Clan Mentality: Evidence That the Medial Prefrontal Cortex Responds to Close Others

“Stimuli were generated on an Apple MacBook Pro (Apple Computer) using MATLAB software (The MathWorks) and the Psychophysics Toolbox extension (Brainard, 1997) and projected onto a screen at the head of the magnet bore.”

“There is considerable evidence that social species develop mechanisms to aid in identifying and evaluating kin, in-group members, and individuals otherwise relevant to one’s survival (Trivers, 1971; Rendall et al., 1996).”

“Bush et al. (2000), in a comprehensive review, noted that regions of the ACC near to our region respond to a range of tasks laden with affective content, many of which do not have explicit social demands.”

“Lesions to human ventromedial PFC result in failure to represent the consequences of choices in nonsocial decision-making tasks (Bechara et al., 1994, 2000).”

“By the age of 5 or 6, children can flexibly process social information, represent mental states of others, and engage with peers and family in a way that maintains cohesive group interactions (Flavell, 1999; Wellman et al., 2001; Hughes and Leekam, 2004; Fehr et al., 2008).”

“Meta-analyses of neuroimaging studies using social content have emphasized the aMPFC (e.g., Amodio and Frith, 2006; Northoff et al., 2006; Mitchell, 2009).”

“Data were spatially normalized to the Montreal Neurological Institute (MNI) standard anatomical atlas space (2 mm isotropic voxels) using a T2-weighted EPI BOLD-contrast atlas in SPM2 (Wellcome Department of Imaging Neuroscience, London, UK) (Friston et al., 1995).”

“Lesions to human ventromedial PFC result in failure to represent the consequences of choices in nonsocial decision-making tasks (Bechara et al., 1994, 2000).”

“…interactions (Glees et al., 1950; Eslinger and Damasio, 1985; Damasio et al., 1990; Rolls et al., 1994; Stone et al., 1998; Anderson et al., 1999; Hadland et al., 2003; Mah et al., 2005; Rudebeck et al., 2006, 2007) [for review, see Damasio et al. (1996), Stuss (2002), and Adolphs (2003, 2009)].”

“Conversely, activity in vmPFC increases with the perceived similarity of others to the self (Mitchell et al., 2006; Mobbs et al., 2009; Volz et al., 2009), and mediates preference for similar others (Mitchell et al., 2006) and affiliative tendencies (Moll and Schulkin, 2009; Krienen et al., 2010).”

“In line with studies in adults (Benoit et al., 2010; Krienen et al., 2010), they showed a linear pattern of decreasing activity within the vMPFC with decreasing closeness of the other.”

“In the interpersonal context, this system has been linked to empathic care, affiliation, interpersonal closeness and vicarious reward (Koenigs et al., 2007; Mobbs et al., 2009; Hare et al., 2010; Krienen et al., 2010; Inagaki and Eisenberger, 2012; Meyer et al., 2013; Moll et al., 2014; Morelli et al., 2015; Ashar et…”

“This is consistent with previous findings concerning the brain underpinnings of friend-ship (Bartels and Zeki, 2000), although another study reports the opposite relationship (Krienen et al. , 2010).”

“In another study, Krienen et al. (2010) focused exclusively on midline frontal regions and found greater anterior medial prefrontal cortex and rostral anterior cingulate cortex activity for judgments relating to participants’ friends versus strangers.”

“person perception, self-reflection, and emotional support (Gutchess et al., 2007; Johnson et al., 2002; Kelley et al., 2002; Krienen et al., 2010; Onoda et al., 2009), and”

“For example, MPFC and PC/PCC are consistently implicated in self-referential processing, as well as thinking about close others, such as friends and family (Krienen et al., 2010; Denny et al., 2012).”

“Patterns of neural activity have been identified that differentiate cognitive representations of close others from less-close others (Krienen et al., 2010; Laurita et al., 2017).”

