The DOI matches its Crossref record; 74 of the 75 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Clan Mentality: Evidence That the Medial Prefrontal Cortex Responds to Close Others
Open accessAbstract
Kinship, friendship alliances, and perceptions of others' beliefs guide social interactions and are central to cohesive group behavior. Under certain conditions, brain systems that involve regions along the frontal midline increase activity when inferences are drawn about others who share a similar view to one's own (similarity). A prominent hypothesis is that these regions contribute to social cognition by simulating the other person's perspective based on one's own experience. An alternative is that certain regions process the social relevance of the person (closeness) to oneself and contribute to the assessment akin to signals that govern behavioral approach responses. These alternatives were explored across four functional magnetic resonance imaging experiments (n= 98). Experiment 1 localized the target midline regions in the rostral anterior cingulate cortex and anterior medial prefrontal cortex by having participants make personal judgments. The two dimensions (similarity, closeness) were crossed in experiment 2 using actual friends of the participant and unknown others. Making judgments about oneself and friends resulted in increased midline response relative to unknown others regardless of whether the friends shared similar views as the participant. Experiment 3 revealed that similarity was not a factor even when close others were not included. Experiment 4 directly contrasted two extremes: participants made inferences about similar, unknown others and dissimilar friends. Judgments about the close others again increased blood oxygenation level-dependent response along the frontal midline. These results encourage further exploration of the idea that frontal systems linked with limbic circuits facilitate assessment of the relevance or personal significance in social contexts.
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“Thinking of vmPFC in terms of meaning rather than more basic concepts like affect, value, memory, or visceromotor control also help explain its role in more complex processes not reviewed in depth here, such as ‘courage’ [75], ‘closeness’ [76], ‘social standing’ [77] and ‘the emergence of concepts’ [78] (figure 1m).”
From Ventromedial prefrontal–subcortical systems and the generation of affective meaning (2012) · cites this paper as [76]
In the citing paper
“The prefrontal cortex is a multimodal structure involved in social cognition [44], moral judgements [45], clan mentality [46], introspection [47] as well as goal-directed and stimulus-driven attention [48].”
From Brain reorganization, not relative brain size, primarily characterizes anthropoid brain evolution (2013) · cites this paper as [46]
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Citations
Cites
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BackgroundInsensitivity to future consequences following damage to human prefrontal cortex
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MethodEmotion, Decision Making and the Orbitofrontal Cortex
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Background
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“…context ranging from uncertainty (e.g., Berkay & Jenkins, 2023; Jenkins & Mitchell, 2010) to the type of mental state inferred (e.g., R. Saxe & Kanwisher, 2003; R. Saxe & Powell, 2006) to the target of the inference (e.g., Jenkins et al., 2008; Krienen et al., 2010; Mitchell et al., 2006).”
BackgroundResultDafni-Merom, A., Monsa, R., Benbaji, M., Klein, A., & Arzy, S. (2024) · Philosophical Transactions B · doi:10.1098/rstb.2023.0414 · Cited by 2
“…and moral domains, stimuli in the temporal domain may have varied in terms of personal closeness, yet the activation in the vmPFC and absence of rostral anterior cingulate cortex and anterior mPFC activity may suggest that most stimuli consisted of people from distant social scales [81,82].”
BackgroundPotential for the medial prefrontal cortex to link mentalizing and attachment schemas
He, Z., Vannucci, A., Meyer, M. L., & Tottenham, N. (2025) · Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience · doi:10.1093/scan/nsaf074 · Cited by 3
How Does Motivation Modulate the Operation of the Mentalizing Network in Person Evaluation?
Nugiel, T., & Beer, J. S. (2019) · Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience · doi:10.1162/jocn_a_01501 · Cited by 3
Tangled Representations of Self and Others in the Medial Prefrontal Cortex
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Building Social Decision Support Mechanisms with Friend Networks
Li, Y.-M., & Lee, Y.-L. (2012) · Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS) · doi:10.1109/hicss.2012.135 · Cited by 3
“People's brains are more responsive to friends than to strangers, even if the stranger has more in common [17].”
BackgroundNozaki, Y., & Koyasu, M. (2015) · PSYCHOLOGIA · doi:10.2117/psysoc.2015.49 · Cited by 5
Memory and the Intentional Stance
Brigard, F. D. (2018) · Oxford University Press eBooks · doi:10.1093/oso/9780199367511.003.0005 · Cited by 4
“Previous research has also shown that, during theory of mind tasks, certain hubs of the default network are modulated by considerations of social relevance (Mitchell et al 2006; Krienen et al 2010).”
