#dlpfc — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #dlpfc, aggregated by home.social.
-
DATE: August 21, 2026 at 06:00AM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: Brain scans reveal biological divides based on subtle political differences
URL: https://www.psypost.org/brain-activity-synchronizes-among-people-with-similar-political-views/
People with even slightly different political views process information using different patterns of brain activity. A recent brain imaging experiment reveals that listening to political statements about immigration prompts synchronized neural responses among individuals who share similar attitudes. These findings, published in iScience, suggest that the biological roots of political division extend to subtle ideological disagreements.
In recent years, researchers have documented a biological phenomenon called neural polarization. This occurs when the brain activity of individuals holding similar political beliefs synchronizes while they consume political content. At the same time, their brain activity diverges from people who hold opposing views. Past studies typically focused on stark divides in the United States or Israel, comparing staunch conservatives to strong liberals.
These previous experiments often found that political attitudes influence how the brain processes information. Some research pointed to polarization in higher-order brain regions responsible for complex thought. Other studies found that political leanings alter activity in lower-order areas responsible for basic sensory perception.
A team of researchers wanted to know if this biological divide happens even among people whose political views are only slightly different. The research was led by neuroscientists Niloufar Zebarjadi and Annika Kluge at Aalto University in Finland, along with Jonathan Levy at Bar-Ilan University in Israel. They designed an experiment focusing on attitudes toward immigration in Finland.
Finland has a multiparty political system with relatively low levels of societal polarization compared to other Western nations. Because the country is not strictly divided into a two-party system, it provides an ideal setting to study subtle ideological differences. The researchers wanted to see if identical information is interpreted differently depending on minor variations in a person’s worldview.
The researchers recorded fMRI data from 48 participants, of whom 40 remained after exclusions and were included in the final analysis. Functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, tracks blood flow in the brain to measure neural activity in real time. While inside the scanner, the participants listened to 44 audio statements about immigration to Finland.
Half of these statements supported immigration, and the other half opposed it. The audio clips were specifically balanced to ensure they were similar in length and grammatical structure. Some statements focused on immigration in general, while others specifically mentioned Muslim immigrants.
After hearing each statement, participants rated how much they agreed with the message on a five-point scale. The researchers used these ratings to calculate an overall immigration attitude score for each person. After the scanning session, participants also filled out several questionnaires measuring their political inclination, empathy, and attitudes toward multiculturalism.
The participants’ immigration attitude scores strongly correlated with their survey answers. Those who scored lower on immigration support also reported higher levels of perceived threat and discriminatory attitudes. The researchers divided the participants into two groups of 20 based on a median split of their immigration attitude scores. Both groups were generally supportive of immigration, but one group was highly supportive while the other was slightly less supportive.
To find evidence of neural polarization, the researchers used a technique called inter-subject correlation. This method looks at how the activity in tiny sections of the brain rises and falls over time. The researchers compared the brain activity time courses among people in the same group and compared them against people in the opposing group.
If the brain waves in a specific area synced up closely among people in the same group, but did not sync up with the other group, that area was marked as polarized. When analyzing all the audio statements together, the researchers found that brain activity was more similar among people in the same group than it was between the two groups. This divergence appeared in two specific brain areas: the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and the left premotor cortex.
The dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is a region associated with complex cognitive tasks like reasoning, memory, and decision making. The premotor cortex is traditionally involved in planning physical movements. Finding differences in both areas indicates that political attitudes filter information through high-level thinking centers as well as lower-level regions tied to physical action.
Next, the researchers analyzed the data to see if the type of political narrative changed the brain’s response. They separated the brain scans recorded during the pro-immigration audio from the scans recorded during the anti-immigration audio. They repeated their inter-subject correlation analysis for each set of data.
When participants listened to pro-immigration statements, the researchers observed a similar pattern of neural polarization. The brain activity diverged between the highly supportive and less supportive groups in the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and the right premotor cortex. The results closely mirrored the findings from the overall analysis.
When participants listened to anti-immigration statements, the brain mapping looked different. Neural polarization still appeared in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, though in the right hemisphere instead of the left. The researchers also found polarized activity in the primary somatosensory cortex, which processes physical sensations like touch.
