Social in, Social out: How the Brain Responds to Social Language with More Social Language

Abstract

Social connection is a fundamental human need. As such, people's brains are sensitized to social cues, such as those carried by language, and to promoting social communication. The neural mechanisms of certain key building blocks in this process, such as receptivity to and reproduction of social language, however, are not known. We combined quantitative linguistic analysis and neuroimaging to connect neural activity in brain regions used to simulate the mental states of others with exposure to, and retransmission of, social language. Our results link findings on successful idea transmission from communication science, sociolinguistics, and cognitive neuroscience to prospectively predict the degree of social language that participants utilize when retransmitting ideas as a function of (1) initial language inputs and (2) neural activity during idea exposure.

Keywords:

• Social Language
• Natural Language Processing
• Social Sharing
• fMRI
• Mentalizing

Acknowledgements

The authors gratefully acknowledge Karl Dambacher, Sylvia Morelli, Locke Welborn, Sarah Paje, Chu Kim, Amber Haney, Danielle Whalen, Aliss Markosian, Heather Mak, Tomoyo Kuriyama, and Julia Tian for assistance with data collection, and Kirsten DiGiacomi and Brandon Fix for assistance with data coding. We thank Josh Carp for expert assistance and discussions regarding data analysis and Joe Cappella, Jason Coronel, and Bob Hornik for helpful feedback on ideas contained in this manuscript. We are grateful to the editor of this special issue and the reviewer of this paper for their detailed feedback and suggestions for improvements. This work was generously supported by the UCLA Department of Psychology; analysis was partially supported by NIH-1 DP2 DA035156-01 (PI: Falk).

Notes

[1] The data reported in this study come from the Products Task and were collected from the same participants and during the same scanning sessions as the TV Shows Task described elsewhere (Falk et al., 2013, 2012).