Neural correlates of integrated self and social processing

Abstract

Self-referential and social processing are often engaged concurrently in naturalistic judgements and elicit activity in overlapping brain regions. We have termed this integrated processing 'self-other referential processing' and developed a task to measure its neural correlates. Ninety-eight healthy young people aged 16-25 (M = 21.5 years old, 67% female) completed our novel functional magnetic resonance imaging task. The task had two conditions, an active self-other referential processing condition in which participants rated how much they related to emotional faces and a control condition. Rating relatedness required thinking about oneself (self-referential processing) and drawing a compar..