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1、Cerebral Cortex, 2023, 111https:/doi.org/10.1093/cercor/bhad069Original ArticleThe impact of social distance on the processing of social evaluation: evidence from brain potentials and neural oscillationsXinmu Hu1, Yinling Zhang1, Xiaoqin Mai1,2,3,*1 Department of Psychology, Renmin University of Chi

2、na, Beijing 100872, China,2 Laboratory of Department of Psychology, Renmin University of China, Beijing 100872, China,3 Interdisciplinary Platform of Philosophy and Cognitive Science, Renmin University of China, Beijing 100872, China*Corresponding author: Department of Psychology, Renmin University

3、of China, Beijing 100872, China. Email: maixqPrevious research indicates that social distance can influence peoples social evaluations of others. Individuals tend to evaluate intimate others more positively than distant others. The present study investigates the modulating effect of social distance

4、on the time course underlying individuals evaluation processes of others using adequate electroencephalography methods. The results reveal that in the initial processing stage, the P2 component is larger when friends are negatively evaluated, whereas this pattern is the opposite for strangers. In th

5、e second stage, medial frontal negativity and early mid-frontal theta band activity is enhanced for negative evaluations of friends, whereas this effect is absent in social evaluations of strangers. At the late stage, the P3 is larger for positive evaluations of friends but insensitive to social eva

6、luations of strangers, and the late mid-frontal theta is also modulated by social distance. These findings provide direct and powerful evidence that social distance modulates individuals evaluations of others with different levels of intimacy throughout all processing stages.Key words: social evalua

7、tion; social distance; electroencephalography (EEG); medial frontal negativity (MFN); mid-frontal theta activity.IntroductionIn a social world, people interact with others at various levels of intimacy. Social distance can effectively ref lect psychological intimacy between oneself and others (Tesse

8、r 1988). Generally, as social distance gets closer, people become increasingly intimate (Liu et al. 2021). Construal level theory suggests that the perceived psychological intimacy between the self and others could affect subsequent motivations, judgments, and decisions (Trope et al. 2007). Social i

9、dentity theory indicates that people define and evaluate others in terms of social distance and tend to be moti- vated to judge those at a closer distance, such as friends, more positively compared with more distant others, such as strangers, and favor the former over the latter when distributing mo

10、ney or resources (Tajfel and Turner 1979; Crandall and Eshleman 2003; Durrheim et al. 2016). However, would evaluating intimate others, as opposed to strangers, involve overlapping or distinct neural correlates? The present study aimed to explore this question from a neuroscientific perspective.Seve

11、ral studies have focused on downstream processes influenced by social distance. Those results found that people express greater empathy for, behave more cooperatively toward, and more positively evaluate close others than distant ones (Ratner and Amodio 2013; Balliet et al. 2014; Ofan et al. 2014; S

12、cheepers and Derks 2016). Furthermore, behavioral evidence has shown that individuals exhibit more prosocial behavior toward intimate rather than distant others (Levine et al. 2005). Recent neuroscience research has examined the neural mechanismsunderlying social distance processes and searched for

13、links between these processes and human behaviors.Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies have revealed that affect-driven evaluations of intimate persons appear to be characterized by increased activity in the ventral medial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) and anterior cingulate cortex (ACC)

14、, which reflects strong empathy, mentalizing, and human- ization of close others (Beer et al. 2003; Xu et al. 2009; Cikara and Van Bavel 2014; Molenberghs and Morrison 2014). For example, participants in one fMRI study were exposed to animated stimuli in painful and non-painful situations. They were

15、 instructed to imagine these scenarios from three different perspectives after being primed with their respective photographs: self, loved one, and stranger. The results showed that adopting the perspective of a loved one increased activity in the ACC and insula, whereas imagining a stranger induced

16、 a signal increase in the right temporoparietal junction (TPJ) and superior frontal gyrus. The closer the relationship participants had with their partners, the greater the deactivation in the right TPJ. These results demonstrate that social distance affects the bottom-up information processing invo

17、lved in empathy, as indicated by the greater overlap between neural representations of the self and others (Cheng et al. 2010).Humans live in complex social environments, and motiva-tions and behaviors induced by social distance have been iden- tified as rapid processes (Ashburn-Nardo et al. 2001; M

