Journal article
Higher or lower? The functional anatomy of perceived allocentric social hierarchies
TFD Farrow, SC Jones, CJ Kaylor-Hughes, ID Wilkinson, PWR Woodruff, MD Hunter, SA Spence
Neuroimage | ACADEMIC PRESS INC ELSEVIER SCIENCE | Published : 2011
Abstract
The perception and judgement of social hierarchies forms an integral part of social cognition. Hierarchical judgements can be either self-referential or allocentric (pertaining to two or more external agents). In psychiatric conditions such as dissocial personality disorder and schizophrenia, the impact of hierarchies may be problematic. We sought to elucidate the brain regions involved in judging allocentric social hierarchies. Twenty-two healthy male subjects underwent three fMRI scans. During scanning, subjects answered questions concerning visually-presented target pairs of human individual's relative superiority within a specific social hierarchy or their perceived degree of social alli..
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Awarded by Medical Research Council
Funding Acknowledgements
We thank colleagues from the Academic Unit of Radiology, University of Sheffield, and the participants in this study. We would also like to thank Jean Woodhead and Martin Brook for administrative and technical support. TFDF is supported by a grant from the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC; RES-060-25-0044). SCJ was sponsored by The Health Foundation, London, UK (Registered charity #286967). SAS was supported by an MRC Career Establishment Grant. These sponsors had no role in data collection, analysis and interpretation, the writing of the report or the decision to submit the paper for publication. Finally, we thank two anonymous reviewers for their very helpful comments on an early version of the manuscript.