We are often surprised when an interaction we remember positively is recalled by a peer negatively. What colors social memories with positive versus negative hues? We show that when resting after a social experience, individuals showing similar default network responding subsequently remember more negative information, while individuals showing idiosyncratic default network responding remember more positive information. Results were specific to rest after the social experience (as opposed to before or during the social experience, or rest after a nonsocial experience). For the first time, we identified post-encoding rest as a key moment and the default network as a key brain system in which negative affect homogenizes, whereas positive affect diversifies social memories. The results also provide novel neural evidence in support of the "broaden and build" theory of positive emotion, which posits that while negative affect confines, positive affect broadens idiosyncrasy in cognitive processing.
Loneliness is characterized by the subjective sense that one’s perspectives on the social world are not shared with others. We demonstrate that this feeling is not just perceptual bias: lonely individuals objectively represent culturally significant figures idiosyncratically. Across two independent brain imaging datasets, lonely participants exhibited idiosyncratic neural representations of well-known celebrities that deviated from group-consensus neural representations in the medial prefrontal cortex—a region that encodes and retrieves social knowledge (Studies 1A-1B). Because verbal communication is key to building shared reality, Study 2 tested whether idiosyncratic representations of celebrities are also reflected in lonely individuals’ language when communicating about them. Natural language processing methods revealed lonely participants were idiosyncratic in their language when communicating about celebrities that otherwise generated strong semantic agreement. Lonely individuals’ lack of overlap with others’ neural and semantic representations of cultural touchstones may serve as an implicit cue to them that they do not belong.
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