title: Empathy matters: ERP evidence for inter-individual differences in social language processing.
abstract: When an adult claims he cannot sleep without his teddy bear, people tend to react surprised. Language interpretation is, thus, influenced by social context, such as who the speaker is. The present study reveals inter-individual differences in brain reactivity to social aspects of language. Whereas women showed brain reactivity when stereotype-based inferences about a speaker conflicted with the content of the message, men did not. This sex difference in social information processing can be explained by a specific cognitive trait, one's ability to empathize. Individuals who empathize to a greater degree revealed larger N400 effects (as well as a larger increase in γ-band power) to socially relevant information. These results indicate that individuals with high-empathizing skills are able to rapidly integrate information about the speaker with the content of the message, as they make use of voice-based inferences about the speaker to process language in a top-down manner. Alternatively, individuals with lower empathizing skills did not use information about social stereotypes in implicit sentence comprehension, but rather took a more bottom-up approach to the processing of these social pragmatic sentences.
authors.affiliation: Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging, Radboud University Nijmegen, P.O. Box 9101, NL-6500 HB Nijmegen, The Netherlands. d.vandenbrink@donders.ru.nl
authors.forename: Daniëlle
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: van den Brink
authors.forename: Jos J A
authors.initials: JJ
authors.lastname: Van Berkum
authors.forename: Marcel C M
authors.initials: MC
authors.lastname: Bastiaansen
authors.forename: Cathelijne M J Y
authors.initials: CM
authors.lastname: Tesink
authors.forename: Miriam
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Kos
authors.forename: Jan K
authors.initials: JK
authors.lastname: Buitelaar
authors.forename: Peter
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Hagoort
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D001921:Brain / Q000502:physiology; D001931:Brain Mapping; D004645:Empathy / Q000502:physiology*; D005071:Evoked Potentials / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007206:Individuality; D007802:Language; D008297:Male; D012660:Semantics; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires; D014831:Voice / Q000502:physiology; D055815:Young Adult