“In control adolescents, we observed that self- and other-related processing elicited strong activation in cortical midline structures (CMS) when contrasted with a semantic baseline condition. ositive symptoms 22q11DS exhibited hypoactivation in the CMS and the striatum during the processing of…”

“, 2006), social relevance (Krienen et al., 2010), or the participant’s idiosyncratic knowledge of a target (Welborn and Lieberman, 2014).”

“Although some fMRI studies have examined cortical regions supporting self–other similarity, the majority of these studies have defined similarity in a binary fashion (similar/ dissimilar; although, see Krienen, Tu, & Buckner, 2010, Experiment 2), treating target individuals as either similar or dissimilar to the self…”

“Neuroimaging suggests that both familiarity and similarity explain meaningful variance in egocentrism 62,105 , though some studies have suggested that the medial prefrontal cortex differentiates mentalizing targets based on familiarity, but not similarity 105 .”

“Previous studies have suggested that the vmPFC engages in self-referential mentalizing (Rilling et al., 2002; 2004; Jenkins and Ranganath, 2010; Krienen et al., 2010; Tamir and Mitchell, 2010), while the dmPFC is associated with non–self-referential mentalizing and deeper objective reasoning…”

“For example, the MPFC, a DMN region known to be particularly active when thinking about the self (51), is also active when thinking about a close other, particularly the ventral portion (52).”

“A recent parametric functional fMRI study found that the MPFC (and the PCC) shows social load-dependent increases in activity that also correlate with an individual’s perspective taking ability (Meyer et al., 2012).”

“For instance, representation of the self and others (Krienen et al., 2010), cooperative human partners (McCabe et al.”

“processing of close others such as the mother or close friend (Benoit et al., 2010; Krienen et al., 2010; Moore et al., 2014), while the dMPFC is more engaged when evaluating socially distant others (Mitchell et al.”

“Interestingly, mentalizing about similar or close others also recruits the regions of the vmPFC that support mentalizing about the self (Krienen et al., 2010; Mitchell et al., 2006; Mitchell, Banaji, & Macrae, 2005), thus suggesting that making inferences about people who are similar or close to one is psychologically…”

“This in turn is in agreement with the core role of anterior mPFC in social value processing, other-related judgments and mentalizing (Ochsner et al., 2004; Amodio and Frith 2006; Gilbert et al., 2006; Mitchell 2009; Krienen et al., 2010; Fareri et al., 2012).”

“Activation of the rPFC has also been associated with the processing of information that relates to close others such as family members or close friends (Benoit, Gilbert, Volle, & Burgess, 2010) as opposed to strangers (Krienen et al., 2010).”

“We note that the orbitofrontal cortex, which overlaps with the vmPFC, is implicated in social cognition, in person-trait processing (Benoit et al., 2010; Jenkins et al., 2008; Krienen et al., 2010), and in representing stereotypes about people (Stolier & Freeman, 2016).”

“Decreased connectivity in frontal areas, which have previously been associated with childhood maltreatment [12, 65] but also self-referential processing [66, 67], might relate to a dif fi culty of understanding others ’ intentions in social situations.”

“Despite these contradictory findings, especially lobule VIIIA is implicated in a somatosensory information processing network by its afferent and efferent projections that also target the anterior prefrontal cortex (Krienen et al., 2010; O’Reilly et al., 2010; Schmahmann & Pandya, 1992).”

“It has been reported that mentalizing about strangers activates more dorsal parts of the MPFC, whereas more ventral regions of the MPFC may be activated during mentalization related to close significant others (for example family members) with whom individuals experience self-other overlap (Mitchell et al., 2005; Krie…”

“or mother) [34,41,42] (other-reflection) in addition to the evaluation of oneself (self-reflection) also activated the mPFC.”

“Consideration of close others (e.g., family, a group of close friends, etc.) similarly elicits activation in these areas 28 .”

“, 2006), closeness (Krienen et al., 2010) and knowledge (Welborn and Lieberman, 2015), the specific role of the rmPFC in trait judgment remains disputed.”

