This study provides further evidence that the EQ is reliable in this population and should be recommended to estimate empathy problems, notably in individuals with troubled interpersonal interaction patterns.

The statement: "An agent harms a victim," depicts a situation that triggers moral emotions. Depending on whether the agent and the victim are the self or someone else, it can lead to four different moral emotions: self-anger ("I harm myself"), guilt ("I harm someone"), other-anger ("someone harms me"), and compassion ("someone harms someone"). In order to investigate the neural correlates of these emotions, we examined brain activation patterns elicited by variations in the agent (self vs. other) and the victim (self vs. other) of a harmful action. Twenty-nine healthy participants underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging while imagining being in situations in which they or someone else harmed themselves or someone else. Results indicated that the three emotional conditions associated with the involvement of other, either as agent or victim (guilt, other-anger, and compassion conditions), all activated structures that have been previously associated with the Theory of Mind (ToM, the attribution of mental states to others), namely, the dorsal medial prefrontal cortex, the precuneus, and the bilateral temporo-parietal junction. Moreover, the two conditions in which both the self and other were concerned by the harmful action (guilt and other-anger conditions) recruited emotional structures (i.e., the bilateral amygdala, anterior cingulate, and basal ganglia). These results suggest that specific moral emotions induce different neural activity depending on the extent to which they involve the self and other.

BackgroundMobile technology gives researchers unimagined opportunities to design new interventions to increase physical activity. Unfortunately, it is still unclear which elements are useful to initiate and maintain behavior change.ObjectiveIn this meta-analysis, we investigated randomized controlled trials of physical activity interventions that were delivered via mobile phone. We analyzed which elements contributed to intervention success.MethodsAfter searching four databases and science networks for eligible studies, we entered 50 studies with N=5997 participants into a random-effects meta-analysis, controlling for baseline group differences. We also calculated meta-regressions with the most frequently used behavior change techniques (behavioral goals, general information, self-monitoring, information on where and when, and instructions on how to) as moderators.ResultsWe found a small overall effect of the Hedges g=0.29, (95% CI 0.20 to 0.37) which reduced to g=0.22 after correcting for publication bias. In the moderator analyses, behavioral goals and self-monitoring each led to more intervention success. Interventions that used neither behavioral goals nor self-monitoring had a negligible effect of g=0.01, whereas utilizing either technique increased effectiveness by Δg=0.31, but combining them did not provide additional benefits (Δg=0.36).ConclusionsOverall, mHealth interventions to increase physical activity have a small to moderate effect. However, including behavioral goals or self-monitoring can lead to greater intervention success. More research is needed to look at more behavior change techniques and their interactions. Reporting interventions in trial registrations and articles need to be structured and thorough to gain accurate insights. This can be achieved by basing the design or reporting of interventions on taxonomies of behavior change.

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Whenever we interact with others, we judge them and whenever we make such judgments, we compare them with ourselves, other people, or internalized standards. Countless social psychological experiments have shown that comparative thinking plays a ubiquitous role in person perception and social cognition as a whole. The topic of social comparison has recently aroused the interest of social neuroscientists, who have begun to investigate its neural underpinnings. The present article provides an overview of these neuroimaging and electrophysiological studies. We discuss recent findings on the consequences of social comparison on the brain processing of outcomes and highlight the role of the brain’s reward system. Moreover, we analyze the relationship between the brain networks involved in social comparisons and those active during other forms of cognitive and perceptual comparison. Finally, we discuss potential future questions that research on the neural correlates of social comparison could address.

Subclinical narcissism is a personality trait with two faces: According to social-cognitive theories it is associated with grandiosity and feelings of superiority, whereas psychodynamic theories emphasize vulnerable aspects like fluctuating self-esteem and emotional conflicts. The psychodynamic view, however, is commonly not supported by self-report studies on subclinical narcissism. Personality neuroscience might help to better understand the phenomenon of narcissism beyond the limits of self-report research. While social-cognitive theory would predict that self-relevant processing should be accompanied by brain activity in reward-related areas in narcissistic individuals, psychodynamic theory would suggest that it should be accompanied by activation in regions pointing to negative affect or emotional conflict. In this study, extreme groups of high and low narcissistic individuals performed a visual self-recognition paradigm during fMRI. Viewing one’s own face (as compared to faces of friends and strangers) was accompanied by greater activation of the dorsal and ventral anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) in highly narcissistic men. These results suggest that highly narcissistic men experience greater negative affect or emotional conflict during self-relevant processing and point to vulnerable aspects of subclinical narcissism that might not be apparent in self-report research.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. How attractive someone is perceived to be depends on the individual or cultural standards to which this person is compared. But although comparisons play a central role in the way people judge the appearance of others, the brain processes underlying attractiveness comparisons remain unknown. In the present experiment, we tested the hypothesis that attractiveness comparisons rely on the same cognitive and neural mechanisms as comparisons of simple nonsocial magnitudes such as size. We recorded brain activity with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while participants compared the beauty or height of two women or two dogs. Our data support the hypothesis of a common process underlying these different types of comparisons. First, we demonstrate that the distance effect characteristic of nonsocial comparisons also holds for attractiveness comparisons. Behavioral results indicated, for all our comparisons, longer response times for near than far distances. Second, the neural correlates of these distance effects overlapped in a frontoparietal network known for its involvement in processing simple nonsocial quantities. These results provide evidence for overlapping processes in the comparison of physical attractiveness and nonsocial magnitudes.

A wide array of social decisions relies on social comparisons. As such, these decisions require fast access to relative information. Therefore, we expect that signatures of the comparative process should be observable in electrophysiological components at an early stage of information processing. However, to date, little is known about the neural time course of social target comparisons. Therefore, we tested this hypothesis in 2 electroencephalography (EEG) studies using a social distance effect paradigm. The distance effect capitalizes on the fact that stimuli close on a certain dimension take longer to compare than stimuli clearly differing on this dimension. Here, we manipulated the distance of face characteristics regarding their levels of attractiveness (Study 1) and trustworthiness (Study 2), 2 essential social dimensions. In both studies, size comparisons served as a nonsocial control condition. In Study 1, distance related effects were apparent 170 ms (vertex positive potential, VPP) and 200 ms (N2) after stimulus onset for attractiveness comparisons. In Study 2, trustworthiness comparisons took effect already after 100 ms (N1) and likewise carried over to an event-related N2. Remarkably, we observed a similar temporal pattern for social (attractiveness, trustworthiness) and nonsocial (size) dimensions. These results speak in favor of an early encoding of comparative information and emphasize the primary role of comparison in social information processing. (PsycINFO Database Record