Reconsidering longstanding assumptions about the role of medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) in social evaluation

Why don’t we know more about the minds of authentic people?

“…For the core self, the goal was to identify neural regions which show weaker responses when self-evaluations follow self-evaluations rather than following an evaluation of another person. Taken together, studies which compare self-evaluation to the evaluation of other social targets or test for repetition suppression in relation to self-evaluation tend to find increased activation in a relatively dorsal region of medial prefrontal cortex (e.g., BA 9/10/32: Delgado et al, 2016;Koski et al, 2020). Therefore, neural research is consistent with theories on authenticity because it finds that different neural operations are at work when people think about the traits and behaviors which define themselves versus when people are motivated to think about the traits and behaviors which cast themselves in a positive light.…”

“…Yet current research paints a very mixed picture. On the one hand, some research could be construed in support: authenticity has been associated with less self-serving distortion of one's behavior (e.g., Gino, Norton, & Ariely, 2010;Kuntz & Abbott, 2017) and the neural underpinnings of core self-representation (i.e., a presumed source of feelings of authenticity) are fairly distinct from the neural underpinnings of self-flattering evaluation (e.g., Delgado et al, 2016;Flagan, Mumford, & Beer, 2017;Koski, McHaney, Rigney, & Beer, 2020;Ochsner et al, 2005). On the other hand, studies have found that people tend to believe that their true selves are rooted in the positive aspects of their actions and personality (Christy, Seto, Schlegel, Vess, & Hicks, 2016;Jongman-Sereno & Leary, 2019) and authenticity has been associated with greater self-serving evaluation (Hart, Richardson, Breeden, & Kinrade, 2020) and only indirectly related to decreased defensiveness (e.g., Lakey, Kernis, Heppner, & Lance, 2008).…”

“…In addition to behavioral findings which could be construed as showing that authenticity does not arise from self-serving cognition, neural research suggests that the neural underpinnings of one's core self (the presumed foundation of the authentic self) are distinct from the neural underpinnings of self-serving cognition (Figure 1 and see Delgado et al, 2016;Flagan et al, 2017;Koski et al, 2020). An early debate in neuroscience research focused on whether neural operations reflected a core sense of self (that was distinct from representations of other people) or whether the self as a psychological construct was simply redundant with neural operations underlying reward processing (e.g., Delgado et al, 2016;Northoff & Hayes, 2011).…”

“…Numbers indicate Brodmann Areas self (see Delgado et al, 2016;Flagan & Beer, 2013). Research tends to identify neural activation associated with core self-representation in two ways (see Koski et al, 2020): observing differences in neural activation when people judge the descriptiveness of traits for themselves compared to others (see Ochsner et al, 2005) and examining repetition suppression of neural activation as a function of thinking about one's core self (e.g., Koski et al, 2020). More specifically, repetition suppression is observed when neural responses within a region begin to decline with repetitions of the same conceptual task (Grill-Spector, Henson, & Martin, 2006).…”

Self-Enhancement and the Medial Prefrontal Cortex: the Convergence of Clinical and Experimental Findings

“…Furthermore, the PFC has several areas that act as functionally specific processors that can operate and interact with one another 4,5 ; which in turn influences other cortical and non-cortical regions. Another prominent descriptor the PFC has acquired is "first person-evaluator" 6 , due to its ability to allow humans to develop a sense of self [7][8][9][10][11][12][13] . This function (i.e.…”