“For example, these same regions are associated with general perspective-taking competence (Lewis et al., 2011), and show neural activity responses when thinking about others (Krienen et al., 2010).”

“, mentality representative of certain ethnicity, social class, profession, kinship, historical, or political experience (Bruni et al. 2004; David and Okazaki 2006; Krienen et al. 2010; Klicperova et al. 1997).”

“A lack of differentiation between the self and the other in cortical midline structures (CMS) has been observed in prior studies, most frequently when targets of reflection were either very close or similar to the self (Ochsner et al. 2005; Krienen et al. 2010).”

“…judgments than when making judgments about a close other (see also Benoit et al., 2010; D’Argembeau et al., 2007, 2008; Heatherton et al., 2006; Krienen et al., 2010; but see Ochsner et al., 2005, Vanderwal et al., 2008, for divergent findings), and this difference was observed for both…”

“PCC is a known default network hub, recruited in social cognitive processes, such as mentalizing, for close others (e.g., Krienen et al., 2010; Laurita et al., 2017).”

“In addition, functional neuroimaging studies have found that activations in regions associated with the processing of mentalizing and rewards are modulated by the distance of the personal relationships (Fareri et al., 2012; Krienen et al., 2010).”

“Therefore, evaluating mothers’ traits is possibly more similar to self for adolescents who are positive about their mothers and might reflect more closeness in the mother– adolescent relationship (Harris and Fiske, 2007; Van Overwalle, 2009; Krienen et al., 2010; Ray et al., 2010; Raposo et al., 2011).”

“…functional specificity for processing social information, the present MDP account can parsimoniously incorporate the dominance of social content in human mental activity as high value function estimates for information about humans (Baker et al., 2009; Kampe et al., 2001; Krienen et al., 2010).”

“In this context, social proximity (or closeness) in particular has been strongly implicated in the differential recruitment of the default network (Gobbini et al., 2004; Krienen et al., 2010).”

“The local component explains the inter-individual differences in stimulus-evoked brain activity and functional connectivity recorded in neuroscientific investigations, which entail different behavioural and cognitive attributes across individuals (Asplund et al., 2010; Bathelt et al., 2019; Forbes et al., 2010; Kriene…”

“Empathy is also affected by perceptions and appraisals of an unknown other’s social proximity to oneself (Xu et al., 2009; Krienen et al., 2010).”

“It is involved in complex processes such as learning and cognitive functions [61], while the latter was identified as critical for specific components of social interpretation and behavioral interactions [62].”

“These regions — which lie beyond the penetration depth of fNIRS — are known to be engaged in mentalizing processes [121] and encode social network information associated with relationship value [122,123].”

“…items into a single measure, as all three have been shown to be individually associated with an increase in self-knowledge activation during social inferences (Davis, 2017; Jenkins et al., 2008; Krienen et al., 2010; Machunsky et al., 2014; Machunsky & Walther, 2015; Savitsky et al., 2011).”

“MPFC activity also varies with the closeness, familiarity, or similarity of the other (Krienen et al., 2010; Mitchell et al., 2006).”

“Research also indicates that the vmPFC is sensitive to social distance with regard to self, with friends eliciting greater vmPFC activity than strangers, presumably due to one’s construal of a “friend” being inextricably linked to oneself (Krienen et al. 2010).”

“, 2008), perceived social proximity (Krienen et al., 2010), and the motivation to understand the target’s mental state (Ickes, 2011; Klein & Hodges, 2001).”

“…it has been demonstrated that the univariate activity patterns in the vmPFC increase linearly with the similarity and closeness of a social target being judged, highlighting that this trait space is likely utilized more with close or familiar others (Mitchell et al. 2006, Krienen et al. 2010).”

“…like empathy and sympathy shine a spotlight on a gay family member or friend and motivate people to care about the various harms inflicted on them; for example, neurological evidence indicates that experiences of empathy are modulated by social closeness (Fareri et al., 2012; Krienen et al., 2010).”