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Talking about emotion and sharing emotional experiences is a key component of human interaction. Specifically, individuals often consider the reactions of other people when evaluating the meaning and impact of an emotional stimulus. It has not yet been investigated, however, how emotional arousal ratings and physiological responses elicited by affective stimuli are influenced by the rating of an interaction partner. In the present study, pairs of participants were asked to rate and communicate the degree of their emotional arousal while viewing affective pictures. Strikingly, participants adjusted their arousal ratings to match up with their interaction partner. In anticipation of the affective picture, the interaction partner’s arousal ratings correlated positively with activity in anterior insula and prefrontal cortex. During picture presentation, social influence was reflected in the ventral striatum, that is, activity in the ventral striatum correlated negatively with the interaction partner’s ratings. Results of the study show that emotional alignment through the influence of another person’s communicated experience has to be considered as a complex phenomenon integrating different components including emotion anticipation and conformity.
Memory enables us to use information from our past experiences to guide new behaviours, calling for the need to integrate or form inference across multiple distinct episodic experiences. Here, we compared children (aged 9–10 years), adolescents (aged 12–13 years), and young adults (aged 19–25 years) on their ability to form integration across overlapping associations in memory. Participants first encoded a set of overlapping, direct AB- and BC-associations (object-face and face-object pairs) as well as non-overlapping, unique DE-associations. They were then tested on these associations and inferential AC-associations. The experiment consisted of four such encoding/retrieval cycles, each consisting of different stimuli set. For accuracy on both unique and inferential associations, young adults were found to outperform teenagers, who in turn outperformed children. However, children were particularly slower than teenagers and young adults in making judgements during inferential than during unique associations. This suggests that children may rely more on making inferences during retrieval, by first retrieving the direct associations, followed by making the inferential judgement. Furthermore, young adults showed a higher correlation between accuracy in direct (AB, BC) and inferential AC-associations than children. This suggests that, young adults relied closely on AB- and BC-associations for making AC decisions, potentially by forming integrated ABC-triplets during encoding or retrieval. Taken together, our findings suggest that there may be an age-related shift in how information is integrated across experienced episodes, namely from relying on making inferences at retrieval during middle childhood to forming integrated representations at different memory processing stages in adulthood.
