Tease or threat? Judging social interactions from bodily expressions

doi:10.1016/j.neuroimage.2009.09.065

NeuroImage

Volume 49, Issue 2, 15 January 2010, Pages 1717-1727

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2009.09.065 Get rights and content

Abstract

We casually observe many interactions that do not really concern us. Yet sometimes we need to be able to rapidly appraise whether an interaction between two people represents a real threat for one of them rather than an innocent tease. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we investigated whether small differences in the body language of two interacting people are picked up by the brain even if observers are performing an unrelated task. Fourteen participants were scanned while watching 3-s movies (192 trials and 96 scrambles) showing a male person either threatening or teasing a female one. In one task condition, observers categorized the interaction as threatening or teasing, and in the other, they monitored randomly appearing dots and categorized the color. Our results clearly show that right amygdala responds more to threatening than to teasing situations irrespective of the observers' task. When observers' attention is not explicitly directed to the situation, this heightened amygdala activation goes together with increased activity in body sensitive regions in fusiform gyrus, extrastriate body area—human motion complex and superior temporal sulcus and is associated with a better behavioral performance of the participants during threatening situations. In addition, regions involved in action observation (inferior frontal gyrus, temporoparietal junction, and inferior parietal lobe) and preparation (premotor, putamen) show increased activation for threat videos. Also regions involved in processing moral violations (temporoparietal junction, hypothalamus) reacted selectively to the threatening interactions. Taken together, our results show which brain regions react selectively to witnessing a threatening interaction even if the situation is not attended because the observers perform an unrelated task.

Section snippets

Participants

Fourteen healthy volunteers (five males; 23.6 ± 5.1 years; all right-handed) participated in this experiment after providing written informed consent. All participants had normal or corrected-to-normal vision. The study was performed in accordance to the Declaration of Helsinki and was approved by the local medical ethical committee.

Materials

Fourteen students (seven males) of the University of Tilburg were filmed while they were engaged into a social interaction which always involved one male and one

Behavioral results

Threatening situations were well recognized as shown in the average recognition rates during the emotion naming task ( mean = 83.9%, SD = 11.15) and participants also performed well in the color naming task (mean = 90.8%, SD = 8.32) (see Fig. 2). A repeated-measures ANOVA showed that there was an emotion effect (F(1,10) = 5.455, p = .042, η p2 = .353) as well as a task effect (F(1,10) = 13.875, p = .004, η p2 = .581) indicating that recognition rates were highest in the color naming condition and for threatening

Discussion

Our goal was to investigate the brain regions associated with witnessing an interaction between two people in which one person threatens the other and to assess whether explicitly paying attention to the situation makes a significant difference. Our major results are that right AMG is active in the attended as well as unattended threat condition while the body processing regions FG, EBA–hMT+/V5, and STS only for unattended threat. In contrast, left IFG responds specifically to threatening

Conclusion

We showed that right AMG is involved in witnessing threatening situations the observer is not part of, also when not actually paying attention to the situation. This AMG activation during the color naming task co-occurred with activations in body processing regions FG, EBA–hMT+/V5, and STS.

Regions involved in action perception (IFG and TPJ) responded more when the interaction was threatening and when attention was directed explicitly to it. Also left IPL showed a heightened response to

Acknowledgments

This project was funded in part by EU project COBOL (FDP6-NEST-043403).

We thank the reviewers for their useful comments.

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Tease or threat? Judging social interactions from bodily expressions

Abstract

Section snippets

Participants

Materials

Behavioral results

Discussion

Conclusion

Acknowledgments

Trends Cogn. Sci.

Acta Psychol. (Amst)

NeuroImage

NeuroImage

Curr. Opin. Neurobiol.

Neuropsychologia

Neuron

NeuroImage

NeuroImage

Curr. Biol.

Prog. Brain Res.

NeuroImage

NeuroImage

Curr. Opin. Neurobiol.

Neuropsychologia

Neurosci. Lett.

NeuroImage

NeuroImage

Neuron

NeuroImage

NeuroImage

Cognitive neuroscience of human social behaviour

Nat. Rev., Neurosci.

Serial pathways from primate prefrontal cortex to autonomic areas may influence emotional expression

BMC Neurosci.

FMRI responses to video and point-light displays of moving humans and manipulable objects

J. Cogn. Neurosci.