ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2020
Brain and behavioral alterations in subjects with social anxiety dominated by empathic embarrassment.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 20 papers.
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Who cites it
20 citing papers in PubMed, 42 citations in OpenAlex.
- Integrating EEG and fMRI in naturalistic paradigms: Advances in understanding mental disorders-a decade study in review (2014-2024).Dialogues in clinical neuroscience · 2026Review
- Altered Theory of Mind Engagement and Neural Alignment in Social Anxiety During Movie Viewing.Biological psychiatry global open science · 2026Article
- Harnessing the Neurobiology of Empathy and Compassion to Alleviate Burnout in Neurology.Annals of neurology · 2026Review
- The prelimbic prefrontal cortex mediates the development of lasting social avoidance as a consequence of social threat conditioning.Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology · 2025Article
- Digital health and Buddhist network philosophy.BJPsych bulletin · 2025Review
- Facial Emotional Expression in Reaction to Internet Gaming Videos Among Young Adults: A Preliminary and Exploratory Study.Neuropsychopharmacology reports · 2025Article
- Neural Patterns of Social Pain in the Brain-Wide Representations Across Social Contexts.Advanced science (Weinheim, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany) · 2025Article
- Brain network alterations in mobile phone use problem severity: A multimodal neuroimaging analysis.Journal of behavioral addictions · 2025Article
- Navigating the self online.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Article
- Roles of empathy in altruistic cooperation in adults with and without autism spectrum disorder.Heliyon · 2024Article
- Explicit and implicit effects of gaming content on social media on the behavior of young adults.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- Pre-COVID brain network topology prospectively predicts social anxiety alterations during the COVID-19 pandemic.Neurobiology of stress · 2023Article
- Adverse effects of empathy and cognitive inflexibility on social trauma.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Article
- Decision flexibilities in autism spectrum disorder: an fMRI study of moral dilemmas.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2022Article
- Structural brain correlates of burnout severity in medical professionals: A voxel-based morphometric study.Neuroscience letters · 2022Article
- Intergroup bias in punishing behaviors of adults with autism spectrum disorder.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2022Article
- The educational value of sense of coherence for grief care.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
- Self-Conscious Emotion Processing in Autistic Adolescents: Over-Reliance on Learned Social Rules During Tasks with Heightened Perspective-Taking Demands May Serve as Compensatory Strategy for Less Reflexive Mentalizing.Journal of autism and developmental disorders · 2021Article
- The right temporoparietal junction during a cooperation dilemma: An rTMS study.Neuroimage. Reports · 2021Article
- Historical reflection on Taijin-kyōfushō during COVID-19: a global phenomenon of social anxiety?History and philosophy of the life sciences · 2021Article
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Authors and funding
10 authors at 9 institutions in 4 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Social-anxiety disorder involves a fear of embarrassing oneself in the presence of others. Taijin-kyofusho (TKS), a subtype common in East Asia, additionally includes a fear of embarrassing others. TKS individuals are hypersensitive to others' feelings and worry that their physical or behavioral defects humiliate others. To explore the underlying neurocognitive mechanisms, we compared TKS ratings with questionnaire-based empathic disposition, cognitive flexibility (set-shifting), and empathy-associated brain activity in 23 Japanese adults. During 3-tesla functional MRI, subjects watched video clips of badly singing people who expressed either authentic embarrassment (EMBAR) or hubristic pride (PRIDE). We expected the EMBAR singers to embarrass the viewers via emotion-sharing involving affective empathy (affEMP), and the PRIDE singers to embarrass via perspective-taking involving cognitive empathy (cogEMP). During affEMP (EMBAR > PRIDE), TKS scores correlated positively with dispositional affEMP (personal-distress dimension) and with amygdala activity. During cogEMP (EMBAR < PRIDE), TKS scores correlated negatively with cognitive flexibility and with activity of the posterior superior temporal sulcus/temporoparietal junction (pSTS/TPJ). Intersubject correlation analysis implied stronger involvement of the anterior insula, inferior frontal gyrus, and premotor cortex during affEMP than cogEMP and stronger involvement of the medial prefrontal cortex, posterior cingulate cortex, and pSTS/TPJ during cogEMP than affEMP. During cogEMP, the whole-brain functional connectivity was weaker the higher the TKS scores. The observed imbalance between affEMP and cogEMP, and the disruption of functional brain connectivity, likely deteriorate cognitive processing during embarrassing situations in persons who suffer from other-oriented social anxiety dominated by empathic embarrassment.
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