Abstract
People often take either the role of an actor or that of recipient in positive and negative interpersonal events when they interact with others. The present study investigated how the actor-recipient role affected the neural responses to self in emotional situations. Twenty-five participants were scanned while they were presented with positive and negative interpersonal events and were asked to rate the degree to which the actor/the recipient was that kind of person who caused the interpersonal event. Half of the trials were self-relevant events and the other half were other-relevant events. Results showed that people were more likely to isolate self from negative events when they played the role of actor relative to recipient. Pregenual anterior cingulate cortex (pgACC) and posterior dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (pdACC) were more active for self than other only in negative events. More importantly, also in negative interpersonal events, dorsal medial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC) showed greater self-related activations (self-other) when participants played the role of recipient relative to actor, while activities in orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) were greater for self than other only when the evaluation target played the role of recipient. These results showed that the actor-recipient role affected neural responses to self in emotional situations, especially when a recipient role was played in negative situations.
Highlights
Actor-recipient role affect emotional self during self-processing (Denny et al, 2012)
Paired-sample t test revealed that orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) showed greater self-related activations when participants played the role of recipient relative to actor in negative interpersonal events (t(24) = 3.69, p = 0.001) but not in positive events (t(24) = 0.84, p = 0.41)
The present study explored the impact of the actor-recipient role on neural responses to self in emotional situations
Summary
Actor-recipient role affect emotional self during self-processing (Denny et al, 2012). Previous studies have claimed that dmPFC was a region associated with self-evaluation processes (Northoff and Bermpohl, 2004; Korn et al, 2012) and it has been argued that people may consume more cognitive resources to engage in self-evaluation when they played the role of recipient. We expected that activities in OFC would be greater when participants made less self-serving judgments in the recipient relative to actor role, based on previous findings that OFC was associated with accurate self-view (Beer et al, 2006; Beer, 2007; Beer and Hughes, 2010)
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