BackgroundMedial prefrontal activity during self-other judgments is modulated by relationship need fulfillment
Domenico, S. I. D., Fournier, M. A., Rodrigo, A. H., Dong, M., Ayaz, H., Ryan, R. M., & Ruocco, A. C. (2022) · Social Neuroscience · doi:10.1080/17470919.2022.2074135 · Cited by 3
“One illustrative example comes from Krienen et al. (2010).”
MethodThe Surprising Role of the Default Mode Network
Brandman, T., Malach, R., & Simony., E. (2020) · doi:10.1101/2020.05.18.101758 · Cited by 88
Dönerkayalı, C., & İkier, S. (2025) · Applied Cognitive Psychology · doi:10.1002/acp.70084 · Cited by 2
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Predicting Framed Decisions: Simulation or Theory?
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“Recently, it has been shown that participants do indeed use specific information when predicting well-known people (Krienen et al., 2010; Schurz et al., 2015) and that participants simulate more when predicting unknown compared to wellknown people.”
BackgroundReproducible, Generalizable Brain Models of Affective Processes
Kragel, P. A., & Wager, T. D. (2019) · Nebraska Symposium on Motivation/The Nebraska symposium on motivation · doi:10.1007/978-3-030-27473-3_8 · Cited by 3
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Beer, J. S., & Flagan, T. (2014) · Springer eBooks · doi:10.1007/978-1-4939-1236-0_14 · Cited by 2
“One predominant hypothesis about this pattern of findings is that VMPFC marks an affective aspect of “self-relatedness,” that is, the socioemotional importance of the trait or person for the self (Krienen et al. 2010; Murray et al. 2012; Northoff et al. 2006; Roy et al. 2012).”
BackgroundSpontaneous Neural Encoding of Social Network PositionPreprint
Parkinson, C. M., & Wheatley, T. P. (2016) · SSRN Electronic Journal · doi:10.2139/ssrn.2894694 · Cited by 2
Dodell‐Feder, D. (2017) · Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard (DASH) (Harvard University) · Cited by 2
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Neurophysiology of Ethnicity (based on foreign literature)
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The Neural Organization of Social Knowledge
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Moving Beyond Dyadic Similarity and Towards Latent Structure Learning in Social Group Inference
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Familiar faces facilitate perspective‐taking in children
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Metadata
- Authors
- Krienen, F. M., Tu, P.-C., & Buckner, R. L.
- Affiliations
- Harvard University (US)
- Massachusetts General Hospital (US)
- Howard Hughes Medical Institute (US)
- Venue
- The Journal of Neuroscience
- Publisher
- Society for Neuroscience
- Published
- 2010-10-13
- Volume
- 30
- Issue
- 41
- Pages
- 13906-13915
- ISSN
- 0270-6474 (ISSN-L)
- 1529-2401
- PMC
- PMC2989424
- OpenAlex
- W2005288839
- Cited by
- 256
- References
- 75
- Citations by year
- 2026: 11 · 2025: 7 · 2024: 10 · 2023: 9 · 2022: 11 · 2021: 23 · 2020: 16 · 2019: 21 · 2018: 20 · 2017: 17 · 2016: 13 · 2015: 21 · 2014: 19 · 2013: 29 · 2012: 21
- FWCI
- 25.24
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- hybrid
- doi.org
- Licence
- Locations
- Journal of Neuroscience (publishedVersion, cc-by-nc-sa)
- Europe PMC (PubMed Central) (publishedVersion)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Funders
- U.S. Department of Defense
- Howard Hughes Medical Institute
- Simons Foundation
- National Institute on Aging (AG021910, AG-034556, R01AG021910, R01AG034556)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Social Psychology › Action Observation and Synchronization
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Neural and Behavioral Psychology Studies
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Developmental and Educational Psychology › Child and Animal Learning Development
- Keywords
- medial prefrontal cortex, rostral anterior cingulate cortex, social cognition, similarity judgments, kinship, friendship, perspective taking, personal meaning, approach behavior, social relevance
- MeSH terms
- Analysis of Variance, Brain Mapping, Female, Humans, Image Processing, Computer-Assisted, Interpersonal Relations, Judgment, Magnetic Resonance Imaging, Male, Surveys and Questionnaires, Social Behavior, Social Environment, Prefrontal Cortex, Friends, Young Adult
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