Fig. 11.

Brain activity during emotional communication. A) When an individual perceives another person’s emotional behavior, the feelings elicited in the observer can be characterized as “shared” or “accompanying.” Accompanying feelings include pleasant feelings of confidence if the communication was successful (i.e. the feeling that one person correctly understood the other person’s feelings), feelings elicited when one partner regards the other partners emotional behavior as appropriate or not, induction of one’s own emotions regarding the other’s response, and assessing confidence in if the person understands the other’s feelings. B) Use of pseudo-hyperscanning allows researchers to l examine brain activity of a “sender” and a “perceiver” of emotional signals that can be temporally aligned. When a person is asked to communicate emotions via facial expressions, their communication partner shows similar neural activation. This is more pronounced between romantic partners than between strangers. The more similar the activation, the more shared feelings are reported (Anders et al., 2020b). C) Strangers viewing facial expressions of a sender show an increase in ventral striatum and medial orbitofrontal cortex activity that is correlated with the perceiver’s confidence in having correctly understood the sender’s emotion and predicts changes in interpersonal attraction (Anders et al., 2016). D) When people were asked to look at images of another person exhibiting publicly inappropriate behavior (a situation associated with self-reported feelings of Fremdscham or vicarious embarrassment caused by another’s inappropriate behavior), greater activations in the left insula and anterior cingulate cortex occurred, and decreased activation in the ventral striatum was observed. In such emerging studies there is no overt communication of feelings or emotions (perceivers inferred the targets’ feeling and emotional states from their actions in context or not at all), and the degree to which perceivers shared the targets’ feelings are not specifically measured. Future studies, though, may develop more robust paradigms to address these issues.