title: 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 observer-target 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.
authors.affiliation: Social and Affective Neuroscience, Department of Neurology, Universität zu Lübeck, 23562 Luebeck, Germany; silke.anders@neuro.uni-luebeck.de.
authors.forename: Silke
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Anders
authors.affiliation: Social and Affective Neuroscience, Department of Neurology, Universität zu Lübeck, 23562 Luebeck, Germany;
authors.forename: Roos
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: de Jong
authors.affiliation: Social and Affective Neuroscience, Department of Neurology, Universität zu Lübeck, 23562 Luebeck, Germany;
authors.forename: Christian
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Beck
authors.affiliation: Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience, Charité Universitätsmedizin Berlin, 10115 Berlin, Germany; Berlin Center for Advanced Neuroimaging, Charité Universitätsmedizin Berlin, 10117 Berlin, Germany; Berlin School of Mind and Brain, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, 10099 Berlin, Germany;
authors.forename: John-Dylan
authors.initials: JD
authors.lastname: Haynes
authors.affiliation: Department of Biomedical Magnetic Resonance, University of Tübingen, 72076 Tuebingen, Germany; Clinic for Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, University of Tübingen, 72076 Tuebingen, Germany.
authors.forename: Thomas
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Ethofer
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D001921:Brain / Q000502:physiology*; D004644:Emotions / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D033182:Intention; D007398:Interpersonal Relations; D008297:Male
keywords: affective communication; confidence; human social relations; intrinsic reward; multivoxel pattern analysis