Another area that showed polarization during anti-immigration audio was the superior temporal gyrus. This part of the brain is involved in processing sounds and understanding language. By comparing the overall level of synchronization, the researchers noticed another pattern during the anti-immigration narratives.
The group that was less supportive of immigration showed a stronger degree of neural polarization than the highly supportive group. The brain responses were distinctly sensitive to the political leaning of the audio content. The researchers noted that focusing on specific polarizing topics, such as immigration, can alter how different ideological groups biologically process political speech.
There are several limitations to consider when interpreting these results. The study group consisted mostly of individuals who favored immigration, and a majority identified as politically left-leaning. Because the participants were mostly uniform in their overall support for immigration, the findings might look different in a highly divided population with extreme opposing views.
The study relied on an observational design, meaning it cannot prove that a person’s political beliefs caused their brain activity to change. It is possible that underlying biological differences influence a person’s political attitudes. The self-reported nature of the surveys also means that some participants might not have revealed their true attitudes due to social pressures.
The participant pool was relatively small, heavily female, and drawn from a single industrialized, democratic country. The researchers also pointed out that the findings were not statistically significant when the groups were analyzed completely separately for some of the brain regions, likely due to reduced statistical power from dividing a small sample size. Expanding the research to include larger, more diverse groups of people would help determine how universal these patterns of neural polarization might be.
Scientists are continuing to investigate how biological mechanisms relate to political beliefs. The study, “Polarized neural responses to political narratives are sensitive to small variations in self-reported political perspectives,” was authored by Niloufar Zebarjadi, Annika Kluge, Enrico Glerean, Matilde Tassinari, Iiro P. Jääskeläinen, Inga Jasinskaja-Lahti, and Jonathan Levy.
URL: https://www.psypost.org/brain-activity-synchronizes-among-people-with-similar-political-views/
-------------------------------------------------
Private, vetted email list for mental health professionals: https://www.clinicians-exchange.org
Unofficial Psychology Today Xitter to toot feed at Psych Today Unofficial Bot @PTUnofficialBot
-------------------------------------------------
#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #NeuralPolarization #PoliticalBrains #ImmigrationDebate #fMRIResearch #NeuroscienceOfPolitics #BrainImaging #PoliticalNarratives #DLPFC #PremotorCortex #InterSubjectCorrelation
-
DATE: August 4, 2026 at 06:00AM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: People who feel lonely show altered brain activity when processing internal physical signals
A recent study published in Biological Psychology suggests that loneliness is linked to how people perceive and process their internal bodily sensations. The findings indicate that individuals who report higher levels of loneliness tend to have less trust in their bodily signals and show reduced brain activity related to monitoring their heartbeats. This research offers a physiological perspective on why loneliness is often accompanied by heightened emotional distress.
Loneliness is commonly understood as a lack of social contact, but psychologists describe it as a state of heightened sensitivity to negative emotions and social threats. This perspective is known as the hypervigilance model of loneliness. According to this framework, lonely individuals tend to be on high alert for social rejection, which can lead to increased stress and difficulty managing emotional reactions.
“Loneliness is a significant global issue linked to various mental and physical health problems,” said study author Kentaro Ono, an assistant professor at the Center for Brain, Mind, and KANSEI Sciences Research at Hiroshima University. “In Japan, it is taken so seriously that the government has even appointed a Minister of Loneliness.”
Ono noted that his laboratory has a background in psychiatry, which led to an interest in how loneliness acts as a trigger for psychiatric disorders. “While there is a great deal of research on who is prone to loneliness and how to cope with it, the underlying mechanisms of how loneliness actually arises remain largely unknown,” Ono said.
The research team noticed that emotional isolation is frequently described in physical terms. “We noticed that people often describe loneliness through physical sensations, such as a tightening in the chest or a sinking feeling,” Ono said. “Our lab was already investigating ‘interoception’, which is the perception of our internal bodily states. Therefore, we were motivated to bridge this gap by exploring the relationship between loneliness and interoception, hoping to better understand how these emotional struggles physically manifest in the body.”
