Background: Changes in cortical activation patterns after rupture of the anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) have been described. However, evidence of these consequences in the early stages following the incident and through longitudinal monitoring is scarce. Further insights could prove valuable in informing evidence-based rehabilitation practices.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFStudy Objectives: Mindfulness describes the ability to focus on the presence, including one's thoughts and feelings. Trait mindfulness-a person's inherent tendency to be mindful-has been connected to increased subjective sleep quality, but evidence from objective EEG-based sleep measures is lacking. Here, we investigate whether objective EEG-based sleep parameters explain interindividual differences in trait mindfulness.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFProsocial behavior is crucial for the smooth functioning of the society. Yet, individuals differ vastly in the propensity to behave prosocially. Here, we try to explain these individual differences under normal sleep conditions without any experimental modulation of sleep.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSocial interactions require both the rapid processing of multifaceted socio-affective signals (e.g., eye gaze, facial expressions, gestures) and their integration with evaluations, social knowledge, and expectations.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMuch research finds that lying takes longer than truth-telling. Yet, the source of this response time difference remains elusive. Here, we assessed the spatiotemporal evolution of electrical brain activity during honesty and dishonesty in 150 participants using a sophisticated electrical neuroimaging approach-the microstate approach.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn everyday life, we have to make decisions under varying degrees of risk. Even though previous research has shown that the manipulation of sleep affects risky decision-making, it remains unknown whether individual, temporally stable neural sleep characteristics relate to individual differences in risk preferences. Here, we collected sleep data under normal conditions in fifty-four healthy adults using a portable high-density EEG at participants' home.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThere are many situations where resources are distributed between two parties and where the deciding party has information about the initial distribution and can change its outcome, for example, the allocation of budget for funds or bonuses, where the deciding party might have self-interested motives. Although the neural underpinnings of distributional preferences of resources have been extensively studied, it remains unclear if there are different types of distributional preferences and if these types underlie different disposing neural signatures. We used source-localized resting EEG in combination with a data-driven clustering approach to participants' behavior in a distribution game in order to disentangle the neural sources of the different types of distributional preferences.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFContributing to and maintaining public goods are important for a functioning society. In reality, however, we see large variations in contribution behavior. While some individuals are not cooperative, others are highly so.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWhy are some people more biased than others in their implicit evaluations during social interaction? The dispositional determinants of individual differences in implicit intergroup bias are poorly understood. Here, we explored whether such variability might be explained by stable neural traits. For that purpose, we used the source-localized resting electroencephalograms of 83 members of naturalistic social groups to explain their bias in an in-/outgroup implicit association test.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFHumankind faces a plethora of environmental problems, many of which are directly influenced by individual human behaviour. To better understand pro-environmental behaviour, we here try to identify interindividual markers that explain variance in the frequency of every-day pro-environmental behaviour. So far, research on this topic has mainly relied on subjective self-report measures and has yielded mixed results.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCogn Affect Behav Neurosci
February 2019
Acts of helping friends and strangers are part of everyday life. However, people vary significantly with respect to how often they help others and with respect to whom they actually help on a day-to-day basis. Despite everyday helping being so pervasive, these individual differences are poorly understood.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFProsocial behavior is of vital importance for the smooth functioning of society. However, the propensity to behave in a prosocial manner is characterized by vast individual differences. In order to reveal the sources of these differences, some studies have used objective, task-independent neural traits, for instance resting electroencephalography (EEG).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFFairness norm compliance is critical in any society. However, norm compliant behavior is very heterogeneous. Some people are reliably fair (voluntary compliers).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDirect eye gaze is a powerful stimulus in social interactions, yet people vary considerably in the range of gaze lines that they accept as being direct (cone of direct gaze, CoDG). Here, we searched for a possible neural trait marker of these individual differences. We measured the width of the CoDG in 137 healthy participants and related their individual CoDG to their neural baseline activation as measured with resting electroencephalogram.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPeople seem to have difficulties when perceiving events whose outcome has no influence on the outcome of future events. This illusion that patterns exist where there are none may lead to adverse consequences, such as escalating losses in financial trading or gambling debt. Despite the enormous social consequences of these cognitive biases, however, their neural underpinnings are poorly understood.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWhy do people take longer to associate the word "love" with outgroup words (incongruent condition) than with ingroup words (congruent condition)? Despite the widespread use of the implicit association test (IAT), it has remained unclear whether this IAT effect is due to additional mental processes in the incongruent condition, or due to longer duration of the same processes. Here, we addressed this previously insoluble issue by assessing the spatiotemporal evolution of brain electrical activity in 83 participants. From stimulus presentation until response production, we identified seven processes.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjective: Intense alcohol consumption is a risk factor for a number of health problems. Dual-process models assume that self-regulatory behavior such as drinking alcohol is guided by both reflective and impulsive processes. Evidence suggests that (a) impulsive processes such as implicit attitudes are more strongly associated with behavior when executive functioning abilities are low, and (b) higher neural baseline activation in the lateral prefrontal cortex (PFC) is associated with better inhibitory control.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFFront Behav Neurosci
February 2015
Research demonstrates that social preferences are characterized by significant individual differences. An important question, often overlooked, is from where do these individual differences originate? And what are the processes that underlie such differences? In this paper, we outline the neural trait approach to uncovering sources of individual differences in social preferences, particularly as evidenced in economic games. We focus on two primary methods-resting-state electroencephalography and structural magnetic resonance imaging (MRI)-used by researchers to quantify task-independent, brain-based characteristics that are stable over time.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMeditation is a self-induced and willfully initiated practice that alters the state of consciousness. The meditation practice of Zazen, like many other meditation practices, aims at disregarding intrusive thoughts while controlling body posture. It is an open monitoring meditation characterized by detached moment-to-moment awareness and reduced conceptual thinking and self-reference.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFRecent research demonstrates that response inhibition-a core executive function-may subserve self-regulation and self-control. However, it is unclear whether response inhibition also predicts self-control in the multifaceted, high-level phenomena of social decision-making. Here we examined whether electrophysiological indices of response inhibition would predict self-control in a social context.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFHumans engage in deceptive behavior that negatively affects others. The propensity to deceive is, however, characterized by vast inter-individual heterogeneity that is poorly understood. Attempts to investigate the origins of this heterogeneity have so far mainly relied on subjective measures and have shown little predictive power.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe capacity to inhibit inappropriate responses is crucial for goal-directed behavior. Inhibiting such responses seems to come more easily to some of us than others, however. From where do these individual differences originate? Here, we measured 263 participants' neural baseline activation using resting electroencephalogram.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIndividuals react to violation of social norms by outgroup members differently than to transgressions of those same norms by ingroup members: namely outgroup perpetrators are punished much more harshly than ingroup perpetrators. This parochial punishment pattern has been observed and extensively studied in social psychology and behavioral economics. Despite progress in recent years, however, little is known about the neural underpinnings of this intergroup bias.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIndividuals differ widely in how steeply they discount future rewards. The sources of these stable individual differences in delay discounting (DD) are largely unknown. One candidate is the COMT Val158Met polymorphism, known to modulate prefrontal dopamine levels and affect DD.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe investigated the spontaneous brain electric activity of 13 skeptics and 16 believers in paranormal phenomena; they were university students assessed with a self-report scale about paranormal beliefs. 33-channel EEG recordings during no-task resting were processed as sequences of momentary potential distribution maps. Based on the maps at peak times of Global Field Power, the sequences were parsed into segments of quasi-stable potential distribution, the 'microstates'.
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