Socially Induced Negative Emotions Elicit Neural Activity in the Mentalizing Network in a Subsequent Inhibitory Task

Despite the growing emphasis on embedding interactive social paradigms in the field of cognitive and affective neuroscience, the impact of socially induced emotions on cognition remains widely unknown. The aim of the present study was to fill this gap by testing whether facial stimuli whose emotional valence was acquired through social learning in an economic trust game may influence cognitive performance in a subsequent stop-signal task. The study was designed as a conceptual replication of previous event-related potential experiments, extending them to more naturalistic settings. We hypothesized that response inhibition to briefly presented faces of negative and positive game partners would be enhanced on the behavioral and neural levels as compared to trials with a neutral player. The results revealed that the trust game was an effective paradigm for the induction of differently valenced emotions towards players; however, behavioral inhibitory performance was comparable in all stop-signal conditions. On the neural level, we found decreased P3 amplitude in negative trials due to significantly stronger activation in the right frontoparietal control network, which is involved in theory-of-mind operations and underlies social abilities in humans, especially memory-guided inference of others' mental states. Our findings make an important contribution to the cognition-emotion literature by showing that social interactions that take place during an economic game may influence brain activity within the mentalizing network in a subsequent cognitive task.