Emotion regulation depends heavily on this process of interoception. Psychologists divide interoception into different categories to better understand how it works. Interoceptive accuracy refers to how well a person can physically detect internal signals, such as a racing heart. Interoceptive sensibility describes a person’s subjective beliefs about their bodily sensations, including whether they view these physical responses as trustworthy or distressing.
Previous research hints that interoceptive sensibility plays a role in how well people manage negative feelings. Brain regions involved in cognitive control, such as the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, are also known to help process bodily signals. This area of the brain helps integrate physical sensations with emotional meaning to regulate distress.
To measure this brain-body connection, scientists often look at the heartbeat-evoked potential. This is a specific pattern of electrical brain activity that occurs in response to each individual heartbeat. Researchers designed the current study to explore whether loneliness is associated with differences in interoceptive accuracy, interoceptive sensibility, and heartbeat-evoked brain activity.
The scientists recruited 45 healthy university students between the ages of 18 and 25. Six participants were later excluded due to issues with data quality, leaving a final sample of 39 participants. Participants first completed a series of questionnaires. These included the UCLA Loneliness Scale to measure subjective feelings of isolation, the Multidimensional Assessment of Interoceptive Awareness (MAIA) to gauge interoceptive sensibility, and a standard inventory to assess depressive symptoms.
Next, the participants completed two behavioral tasks to measure their interoceptive accuracy. In a heartbeat counting task, they were asked to silently count their heartbeats over various time intervals ranging from 25 to 50 seconds without checking their pulse. In a heartbeat discrimination task, they listened to a series of tones and had to judge whether the sounds were in sync with their own physical heartbeats or delayed.
Finally, the researchers recorded the participants’ brain and heart activity. Participants sat in a quiet, dimly lit room for three minutes while the researchers collected continuous electroencephalogram (EEG) and electrocardiogram (ECG) recordings. EEG uses sensors on the scalp to measure electrical brain waves, and ECG measures the electrical activity of the heart. The researchers used these concurrent recordings to extract the heartbeat-evoked potential, allowing them to see how the brain responded to cardiac events.
The average loneliness score in the sample was 40.5 out of a possible 80 points, indicating a moderate level of loneliness among the students. The survey findings indicated that higher loneliness scores correlated with specific aspects of interoceptive sensibility. People who felt more lonely tended to report more worry about their bodily sensations. They also reported lower emotional awareness, less ability to use bodily sensations to regulate distress, and less trust in their bodies as a safe resource.
“We were quite surprised, and ultimately reassured, by the specific patterns in our survey data,” Ono told PsyPost. He noted that the MAIA questionnaire measures interoceptive sensibility across several different categories. “We found a strong correlation between the UCLA Loneliness Scale and one specific category of MAIA: the one reflecting how people think about or appraise their bodily states. Seeing the correlation clearly localized to this specific category, rather than being broadly scattered across all categories, gave us a lot of confidence in the reliability of our data.”
Loneliness was not associated with interoceptive accuracy. Participants with higher loneliness scores were just as capable of accurately counting their heartbeats and distinguishing synchronized tones as those with lower scores. Heart rate variability, a physiological measure of the changes in time intervals between consecutive heartbeats, also showed no statistical relationship with loneliness.
When looking at the EEG recordings, the researchers found an association between loneliness and the brain’s processing of cardiac signals. Higher loneliness scores were associated with a reduced electrical brain response to heartbeats over the left frontal areas of the scalp. Using specialized source localization software, the scientists traced this reduced electrical activity to the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, which is a brain region typically involved in higher-order cognitive control and emotion regulation.
To ensure these brain activity patterns were linked to loneliness rather than other factors, the researchers ran additional statistical models. The association between loneliness and reduced brain responses to heartbeats remained present even after the researchers controlled for the participants’ age, sex, and severity of depressive symptoms. This provides evidence that the observed physiological differences relate specifically to the experience of loneliness rather than general depression.
“The most important takeaway is that the brain and the body are in constant communication, and changes in your bodily state impact your mental state,” Ono said. “Therefore, paying attention and taking care of your physical body is crucial for your emotional well-being.”
