Figure 1.

Location of peak MPFC activations associated with “social” phenomena. Each of the four images displays the midline of a canonical right hemisphere with the peak MPFC coordinates observed by studies of different classes of psychological phenonemon primarily studied by social psychologists. (a) The self-concept refers to a person’s introspective awareness of her own personality traits and idiosyncratic dispositions³–¹⁸. (b) Attitudes entail positive or negative evaluations of an object, idea, other person, or group, and may be reported explicitly through language or revealed through actual behavior⁶, ¹⁰, ²²–²⁸, ³⁰, ³¹ (for attitudes, only studies identifying MPFC, rather than OFC, were plotted). (c) The subjective experience of emotion refers to the subjective awareness of one’s affective states, such as the degree to which one is experiencing happiness, sadness, disgust, or fear³⁷–⁴⁸. (d) Theory-of-mind or mentalizing refers to the ability to infer the thoughts, feelings, and desires of other people⁵³–⁶⁸. Although each of these phenomena differs superficially from the others, all ultimately rely on the internal generation of probabilistic and malleable estimates – rather than exact representations that correspond veridically and stably to external reality – a set of functions previously linked to MPFC.