18、olenberghs et al. 2013). Therefore, exploring the time course of the neuralDownloaded from by Stanford University Libraries user on 18 May 2023Received: December 22, 2022. Revised: February 14, 2023. Accepted: February 15, 2023 The Author(s) 2023. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights res

19、erved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permission.|11Xinmu Hu et al.Downloaded from by Stanford University Libraries user on 18 May 2023processes involved in bottom-up information processing affected by social distance is of great importance. Compared with the fMRI approach, the high tempor

20、al resolution of event-related potentials (ERPs) offers an appropriate method for examining the time course of social evaluation induced by social distance. In the present study, we examined the effects of social distance on various processing stages of social evaluation of others with different lev

21、els of intimacy.Three ERP components, the P2, medial frontal negativity (MFN), and P3, have been found to be particularly sensitive to evalua- tive processing. The P2 is a positive frontal component peaking within 150 and 250 ms following stimulus onset, and plays an important role in the early proc

22、essing of attention capture, vig- ilance to threatening and novel cues, and stimulus evaluation (Nieuwenhuis et al. 2004; Bar-Haim et al. 2005; Correll et al. 2006; Dickter and Bartholow 2007), reflecting automatic, rapid, and low- level processing of stimuli (Jernimo et al. 2017). Generally, stim-

23、uli conferred higher motivational relevance elicited a larger P2 (Schindler and Kissler 2016). Given that social perception tends to be automatically affected by social distance, the P2 is considered a good indicator of the automatic processing of social distance information.The MFN is a negative de

24、f lection at frontocentral scalp sites that peaks approximately 200350 ms after outcome onset, pre- sumably generated in the ACC, a brain area reflecting social pain elicited when a person is negatively evaluated or socially rejected (Somerville et al. 2006; Kross et al. 2011; Rotge et al. 2015; Ded

25、ovic et al. 2016). The MFN also depicts rapid processing of the current outcome on a “goodbad” dimension (Miltner et al. 1997; Gehring and Willoughby 2002). Several studies have indicated that the MFN is more pronounced for negative stimuli than for positive stimuli (Gehring and Willoughby 2002; Sid

26、arus et al. 2017) and is highly sensitive to expectancy violations (Hajcak et al. 2007; Marciano et al. 2018). In addition, the MFN has been demonstrated to be affected by some social factors such as social distance, social rejection, and empathy (Fukushima and Hiraki 2006; Kujawa et al. 2014; Liu e

27、t al. 2021).Following the MFN, the P3 is a centroparietal positive compo- nent that peaks within 300600 ms following stimulus onset and plays a vital role in evaluative processing (Holroyd and Coles 2002; Yeung and Sanfey 2004; Nieuwenhuis et al. 2005). The P3 is larger for positive stimuli than for

28、 negative stimuli, and for large rewards than for small rewards (Holroyd et al. 2006; Gu et al. 2010; Hewig et al. 2011), and is sensitive to social factors such as interpersonal relationships (Ma et al. 2011; Leng and Zhou 2014; Zhang et al. 2021) and empathy (Ikezawa et al. 2014). Researchers beli

29、eve that P3 is related to the allocation of attentional resources and high-level affective evaluations of outcomes (Nieuwenhuis et al. 2005; Polich 2007; Hu and Mai 2021; Liu et al. 2021). Evaluative processing studies have shown that the P3 is larger for words related to emotional social evaluation

30、 than for neutral words (Schindler and Kissler 2016).In addition to ERP analysis, time-frequency analysis has recently been used to examine the neural basis of evaluative processing. Theta oscillations spatially and temporally organize neural processing throughout the human cortex (Zhang et al. 2018

31、). The mid-frontal theta, which is typically captured using frontocentral electrodes, is involved in salience detection and cog- nitive control, such as performance monitoring and information integration (Cavanagh and Frank 2014; Darriba and Waszak 2018). Recent studies found that, during the percep