Ono added that these findings support the idea that social connection helps people regulate their physical responses. “In our study, we interpret that individuals with low levels of loneliness have brains that successfully detect bodily changes triggered by isolating situations, allowing them to effectively regulate and correct their bodily states,” Ono explained. “Conversely, individuals with high levels of loneliness tend to ignore or not worry about these altered physical states.”
“Because they fail to attend to and adjust their physical response to isolation, they may fall deeper into loneliness,” Ono noted. “Based on this, we suggest that practices which help you deliberately direct attention to your body, such as yoga or mindfulness meditation, could be effective methods for alleviating loneliness.”
The study relies on a cross-sectional design, meaning the researchers measured all variables at a single point in time. Because of this design, it is impossible to determine the direction of the relationship. Reduced brain processing of bodily signals might contribute to feelings of loneliness, or chronic social disconnection might lead to changes in how the brain handles internal sensations.
“One important caveat is that our current study had a relatively small sample size of about 40 participants,” Ono said. “Because of this, we must be careful not to overstate the strength of these effects just yet.”
This small sample of university students generally reported moderate loneliness, meaning the findings might not apply to older adults or individuals experiencing severe, chronic social isolation. The study also recorded brain activity during a resting state rather than during an active emotional task. This limits the ability to tie the brain activity patterns directly to active emotion regulation in real-time social situations.
The use of EEG to track the source of brain activity has spatial limitations compared to other imaging techniques. Although the data points to the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, EEG sensors on the scalp provide only an approximation of where electrical signals originate in the brain. “To draw firmer, more generalized conclusions, we are already planning a much larger-scale study to further investigate this relationship between loneliness and interoception,” Ono added.
“Moving forward, we are very interested in whether we can predict an individual’s future vulnerability to loneliness,” Ono said. “For example, entering university is a major environmental shift where many students face isolating situations.”
“If we can use these findings to screen for individuals who are highly susceptible to loneliness during such transitions, we might be able to design and implement much more effective, preventative interventions.”
The study, “Loneliness is associated with altered interoceptive appraisal and attenuated prefrontal heartbeat-evoked potentials,” was authored by Kentaro Ono, Takafumi Sasaoka, and Shigeto Yamawaki.
-------------------------------------------------
Private, vetted email list for mental health professionals: https://www.clinicians-exchange.org
Unofficial Psychology Today Xitter to toot feed at Psych Today Unofficial Bot @PTUnofficialBot
-------------------------------------------------
#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #Loneliness #Interoception #HeartbeatEvokedPotentials #BrainBodyConnection #DLPFC #EmotionalRegulation #SocialIsolation #Mindfulness #YogaForLoneliness #MentalHealthResearch
-
🧠 New preprint by Ruff, Markman, Kim & Cohen (2025): #NeuralPopulation formatting matters for function. In monkeys combining motion and reward, both middle temporal area (#MT) & dorsolateral prefrontal #cortex (#dlPFC) encode both signals. But MT formats them separately, dlPFC integrates them. A recurrent #RNN model predicted, and microstimulation confirmed, distinct #behavioral impacts.
🌍 https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.01.03.631242v1
-
#Ultradian rhythms and #schizophrenia: @MadelineRScott &co identify 12-hour rhythms in gene expression in the human #DLPFC, showing that the rhythms of some of these genes are lost/shifted in people with schizophrenia @McClungColleen @LabZhu #PLOSBiology https://plos.io/3DbLChq
-
#Ultradian rhythms and #schizophrenia: @MadelineRScott &co identify 12-hour rhythms in gene expression in the human #DLPFC, showing that the rhythms of some of these genes are lost/shifted in people with schizophrenia @McClungColleen @LabZhu #PLOSBiology https://plos.io/3DbLChq
-
#Ultradian rhythms and #schizophrenia: @MadelineRScott &co identify 12-hour rhythms in gene expression in the human #DLPFC, showing that the rhythms of some of these genes are lost/shifted in people with schizophrenia @McClungColleen @LabZhu #PLOSBiology https://plos.io/3DbLChq