In empathy toward emotional distress, the relationship between empathizer and empathy target may change dependent upon whether empathizers have personal experience with the emotionally distressing event, representing a shared experience between empathizer and empathy target. This research explored the neural and behavioral correlates of two key empathy-related processes, empathic concern and personal distress, as they pertain to shared experience. These processes were examined for empathy for an emotionally distressing event (e.g., the loss of a loved one) in empathizers who themselves had prior experience with losing a loved one compared to empathizers with no experience with loss. In addition to shared experience, Paper 1 examined neural correlates of empathic concern and personal distress using functional near-infrared imagery (fNIRS), and also explored how empathic concern, personal distress, and shared experience each relate to the likelihood of offering support as well as quality of any support offered. Paper 2 examined neural synchrony between empathizers and a storyteller empathy target as it pertained to shared vs. non-shared experience with losing a loved one. Paper 2 also tested the effects of a mindful attention intervention on empathic concern and personal distress, with the goal of reducing personal distress while maintaining empathic concern. Contributions to social neuroscience research and implications for support providers are discussed.

Dynamic, naturalistic study of social interactions in humans is a small but growing literature. Emerging from this work is the theory that social interaction creates a “merged mind” between interlocutors – they come into psychological, behavioral, and neural alignment in order to better predict each other and coordinate as one social unit. However social interaction is diverse, so more work is needed to understand the specific nature of alignment between people in a variety of interactive contexts. In particular, it’s unclear how heterogeneities among members of an interaction impact their ability to align. This work aims to help address this gap by first evaluating and improving ways to collect neuroimaging data in naturalistic, social settings (Chapter 2). Then, empirical research is presented that examines how personal similarity factors impact the extent of alignment during personal disclosure interactions, where one person speaks and the other listens (Chapter 3). Finally, further empirical research investigates different types of alignment that may be present in a dyadic back-and-forth discussion in a joint decision-making paradigm. How this work contributes to a broader understanding of the ways people communicate and work together, and how this research can continue with improved methods, is discussed.

When individuals see the world differently, the divide between their subjective construals manifests in differential neural responses. Research on neural polarization has found that individuals who share similar viewpoints tend to synchronize their brain responses and those with different viewpoints show distinguishable brain responses. In this dissertation, I attempt to build upon and extend this nascent literature on neural polarization by demonstrating two novel ways in which neural synchrony analyses can shed light on people’s viewpoints. This research utilizes a cost-effective and portable neuroimaging tool called functional near infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), which is optimized for measuring brain responses in the mentalizing network. In Chapter 2, I demonstrate that a classification technique called the ‘neural reference groups’ approach can be used to predict individuals' political viewpoints at an above-chance level from the prefrontal cortex. In Chapter 3, I explore how the neural reference groups approach can also be used to detect whether an open-mindedness intervention has impacted individuals’ subjective construal processes. In Chapter 4, I provide a comprehensive review of open-mindedness interventions that have been developed in order to provide a roadmap for researchers who may be interested in applying the neural reference groups approach to other interventions.

The act of putting feelings into words, or ‘affect labeling’, can attenuate our negative

experiences. Unlike explicit emotion regulation techniques, affect labeling may not even feel like a regulatory process as it occurs. Nevertheless, research investigating affect labeling has found it produces a pattern of effects similar to those seen during explicit emotion regulation, suggesting affect labeling is a form of implicit emotion regulation. However, the mechanisms driving the processes behind affect labeling remain poorly understood and, despite rising interest in converting affect labeling paradigms into clinical interventions, many questions remain about the best way to implement affect labeling in a laboratory setting. This dissertation is the culmination of research that addresses several open questions about affect labeling and suggests improvements for the paradigm moving forward.

Current classification systems of mental illness characterize bipolar disorder (BD) and schizophrenia (SCZ) as discrete diagnostic categories, presupposing distinct presentation, etiology, and treatment, despite mounting evidence of epidemiological and genetic overlap between the two and in a way that does not fully reflect increasing knowledge of underlying biological mechanisms or pathogenesis. To further elucidate the nature of phenotypic overlap versus differentiation between the two, emotion perception and regulation deficits were examined via a task of affect recognition during fMRI. Data were collected at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden; demographically matched participants were recruited based on national medical records data in line with study protocol approved by Karolinska and UCLA IRB. Behaviorally, patients with SCZ (n=41) and BD (n=38) demonstrated similar impairment in affect labeling relative to controls (n=64); however, SCZ patients showed greater deficits during affect matching and the two groups showed differences in corresponding patterns of neural activation. During affect matching, whole-brain voxel-wise BOLD signal analysis indicated both patient groups showed hypoactivation relative to controls in putative social cognitive network regions but the specific regions differed by group, such that BD patients showed hypoactivation of posterior cingulate/precuneus, whereas SCZ patients showed hypoactivity in right amygdala/hippocampus. In addition, the SCZ group demonstrated failure of fronto-limbic circuitry to modulate ventral face and emotion processing regions during affect labeling; they showed hyperactivation of fusiform gyrus, inferior occipital cortex, and posterior superior and middle temporal gyrus and did not show negative functional connectivity between these regions as shown in controls and BD patients through PPI analysis. SCZ patients also showed aberrant positive cortico-cortical connectivity in frontal regions versus BD patients, suggestive of compensatory recruitment of additional frontal regions. The current study thus adds new and novel evidence to the ongoing debate regarding the utility of categorical classification of disease, demonstrating underlying disparateness in neurophysiology related to specific aspects of the socio-emotional domain and lending at least partial validation to the current diagnostic distinction. Implications for treatment considerations are also discussed.