Inter-brain plasticity as a mechanism of change in psychotherapy: A proof of concept focusing on test anxiety.

Objective.: There is a growing consensus that interpersonal processes are key to understanding psychotherapy. How might that be reflected in the brain? Recent research proposes that inter-brain synchrony is a crucial neural component of interpersonal interaction.

Different ways to reach the same goal: Are the analgesic effects of different types of tactile stimuli similar?

Background: Tactile-induced analgesia (TIA) is a phenomenon in which different types of tactile stimulation alleviate pain via different mechanisms including empathy. As TIA plays an essential role in therapeutic situations and clinical conditions, it is crucial to determine whether specific tactile stimulations confer distinct benefits.

Methods: Fifty-two subjects (31 females; 21-47 years) were exposed to four distinct experimental conditions involving three types of touch provided within a simulated supportive therapeutic setting.

Creating together: An interbrain model of group creativity.

Despite the growing interest in understanding creativity-the ability to produce novel and useful ideas-most research in the field focuses on examining the neural networks underlying creativity in isolated individuals. However, numerous creative breakthroughs in arts, sciences, and industries occur through social interactions, where ideas are generated collaboratively by dyads and groups. The accumulating evidence indicates that cooperative settings foster higher levels of creativity compared to individual settings, suggesting that social factors play a role in creativity.

Empathic disequilibrium in schizophrenia: An individual participant data meta-analysis.

Schizophrenia involves substantial social difficulties, yet their nature remains unclear. Although empathy has been considered a promising social cognition construct, inconsistent findings have undermined its usefulness as a stable index for schizophrenia. This may be because previous studies overlooked the interdependency between the emotional and cognitive components of empathy.

Hyperscanning: from inter-brain coupling to causality.

In hyperscanning studies, participants perform a joint task while their brain activation is simultaneously recorded. Evidence of inter-brain coupling is examined, in these studies, as a predictor of behavioral change. While the field of hyperscanning has made significant strides in unraveling the associations between inter-brain coupling and changes in social interactions, drawing causal conclusions between brain and behavior remains challenging.