When dealing with emotional situations, we often need to rapidly override automatic stimulus-response mappings and select an alternative course of action [1], for instance, when trying to manage, rather than avoid, another's aggressive behavior. The anterior prefrontal cortex (aPFC) has been linked to the control of these social emotional behaviors [2, 3]. We studied how this control is implemented by inhibiting the left aPFC with continuous theta burst stimulation (cTBS; [4]). The behavioral and cerebral consequences of this intervention were assessed with a task quantifying the control of social emotional actions and with concurrent measurements of brain perfusion. Inhibition of the aPFC led participants to commit more errors when they needed to select rule-driven responses overriding automatic action tendencies evoked by emotional faces. Concurrently, task-related perfusion decreased in bilateral aPFC and posterior parietal cortex and increased in amygdala and left fusiform face area. We infer that the aPFC controls social emotional behavior by upregulating regions involved in rule selection [5] and downregulating regions supporting the automatic evaluation of emotions [6]. These findings illustrate how exerting emotional control during social interactions requires the aPFC to coordinate rapid action selection processes, the detection of emotional conflicts, and the inhibition of emotionally-driven responses.

It is clear that the steroid hormone testosterone plays an important role in the regulation of social emotional behavior, but it remains unknown which neural circuits mediate these hormonal influences in humans. We investigated the modulatory effects of endogenous testosterone on the control of social emotional behavior by applying functional magnetic resonance imaging while healthy male participants performed a social approach–avoidance task. This task operationalized social emotional behavior by having participants approach and avoid emotional faces by pulling and pushing a joystick, respectively. Affect-congruent trials mapped the automatic tendency to approach happy faces and avoid angry faces. Affect-incongruent trials required participants to override those automatic action tendencies and select the opposite response (approach-angry, avoid-happy). The social emotional control required by affect-incongruent responses resulted in longer reaction times (RTs) and increased activity at the border of the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex and frontal pole (VLPFC/FP). We show that endogenous testosterone modulates these cerebral congruency effects through 2 mechanisms. First, participants with lower testosterone levels generate larger VLPFC/FP responses during affect-incongruent trials. Second, during the same trials, endogenous testosterone modulates the effective connectivity between the VLPFC/FP and the amygdala. These results indicate that endogenous testosterone influences local prefrontal activity and interregional connectivity supporting the control of social emotional behavior.

a b s t r a c tIncreasing evidence indicates that eye gaze direction affects the processing of emotional faces in anxious individuals. However, the effects of eye gaze direction on the behavioral responses elicited by emotional faces, such as avoidance behavior, remain largely unexplored. We administered an Approach-Avoidance Task (AAT) in high (HSA) and low socially anxious (LSA) individuals. All participants responded to photographs of angry, happy and neutral faces (presented with direct and averted gaze), by either pushing a joystick away from them (avoidance) or pulling it towards them (approach). Compared to LSA, HSA were faster in avoiding than approaching angry faces. Most crucially, this avoidance tendency was only present when the perceived anger was directed towards the subject (direct gaze) and not when the gaze of the face-stimulus was averted. In contrast, HSA individuals tended to avoid happy faces irrespectively of gaze direction. Neutral faces elicited no approach-avoidance tendencies. Thus avoidance of angry faces in social anxiety as measured by AA-tasks reflects avoidance of subject-directed anger and not of negative stimuli in general. In addition, although both anger and joy are considered to reflect approach-related emotions, gaze direction did not affect HSA's avoidance of happy faces, suggesting differential mechanisms affecting responses to happy and angry faces in social anxiety.

a b s t r a c tThe ability to design tailored messages for specific listeners is an important aspect of human communication. The present study investigates whether a mere belief about an addressee's identity influences the generation and production of a communicative message in a novel, non-verbal communication task. Participants were made to believe they were playing a game with a child or an adult partner, while a confederate acted as both child and adult partners with matched performance and response times. The participants' belief influenced their behavior, spending longer when interacting with the presumed child addressee, but only during communicative portions of the game, i.e. using time as a tool to place emphasis on target information. This communicative adaptation attenuated with experience, and it was related to personality traits, namely Empathy and Need for Cognition measures. Overall, these findings indicate that novel nonverbal communicative interactions are selected according to a socio-centric perspective, and they are strongly influenced by participants' traits.