32、tion of evaluative feedback, early oscillation of the frontal theta with power peaks of 50250 ms was sensitive to the feedback source and valence, andwas especially greater for negative social feedback (Pfabigan and Han 2019; Zhang et al. 2022). Furthermore, Van der Molen et al. (2016) found that la

33、te theta activity increased for unexpected negative feedback compared to unexpected positive feedback.Although extensive research has investigated the relationship between social distance and social evaluation in an explicit way, little is known about how we evaluate others in an implicit way. Elect

34、roencephalography (EEG) is an excellent technique for assessing spontaneous social evaluation of others due to its high temporal resolution. Furthermore, it allows for measurement of the variations in the extent to which peoples brains process evaluative information implicitly and rapidly. With this

35、 approach, we sought to explore how the time course of the brain activity underlying social evaluation processes of social agents varies with different levels of intimacy. We expect that our findings could extend the knowledge of the neural underpinning of social distance modulating social evaluatio

36、n processing by providing a temporal description of the modulation. Moreover, the present study can also provide more direct evidence for a link between social evaluation and neural markers of the self. Electrophysio- logical results could further provide new evidences supporting the social identity

37、 theory, which suggests that people tend to show favoritism toward their close ones and evaluate them more positively relative to strangers (Brewer 2007; Scheepers and Derks 2016). Therefore, we employed an implicit social evaluation task modified from the social evaluation paradigm used by Somervil

38、le et al. (2006) and Yang et al. (2016) to investigate the temporal pro- cessing of the effect of social distance on individuals social eval- uations from two perspectives: intimate friends and strangers. We hypothesized that social distance could modulate individuals evaluative processing from the

39、automatic to conscious processing stage. Considering previous research on peoples preference for loved ones, we further predicted that negative evaluations of friends and positive evaluations of strangers would induce a larger P2 because such associations may be novel cues to par- ticipants. Further

40、more, the MFN and mid-frontal theta activity following negative evaluation were expected to be more nega- tive going than for positive evaluations in the friend condition, because individuals would have a strong motivation and tendency to positively evaluate their friends. In the stranger condition,

41、 we expected the MFN and theta response much weaker (or even nonexistent) because people often care less about distant others compared with friends. Similarly, the P3 should be larger for positive than negative evaluations of friends and insensitive to strangers because people generally prefer their

42、 own loved ones.MethodsParticipantsTwenty-nine healthy college students participated in this study as paid volunteers. All participants were right-handed, had normal or corrected-to-normal vision, and reported no history of neuro- logical or psychiatric disorders, head injury, significant physical i

43、llness, or alcohol or drug use. All participants provided written informed consent. The study was approved by the Institutional Review Board of the Department of Psychology at Renmin Univer- sity of China. Two participants were removed from data analysis because of uncorrectable artifacts during ele

44、ctroencephalography (EEG) recording, resulting in a final sample of 27 participants (14 women, mean age SD = 20.8 1.7 years). An a priori sample size estimation was conducted using GPower v.3.1 (Faul et al. 2009). According to the analysis d = 0.3, = 0.05, = 0.8, analysis of variance (ANOVA): repeat

45、ed measures, within interaction, a totalDownloaded from by Stanford University Libraries user on 18 May 2023sample size of 24 participants was required to detect a reliable effect.StimuliThe implicit social evaluation task in this study was a modified version of the social evaluation paradigm previo

46、usly used by Somerville et al. (2006) and Yang et al. (2016). During the ERP experiment, each participant was presented with two photos of faces, one of a personal friend and one of a stranger, along with words associated with personality traits and specific objects.Facial photosOne week prior to th

47、e experiment, each participant was asked to send the researchers a portrait photograph of a close same- gender friend with a neutral expression. We additionally collected16 photos from students in the Department of Psychology at Renmin University of China. Twenty students (10 females, mean age SD =

48、22.54 2.17 years) from Renmin University of China rated all photos on a 5-point scale for emotion valence and facial attractiveness. The emotion valence score (M = 3.08,SD = 0.29) was not significantly different from the neutral score(3) for all photos, t(41) = 1.66, P = 0.105. We then divided the photos into four groups based on facial attractiveness scores: female-high (M = 4.47, n = 11), female-low (M