we review recent studies that investigate the neural representation of social cognition as interacting, complex, and flexible networks. We discuss studies that identify individual brain networks associated with social affect and cognition, interaction of these networks, and their relevance for disorders of social affect and cognition. This perspective on social cognitive neuroscience can highlight how a more fine-grained understanding of complex network (re-)configurations could improve our understanding of social cognitive deficits in mental disorders such as autism spectrum disorder and schizophrenia, thereby providing new impulses for methods of interventions.

Toward a hierarchical model of social cognition: A neuroimaging meta-analysis and integrative review of empathy and theory of mind.

Along with the increased interest in and volume of social cognition research, there has been higher awareness of a lack of agreement on the concepts and taxonomy used to study social processes. Two central concepts in the field, empathy and Theory of Mind (ToM), have been identified as overlapping umbrella terms for different processes of limited convergence. Here, we review and integrate evidence of brain activation, brain organization, and behavior into a coherent model of social-cognitive processes. We start with a meta-analytic clustering of neuroimaging data across different social-cognitive tasks. Results show that understanding others' mental states can be described by a multilevel model of hierarchical structure, similar to models in intelligence and personality research. A higher level describes more broad and abstract classes of functioning, whereas a lower one explains how functions are applied to concrete contexts given by particular stimulus and task formats. Specifically, the higher level of our model suggests 3 groups of neurocognitive processes: (a) predominantly cognitive processes, which are engaged when mentalizing requires self-generated cognition decoupled from the physical world; (b) more affective processes, which are engaged when we witness emotions in others based on shared emotional, motor, and somatosensory representations; (c) combined processes, which engage cognitive and affective functions in parallel. We discuss how these processes are explained by an underlying principal gradient of structural brain organization. Finally, we validate the model by a review of empathy and ToM task interrelations found in behavioral studies. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Brain activation during social cognition predicts everyday perspective-taking: A combined fMRI and ecological momentary assessment study of the social brain.

Identifying distinct neural networks underlying social affect (empathy, compassion) and social cognition (Theory of Mind) has advanced our understanding of social interactions. However, little is known about the relation of activation in these networks to psychological experience in daily life. This study (N = 122) examined the ecological validity of neural activation patterns induced by a laboratory paradigm of social affect and cognition with respect to social interactions in everyday life. We used the EmpaToM task, a naturalistic video-based paradigm for the assessment of empathy, compassion, and Theory of Mind, and combined it with a subsequent 14-day ecological momentary assessment protocol on social interactions. Everyday social affect was predicted by social affect experienced during the EmpaToM task, but not by related neural activation in regions of interest from the social affect network. In contrast, everyday social cognition was predicted by neural activation differences in the medial prefrontal cortex - a region of interest from the social cognition network - but not by social cognition performance in the EmpaToM task. The relationship between medial prefrontal cortex activation and everyday social cognition was stronger for spontaneous rather than deliberate perspective taking during the EmpaToM task, pointing to a distinction between propensity and capacity in social cognition. Finally, this neural indicator of Theory of Mind explained variance in everyday social cognition to a similar extent as an established self-report scale. Taken together, this study provides evidence for the ecological validity of lab-based social affect and cognition paradigms when considering relevant moderating factors.

Cross-network interactions in social cognition: A review of findings on task related brain activation and connectivity.

Theory of Mind, empathy, and action observation are central themes in social neuroscience research. Meta-analyses of functional neuroimaging studies show substantial heterogeneity in brain activation for these cognitive abilities, depending on the type of experimental task used. We followed up on these findings by a comparison to basic connectivity networks of the brain. In particular, we evaluated to what extent brain activation for social cognition tasks draws on areas of different fMRI resting-state networks (e.g., Default Mode, Ventral Attention Network) in parallel. Our review illustrates high prevalence of such network co-recruitments across Theory of Mind, empathy, and action observation tasks. To characterize these observations in more detail, we additionally conducted a literature review of fMRI effective connectivity studies. Findings reveal two main types of cross-network interactions in social cognition tasks: Negative coupling (segregation) between Default Mode and Control Networks (Ventral Attention, Frontoparietal, and Dorsal Attention Network), and positive coupling (integration) between these networks. The two patterns reflect different types of brain network organization taking place in the context of social cognition tasks-segregation for specialized, versus integration for flexible processing. We discuss evidence from connectivity research in other research fields, suggesting that increased network integration indicates more effortful and controlled processing. Based on that, we consider how findings of network segregation versus integration can provide new perspectives on dual-system accounts of social cognition, which differentiate between automatic and controlled processes. Moreover, we discuss how the reviewed evidence relates to neural processes which are assumed to take place during naturalistic social cognition.