Psychopathy (PP) is associated with marked abnormalities in social emotional behaviour, such as high instrumental aggression (IA). A crucial but largely ignored question is whether automatic social approach-avoidance tendencies may underlie this condition. We tested whether offenders with PP show lack of automatic avoidance tendencies, usually activated when (healthy) individuals are confronted with social threat stimuli (angry faces). We applied a computerized approach-avoidance task (AAT), where participants pushed or pulled pictures of emotional faces using a joystick, upon which the faces decreased or increased in size, respectively. Furthermore, participants completed an emotion recognition task which was used to control for differences in recognition of facial emotions. In contrast to healthy controls (HC), PP patients showed total absence of avoidance tendencies towards angry faces. Interestingly, those responses were related to levels of instrumental aggression and the (in)ability to experience personal distress (PD). These findings suggest that social performance in psychopaths is disturbed on a basic level of automatic action tendencies. The lack of implicit threat avoidance tendencies may underlie their aggressive behaviour.

After a threatening event, the risk of developing social psychopathologies is increased in short-allele (s) carriers of the serotonin transporter gene. The amygdala becomes overresponsive to emotional stimuli, an effect that could be driven by local hypersensitivity or by reduced prefrontal regulation. This study distinguishes between these two hypotheses by using dynamic causal modeling of fMRI data acquired in a preselected cohort of human s-carriers and homozygous long-allele carriers. Increased amygdala activity in s-carriers originates from reduced prefrontal inhibitory regulation when social emotional behavior needs to be controlled, suggesting a mechanism for increased vulnerability to psychopathologies.

Increased limbic and striatal activation in adolescence has been attributed to a relative delay in the maturation of prefrontal areas, resulting in the increase of impulsive reward-seeking behaviors that are often observed during puberty. However, it remains unclear whether and how this general developmental pattern applies to the control of social emotional actions, a fundamental adult skill refined during adolescence. This domain of control pertains to decisions involving emotional responses. When faced with a social emotional challenge (e.g., an angry face), we can follow automatic response tendencies and avoid the challenge or exert control over those tendencies by selecting an alternative action. Using an fMRI-adapted social approach-avoidance task, this study identifies how the neural regulation of emotional action control changes as a function of human pubertal development in 14-year-old adolescents (n ϭ 47). Pubertal maturation, indexed by testosterone levels, shifted neural regulation of emotional actions from the pulvinar nucleus of the thalamus and the amygdala to the anterior prefrontal cortex (aPFC). Adolescents with more advanced pubertal maturation showed greater aPFC activity when controlling their emotional action tendencies, reproducing the same pattern consistently observed in adults. In contrast, adolescents of the same age, but with less advanced pubertal maturation, showed greater pulvinar and amygdala activity when exerting similarly effective emotional control. These findings qualify how, in the domain of social emotional actions, executive control shifts from subcortical to prefrontal structures during pubertal development. The pulvinar and the amygdala are suggested as the ontogenetic precursors of the mature control system centered on the anterior prefrontal cortex.

Psychopathic individuals are notorious for their controlled goal-directed aggressive behavior. Yet, during social challenges, they often show uncontrolled emotional behavior. Healthy individuals can control their social emotional behavior through anterior prefrontal cortex (aPFC) downregulation of neural activity in the amygdala, with testosterone modulating aPFC–amygdala coupling. This study tests whether individual differences in this neuroendocrine system relate to the paradoxical lack of emotional control observed in human psychopathic offenders. Emotional control was operationalized with an fMRI-adapted approach–avoidance task requiring rule-driven control over rapid emotional responses. Fifteen psychopathic offenders and 19 matched healthy control subjects made approaching and avoiding movements in response to emotional faces. Control of social emotional behavior was required during affect-incongruent trials, when participants had to override affect-congruent, automatic action tendencies and select the opposite response. Psychopathic offenders showed less control-related aPFC activity and aPFC–amygdala coupling during trials requiring control of emotional actions, when compared with healthy control subjects. This pattern was particularly pronounced in psychopathic individuals with high endogenous testosterone levels. These findings suggest that reduced prefrontal coordination underlies reduced behavioral control in psychopathic offenders during emotionally provoking situations. Even though the modest sample size warrants replication, the modulatory role of endogenous testosterone on the aPFC–amygdala circuit suggests a neurobiological substrate of individual differences that is relevant for the advancement of treatment and the reduction of recidivism.