The Neural Mechanisms Of The Fundamental Dimensions Of Social Cognition

Research in social cognition has cataloged and organized diverse social phenomenon to two fundamental dimensions:communion and agency. Communion refers to building social connections and gaining social acceptance, whereas agency refers to striving for personal goals and developing competencies. Little, direct research has examined the neural representation of content from the fundamental dimensions. However, A focus on content matters because content has been shown to affect information processing and likely underlying neural activations. Thus, in the present study, we used both task-related and resting-related fMRI to explore the neural mechanisms of agency and communion.In the pilot research, the purpose is to establish a standardized Chinese adjective words system, which can be used as the stimulus words.49 participants rated 300 words on familiarity, valence, agency and communion. A total of 160 words,40 for each category, were kept according to their meaning and valence. There were significant differences between agentic words and communal words on with regard to their rated agency and communion, and agentic and communal words had no difference on their strokes, frequency rank, familiarity and valence.In research 1, we used a valence classification task to determine the common as well as distinct neuromechanisms of agency and communion-related content. Several brain areas associated with the social cognition network (cerebellum, superior frontal gyrus, insula, putamen and inferior parietal gyrus) showed overlap in response to both agency and communion words. These findings suggest that both content categories are related to a social cognition network. In terms of distinct activations, the findings indicated greater deactivations for communion than agentic content in the ventral anterior cingulate (vACC) and medial orbitofrontal cortex (mOFC). The larger deactivations may reflect greater allocation of attentional resources to visual areas, or inhibition of cognitive activity irrelevant to task performance. If so, this suggests greater attention and engagement with communion-related content.In research 2, the regional homogeneity (ReHo) in the resting state fMRI was performed to examine the neural sources of agency and communion. The results showed that communion and agency both have a positive relationship with the ReHo values in right superior temporal gyrus (STG). STG plays an important role in social cognition, so the results may suggested that people with high agentic traits or high communal traits have a higher capacity to understand other’s mental state and behaviors than people with low agentic triats or communal traits. Otherwise, agentic traits referred to more brain areas associated with the social cognition network. For example, the ReHo values in precuneus and inferior parietal gyrus (IPL) showed positive relationship with agentic triats. These two brain areas were all correlated with self-reflection, it may indicate that people with high agentic triats are more likely to reflect on their abilities than those with low agentic triats.In conclusion, these two researches suggested common and differential networks for agency versus communion-related content.