Brain activity linked to shared uncertainty about emotions
Brain scans of 20 young and 40 older adults linked activity in a decision-making region to uncertainty about other people’s emotions.
Limit: Only 20 young and 40 older adults contributed brain scans
Edited by Boris Djordjevic · AgingResearch.News
Twenty young and 40 older adults underwent brain scans while judging actors’ emotions in controlled social interactions. This observational study used functional magnetic resonance imaging to track brain activity. An independent group watched the same scenes; their responses supplied measures of shared judgments and uncertainty about the emotions.
Activity in the medial prefrontal cortex, a brain region involved in decision-making, was linked to uncertainty about competing interpretations of the actors’ emotions. Greater social agreement about the emotional conflict in the scenes was associated with more similar activity patterns in this region. That association varied with age.
Why it matters
Understanding others’ emotions is part of social cognition. The authors suggest their findings help account for age-related changes in this ability.
Caveats
These observational results identify associations, not causal relationships. The abstract does not specify how the association differed with age.
