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TL;DR: A 2026 study in Communications Psychology used functional MRI (fMRI) before and after a television drama and found that antagonistic relationships were represented most clearly in the left anterior supramarginal gyrus and right medial prefrontal cortex.…
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TL;DR: A 2026 study in PLOS Computational Biology found that people overestimated an opponent’s competitiveness after betrayal, especially when they chose to watch the opponent instead of controlling their own avatar. Key Findings 62-person social task: 62 adu…
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TL;DR: A 2026 Scientific Reports study found that a robot’s utterances shaped expected human-robot relationship structure far more than the robot’s physical appearance in Japanese online scenario experiments. Key Findings Nine pictograms: Researchers built a n…
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TL;DR: A 2026 electroencephalography (EEG) study in Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience found that observers’ empathy-for-pain ratings and physiological coupling stayed similar whether they watched another person receive painful stimulation through…
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TL;DR: A 2026 systematic review in Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience found that stroke and traumatic brain injury populations showed consistent social cognition alterations across domains, while insula, cingulate cortex, middle frontal gyrus, and…
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TL;DR: A 2026 medRxiv preprint found that nonverbal Theory of Mind (ToM), the ability to infer another person’s beliefs or perspective, varied in 44 adults with post-stroke aphasia and was more closely tied to vascular brain-health markers than to aphasia seve…
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TL;DR: A 2026 mouse study in Communications Biology found that activating parvalbumin (PV) interneurons, inhibitory nerve cells in the orbitofrontal cortex, reduced default mode network connectivity and decreased normal social approach and sniffing behavior. K…
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TL;DR: A 2026 study in The Journal of Neuroscience found that listening to consonant chord progressions while looking at a live partner increased functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), a scalp blood-flow measure, in social brain systems. Key Findings D…
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TL;DR: A 2026 Communications Biology fMRI study found that language and theory of mind, the ability to infer other people’s mental states, were already neurally distinct in children aged 3-9 rather than slowly separating during development. Key Findings Childr…
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Digital Faces Looked More Believable When Their Eyes Matched the Emotion TL;DR: A virtual smile or glare looked most believable with direct eye contact, while sadness became more believable when the digital face looked downward. Key Findings Direct gaze booste…
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