Are you an "i person" or an "e person"? Can "i person" become "e person"? “i人” and “e人” are both Internet buzzwords derived from the MBTI personality test. “i人” represents introverted personality traits and “e人” represents extroverted personality traits. "e people" are good at socializing and tend to gain energy from interacting with others. They are often called "social cows".
Groups such as "i people" are often characterized by "social phobia". They have social needs but are unable to break through themselves due to inner fear, which makes many "i people" very distressed. However, this problem may be solved in the near future.
Not long ago, the research team of the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China conducted a study on neural decoding based on functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). They tried to use machine learning technology to analyze how the brain encodes different types of social pain empathy and explore its association with physical pain empathy.
Zhao Weihua's research team is conducting experiments. Photo provided by interviewee
This research not only helps to understand the neural mechanisms of human emotional interaction, but may also provide new directions for the alleviation of social phobia and the treatment of mental illnesses such as autism, anxiety, and depression. The relevant results have been published in Advanced Science.
"'I people' and 'e people' will show different reactions during social interaction, which is due to the difference in social pain empathy ability, and this difference may be due to the different brain areas and activity intensity of different groups." Zhao Weihua, associate researcher at the School of Life Sciences and Technology, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, said that in order to study the connection between the brain and different types of social pain empathy, the research team spent three years completing the experimental design and writing the paper.
After evaluation and verification, the research team screened 120 videos for experimental stimulation from the Internet, covering four types of social exclusion, social separation, social companionship, and neutral control. They also recruited volunteers from schools to watch according to health standards.
When the participants watched the video, the research team used fMRI equipment to scan the participants' brains, capture the activity changes in different areas of the brain and record the data. They then processed and analyzed it through computer algorithms, established a "translation" model, and analyzed the neural activity patterns in different social situations. This way it can be determined which brain area is responsible for "empathy" processing.
"Through experiments, we found that social pain empathy involves the synergy of multiple brain areas. Different types of social pain empathy involve different brain areas and the intensity of brain area activity." Zhao Weihua said that previous studies have shown that the reason why patients with "social phobia" and autism have poor interpersonal communication is because their "empathy ability" is imbalanced. The research results will provide more precise assistance in solving emotional problems and treating such mental illnesses.
"For example, patients with 'social phobia' will over-interpret and care about other people's negative manifestations of 'ostracism'. This study found that when faced with social rejection, multiple brain areas involved in normal people's painful emotions and self-cognition processing will become active. This reminds us that in the process of alleviating 'social phobia' emotions "We should focus on whether patients have functional disorders in these brain areas. Depending on the specific situation, we can consider using techniques such as transcranial magnetic stimulation to activate or inhibit their activity and perform 'emotional massage' on the brain." Zhao Huawei also said that current research can accurately identify depression and anxiety. "Depression and anxiety are co-morbidities, with most of their symptoms overlapping, but there are significant differences in neural representations in the brain. Currently, the diagnosis and treatment of the two mostly rely on doctors' subjective evaluation, so misdiagnosis and misdiagnosis may occur. Our study just shows that it is feasible to accurately diagnose the disease through the performance of the patient's empathy ability in the brain area."
Zhao Weihua said that the current research is still in a relatively early stage, the experimental samples are not enough, and the social pain empathy type still has limitations. "We strive to launch clinical trials next year, and will combine multi-modal neuroimaging and a larger cohort to further reveal the dynamic development mechanism of social pain empathy and its interaction with genetic and environmental factors."