A neural link between affective understanding and interpersonal attraction

Abstract

Being able to comprehend another person's intentions and emotions is essential for successful social interaction. However, it is currently unknown whether the human brain possesses a neural mechanism that attracts people to others whose mental states they can easily understand. Here we show that the degree to which a person feels attracted to another person can change while they observe the other's affective behavior, and that these changes depend on the observer's confidence in having correctly understood the other's affective state. At the neural level, changes in interpersonal attraction were predicted by activity in the reward system of the observer's brain. Importantly, these effects were specific to individual observertarget pairs and could not be explained by a target's general attractiveness or expressivity. Furthermore, using multivoxel pattern analysis (MVPA), we found that neural activity in the reward system of the observer's brain varied as a function of how well the target's affective behavior matched the observer's neural representation of the underlying affective state: The greater the match, the larger the brain's intrinsic reward signal. Taken together, these findings provide evidence that reward-related neural activity during social encounters signals how well an individual's "neural vocabulary" is suited to infer another person's affective state, and that this intrinsic reward might be a source of changes in interpersonal attraction.affective communication | confidence | intrinsic reward | multivoxel pattern analysis | human social relations F inding the "right" cooperation partner is an important task for individuals living in complex environments that require social interaction and cooperation. To accomplish a common goal, interaction partners must understand and continuously update information about their partner's current intentions, motivation, and affect, anticipate the other's behavior, and adapt their own behavior accordingly. From a sociobiological point of view, one thus might expect that evolution has favored a neural mechanism that permits individuals to select other individuals as their cooperation partners whose behavior and communication signals they can easily decode. However, the neural mechanisms that control human interpersonal attraction and the selection of cooperation partners are not wellunderstood.Several influential theories in social psychology have stressed the role of reward in interpersonal attraction (1, 2). The idea is that if a social encounter with another person is rewarding, then the reward will become associated with the other person, resulting in interpersonal attraction (2-4). Until recently, neuroscientific research into interpersonal attraction has focused mainly on determining the neural mechanism underlying the evaluation of others based on the physical attractiveness of their faces (e.g., 5-11). These studies consistently show that neural activity in the ventral striatum and medial orbitofrontal cortex (mOFC), core regions of the brain's reward syste...

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