Mortality threat mitigates interpersonal competition: an EEG-based hyperscanning study

Abstract

Awareness of death has been shown to influence human cognition and behavior. Yet, how mortality threat impacts our daily social behavior remains elusive. To address this issue, we developed a dyadic experimental model and recruited 86 adults (43 dyads) to complete two computer-based tasks (i.e., competitive and cooperative button-pressing). We manipulated dyads’ awareness of death (mortality threat vs. neutral control, MT vs. NC) and simultaneously measured their neurophysiological activity using electroencephalography (EEG) during the task. Several fundamental observations were made. First, the MT group showed significantly attenuated competition and slightly promoted cooperation. Second, compared to NC, MT significantly decreased gamma-band inter-brain synchronization (IBS) in the competitive context, which was associated with increased subjective fear of death within dyads. Notably, those effects were context-specific: we did not observe comparable results in the cooperative context. Finally, a machine-learning approach was successfully used to discriminate between the MT and NC groups based on accumulated IBS. Together, these findings indicate that mortality threat to some extent mitigates interpersonal competition, and such mitigation might be associated with changes of gamma-band IBS.

The presence of adjacent others facilitates interpersonal neural synchronization in the left prefrontal cortex during a simple addition task

“…Thus, we can interpret that awareness of adjacent individuals, even in the absence of explicit communication, triggers the interpersonal neural synchronization. These findings extend previously reported findings of interpersonal neural synchronization induced by explicit communicative interactions 7 – 16 and external interactive triggers, such as rhythmic sounds 17 .…”

“…Recently, hyperscanning techniques using near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) or electroencephalography have been widely used for examining the interpersonal synchronization of neural activity 4 – 6 . Previous studies have focused on explicit communicative group interaction such as cooperation 7 – 13 and competition 14 – 16 as the target of hyperscanning. In these studies, fluctuations in interpersonal neural synchronization are observed in a periodic band matching the task interval of repeated trials 8 , 11 , 12 .…”

Cerebral coherence in task-based fMRI hyperscanning: A new trick to an old dog

“…The common mechanism of interpersonal rapport triggering similar brain activities should be a common theme [27][28][29]. All in all, with the recent literature that suggests the importance of neuron oscillations at specific frequencies [30,31] or decreased gamma-band in the competitive pairs [32], all lend support to the 'communication-through-coherence' hypothesis [33]. Therefore, coherence between two neuronal groups, brain areas, pairs, organizations, societies, or even countries or cultures could be exploited to reach effective communication, benefiting the future of human societies.…”

The Temporal Dynamics of Brain-to-Brain Synchrony Between Students and Teachers Predict Learning Outcomes

“…A within-dyad bootstrapping analysis was used to control for spurious (i.e., coincidental) BBS (Pérez et al, 2019; Zhou et al, 2021). For each student–student and student–teacher dyad, BBS was computed between all combinations of lectures given at different time points (e.g., Lecture 1–Lecture 2, Lecture 1–Lecture 3).…”