A Quantitative Review of Brain Activation Maps for Mentalizing, Empathy, and Social Interactions: Specifying Commonalities and Differences

TL;DR

This paper reviews brain activity patterns during social tasks like mentalizing, empathy, and social interactions to identify shared and distinct neural features.

Contribution

The study re-analyzes brain activation data to clarify how cognitive and affective systems overlap in social tasks.

Findings

Social interaction engagement co-activates cognitive and affective brain systems linked to mentalizing and empathy.

Little direct overlap in brain activation was found between intermediate mentalizing/empathy tasks and social interaction engagement.

The tasks collectively involve co-recruitment of the default mode network and control networks.

Abstract

Humans are inherently social beings, and the quality of their interactions is essential for maintaining physical and mental health. Effective social interaction involves understanding not just people’s visible behavior but also the underlying factors like thoughts and emotions. This review investigates the convergence and divergence of meta-analytic brain activation for mentalizing, empathy, and social interaction engagement. To achieve this, we re-analyzed data from our prior meta-analysis on mentalizing and empathy using the same methodology as an existing meta-analysis on social interaction engagement. The comparison of brain activation maps focused on the question of whether the co-activation of cognitive and affective brain systems is an overarching characteristic of intermediate mentalizing/empathy tasks and social interaction engagement. Our findings support the general assumption that social interaction engagement co-recruits cognitive and affective brain systems also implicated in mentalizing and empathy. However, we found little direct overlap of brain activation for intermediate mentalizing/empathy tasks and social interaction engagement. Finally, applying a network neuroscience perspective, we suggest that social interaction engagement, affective/empathy, and intermediate mentalizing/empathy tasks are collectively characterized by co-recruitment of the default mode network and control networks.

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