ArticleHuman brain mapping2019
Close yet independent: Dissociation of social from valence and abstract semantic dimensions in the left anterior temporal lobe.
Article in Human brain mapping, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 30 papers, 3 of them syntheses that pooled it.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
30 citing papers in PubMed, 3 syntheses or guidelines pooled it, 78 citations in OpenAlex.
- An ALE meta-analytical review of the neural correlates of abstract and concrete words.Scientific reports · 2021Pooled it
- Neural representation of social concepts: a coordinate-based meta-analysis of fMRI studies.Brain imaging and behavior · 2021Pooled it
- The brain network in support of social semantic accumulation.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2021Pooled it
- Object knowledge representation in the human visual cortex requires a connection with the language system.PLoS biology · 2025Article
- Mapping Contributions of the Anterior Temporal Semantic Hub to the Processing of Abstract and Concrete Verbs.Human brain mapping · 2025Article
- Quantifying the Multidimensionality of Abstract Concepts: An Italian Database.Brain sciences · 2025Article
- The Flexible Role of Social Experience in the Processing of Abstract Concepts.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Default mode network shows distinct emotional and contextual responses yet common effects of retrieval demands across tasks.Human brain mapping · 2024Article
- Brain decoding of spontaneous thought: Predictive modeling of self-relevance and valence using personal narratives.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Representation of event and object concepts in ventral anterior temporal lobe and angular gyrus.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2024Article
- The Italian Sensorimotor Norms: Perception and action strength measures for 959 words.Behavior research methods · 2023Article
- A social-semantic working-memory account for two canonical language areas.Nature human behaviour · 2023Article
- The early negative bias of social semantics: evidence from behavioral and ERP studies.BMC psychology · 2023Article
- Semantic Bimodal Presentation Differentially Slows Working Memory Retrieval.Brain sciences · 2023Article
- Article
- Semantic knowledge of social interactions is mediated by the hedonic evaluation system in the brain.Cortex; a journal devoted to the study of the nervous system and behavior · 2023Article
- A Semantic Cognition Contribution to Mood and Anxiety Disorder Pathophysiology.Healthcare (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Review
- A large dataset of semantic ratings and its computational extension.Scientific data · 2023Article
- Social semantics: the organization and grounding of abstract concepts.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Review
- Quantifying social semantics: An inclusive definition of socialness and ratings for 8388 English words.Behavior research methods · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
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Abstract
The anterior temporal lobe (ATL) is engaged in various types of semantic dimensions. One consistently reported dimension is social information, with abstract words describing social behaviors inducing stronger activations in the ATL than nonsocial words. One potential factor that has been systematically confounded in this finding is emotional valence, given that abstract social words tend to be associated with emotional feelings. We investigated which factors drove the ATL sensitivity using a 2 (social/nonsocial) × 2 (valenced/neutral) factorial design in an fMRI study with relatively high spatial resolutions. We found that sociality and valence were processed in different ATL regions without significant interactions: The social effect was found in the left anterior superior temporal sulcus (aSTS), whereas the valence effect activated small clusters in the bilateral temporal poles (TP). In the left ATL, the social- and valence-related clusters were distinct from another superior ATL area that exhibited a general "abstractness" effect with little modulation of sociality or valence. These subregions exhibited distinct whole-brain functional connectivity patterns during the resting state, with the social cluster functionally connected to the default mode network, the valence cluster connected to the adjacent temporal regions and amygdala, and the abstractness cluster connected to a distributed network including a set of language-related regions. These results of activation profiles and connectivity patterns together indicate that the way in which the left ATL supports semantic processing is highly fine-grained, with the neural substrate for social semantic effects dissociated from those for emotional valence and abstractness.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.