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Articles 1 - 9 of 9
Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Multimodal Frontostriatal Connectivity Underlies Individual Differences In Self-Esteem, Robert S. Chavez, Todd F. Heatherton
Multimodal Frontostriatal Connectivity Underlies Individual Differences In Self-Esteem, Robert S. Chavez, Todd F. Heatherton
Dartmouth Scholarship
A heightened sense of self-esteem is associated with a reduced risk for several types of affective and psychiatric disorders, including depression, anxiety and eating disorders. However, little is known about how brain systems integrate self-referential processing and positive evaluation to give rise to these feelings. To address this, we combined diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to test how frontostriatal connectivity reflects long-term trait and short-term state aspects of self-esteem. Using DTI, we found individual variability in white matter structural integrity between the medial prefrontal cortex and the ventral striatum was related to trait measures of …
Socially Excluded Individuals Fail To Recruit Medial Prefrontal Cortex For Negative Social Scenes, Katherine E. Powers, Dylan D. Wagner, Catherine J. Norris, Todd F. Heatherton
Socially Excluded Individuals Fail To Recruit Medial Prefrontal Cortex For Negative Social Scenes, Katherine E. Powers, Dylan D. Wagner, Catherine J. Norris, Todd F. Heatherton
Dartmouth Scholarship
Converging behavioral evidence suggests that people respond to experiences of social exclusion with both defensive and affiliative strategies, allowing them to avoid further distress while also encouraging re-establishment of positive social connections. However, there are unresolved questions regarding the cognitive mechanisms underlying people's responses to social exclusion. Here, we sought to gain insight into these behavioral tendencies by using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine the impact of social exclusion on neural responses to visual scenes that varied on dimensions of sociality and emotional valence. Compared to socially included participants, socially excluded participants failed to recruit dorsomedial prefrontal cortex …
Self-Regulatory Depletion Increases Emotional Reactivity In The Amygdala, Dylan D. Wagner, Todd F. Heatherton
Self-Regulatory Depletion Increases Emotional Reactivity In The Amygdala, Dylan D. Wagner, Todd F. Heatherton
Dartmouth Scholarship
The ability to self-regulate can become impaired when people are required to engage in successive acts of effortful self-control, even when self-control occurs in different domains. Here, we used functional neuroimaging to test whether engaging in effortful inhibition in the cognitive domain would lead to putative dysfunction in the emotional domain. Forty-eight participants viewed images of emotional scenes during functional magnetic resonance imaging in two sessions that were separated by a challenging attention control task that required effortful inhibition (depletion group) or not (control group). Compared to the control group, depleted participants showed increased activity in the left amygdala to …
Implicitly Priming The Social Brain: Failure To Find Neural Effects, Katherine E. Powers, Todd F. Heatherton
Implicitly Priming The Social Brain: Failure To Find Neural Effects, Katherine E. Powers, Todd F. Heatherton
Dartmouth Scholarship
Humans have a fundamental need for social relationships. Rejection from social groups is especially detrimental, rendering the ability to detect threats to social relationships and respond in adaptive ways critical. Indeed, previous research has shown that experiencing social rejection alters the processing of subsequent social cues in a variety of socially affiliative and avoidant ways. Because social perception and cognition occurs spontaneously and automatically, detecting threats to social relationships may occur without conscious awareness or control. Here, we investigated the automaticity of social threat detection by examining how implicit primes affect neural responses to social stimuli. However, despite using a …
Tree Climbing And Human Evolution, Vivek V. Venkataraman, Thomas S. Kraft, Nathaniel J. Dominy
Tree Climbing And Human Evolution, Vivek V. Venkataraman, Thomas S. Kraft, Nathaniel J. Dominy
Dartmouth Scholarship
Paleoanthropologists have long argued—often contentiously—about the climbing abilities of early hominins and whether a foot adapted to terrestrial bipedalism constrained regular access to trees. However, some modern humans climb tall trees routinely in pursuit of honey, fruit, and game, often without the aid of tools or support systems. Mortality and morbidity associated with facultative arboreality is expected to favor behaviors and anatomies that facilitate safe and efficient climbing. Here we show that Twa hunter–gatherers use extraordinary ankle dorsiflexion (>45°) during climbing, similar to the degree observed in wild chimpanzees. Although we did not detect a skeletal signature of dorsiflexion …
Microsaccade Rate Varies With Subjective Visibility During Motion-Induced Blindness, Po-Jang Hsieh, Peter U. Tse
Microsaccade Rate Varies With Subjective Visibility During Motion-Induced Blindness, Po-Jang Hsieh, Peter U. Tse
Dartmouth Scholarship
Motion-induced blindness (MIB) occurs when a dot embedded in a motion field subjectively vanishes. Here we report the first psychophysical data concerning effects of microsaccade/eyeblink rate upon perceptual switches during MIB. We find that the rate of microsaccades/eyeblink rises before and after perceptual transitions from not seeing to seeing the dot, and decreases before perceptual transitions from seeing it to not seeing it. In addition, event-related fMRI data reveal that, when a dot subjectively reappears during MIB, the blood oxygen-level dependent (BOLD) signal increases in V1v and V2v and decreases in contralateral hMT+. These BOLD signal changes observed upon perceptual …
Switching Language Switches Mind: Linguistic Effects On Developmental Neural Bases Of ‘Theory Of Mind’, Chiyoko Kobayashi, Gary H. Glover, Elise Temple
Switching Language Switches Mind: Linguistic Effects On Developmental Neural Bases Of ‘Theory Of Mind’, Chiyoko Kobayashi, Gary H. Glover, Elise Temple
Dartmouth Scholarship
Theory of mind (ToM)—our ability to predict behaviors of others in terms of their underlying intentions—has been examined through false-belief (FB) tasks. We studied 12 Japanese early bilingual children (8−12 years of age) and 16 late bilingual adults (18−40 years of age) with FB tasks in Japanese [first language (L1)] and English [second language (L2)], using fMRI. Children recruited more brain regions than adults for processing ToM tasks in both languages. Moreover, children showed an overlap in brain activity between the L1 and L2 ToM conditions in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC). Adults did not show such a convergent activity …
Detecting Agency From The Biological Motion Of Veridical Vs Animated Agents, Raymond A. Mar, William M. Kelley, Todd F. Heatherton, C. Neil Macrae
Detecting Agency From The Biological Motion Of Veridical Vs Animated Agents, Raymond A. Mar, William M. Kelley, Todd F. Heatherton, C. Neil Macrae
Dartmouth Scholarship
The ability to detect agency is fundamental for understanding the social world. Underlying this capacity are neural circuits that respond to patterns of intentional biological motion in the superior temporal sulcus and temporoparietal junction. Here we show that the brain's blood oxygenation level dependent (BOLD) response to such motion is modulated by the representation of the actor. Dynamic social interactions were portrayed by either live-action agents or computer-animated agents, enacting the exact same patterns of biological motion. Using an event-related design, we found that the BOLD response associated with the perception and interpretation of agency was greater when identical physical …
Medial Prefrontal Activity Differentiates Self From Close Others, Todd F. Heatherton, Carrie L. Wyland, C. Neil Macrae, Kathryn E. Demos, Bryan T. Denny, William M. Kelley
Medial Prefrontal Activity Differentiates Self From Close Others, Todd F. Heatherton, Carrie L. Wyland, C. Neil Macrae, Kathryn E. Demos, Bryan T. Denny, William M. Kelley
Dartmouth Scholarship
No abstract provided.