How spontaneous brain activity and narcissistic features shape social interaction

Andrea Scalabrini,Zirui Huang,Gian Luca Romani,Clara Mucci,Andrea Fossati,Antonio Ferretti,Mauro Gianni Perrucci,Sjoerd J H Ebisch,Georg Northoff

doi:10.1038/s41598-017-10389-9

Abstract

There is an increasing interest in how ongoing spontaneous brain activity and personality provide a predisposition for the processing of environmental demands. It further has been suggested that the brain has an inherent sensitivity to the social environment. Here we tested in healthy volunteers if spontaneous brain activity contributes to a predisposition for social behavior and how this is modulated by narcissistic personality features associated with poor interpersonal functioning. Functional magnetic resonance imaging included a resting state and an experimental paradigm focusing on the anticipation of actively touching an animate (human hand) versus an inanimate target (mannequin hand). The experimental task induced a significant modulation of neural activity in left postcentral gyrus (PostCG), right culmen and, co-varying with narcissistic features, in right anterior insula (AI). Neural activity in anticipation of the animate target significantly correlated with spontaneous activity during the resting state indexed by the Power Law Exponent (PLE) in PostCG and AI. Finally, the correlation between spontaneous and task-induced activity in AI was mediated by narcissistic features. These findings provide novel evidence for a relationship between intrinsic brain activity and social behavior and show how personality could contribute to individual differences in our predisposition to approach the animate world.

Highlights

Since the early infancy we act in a social environment where we need to distinguish between the animate and the inanimate[1]
We aimed to investigate whether task activity induced by the anticipation of social behavior could be related to the spontaneous activity of the brain during a preceding resting state period, and if this relationship may be mediated by narcissistic traits, NG and NV
The main results showed that task-induced activity during the anticipation of the animate target in left postcentral gyrus (PostCG) and right anterior insula (AI) negatively correlated with the degree of long-range temporal correlations (LRTCs) during a preceding resting state: the stronger the Power Law Exponent (PLE) in spontaneous activity in left PostCG and AI, the weaker the Blood Oxygen Level Dependent (BOLD) response in the same regions for the anticipation of the animate target

Summary

Introduction

Since the early infancy we act in a social environment where we need to distinguish between the animate and the inanimate[1]. This suggests an inherent sensitivity of our brain to the social environment[1, 2]. Social interactions induce neural activity in sensorimotor and affective circuits which allows us to predict and understand others’ sensory experiences[6,7,8]. The brain’s spontaneous activity as measured in the resting state (when a participant is awake but not involved in a specific task) shows a complex temporal structure characterized by long-range temporal correlations (LRTCs)[24, 25]. Higher LRTC’s are indexed by a higher PLE, and imply stronger low-frequency Blood Oxygen Level Dependent (BOLD) signal fluctuations and higher glucose metabolism in the brain[24, 29, 30]

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