Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience

Financial exploitation often arises in social contexts in which individuals must evaluate fairness, trust, and interpersonal information during financial decisions. We examined whether neural responses to fairness in social versus nonsocial contexts relate to financial exploitation vulnerability and whether these relationships vary with age, emotional intelligence, and affect. A total of 310 adults spanning ages 21-89 completed an fMRI Ultimatum Game in which they accepted or rejected offers from human and computer partners, along with measures of financial exploitation vulnerability, emotional intelligence, and affect. Participants were strongly sensitive to offer fairness, and individual differences in behavioral sensitivity to partner type were associated with social-relative anterior insula responses to unfairness. Greater baseline negative affect was associated with stronger anterior insula differentiation between social and nonsocial fairness. Financial exploitation vulnerability was associated with prefrontal responses to social-relative fairness in ways that depended on individual characteristics: age moderated its association with dorsomedial prefrontal cortex activation, whereas emotional intelligence moderated its association with dorsolateral prefrontal cortex activation. Whole-brain connectivity analyses further showed that age moderated associations between emotional intelligence and executive control network connectivity with posterior cingulate and right temporoparietal regions. These findings suggest that vulnerability to financial exploitation is reflected in how social context is integrated with affective and individual characteristics across adulthood.

Shared understanding of common experiences can foster feelings of social closeness and friendship, and help us understand those experiences. Recent work has suggested that patterns of neural activity shared across individuals, especially throughout the default mode network, may underlie shared representations. Here we used repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) and functional magnetic resonance imaging during movie watching to show that shared neural patterns to common experiences rely on the encoding of social information from the environment by the right posterior superior temporal sulcus (rpSTS). An encoding model of movie features showed that rTMS selectively degraded social feature encoding in rpSTS, leaving low-level visual encoding in early visual cortex intact. Using natural language processing (NLP)-based analysis, we found that rpSTS stimulation was associated with reduced memory and intersubject pattern similarity across DMN and limbic networks during scenes central to the movie narrative. Projecting scene embeddings onto NLP-based concept axes revealed reductions in memory and neural pattern similarity for scenes conveying helplessness and empathy following rTMS. These findings provide causal evidence that the rpSTS is a key region that encodes shared social information into common neural representations, and suggest that disrupting its input leads DMN representations to become idiosyncratic.

Neuroimaging studies have identified a specialised social brain network that supports emotion recognition and social cognition. This network performs a range of functions that include facial expression recognition and inferring the mental states of others. Studies of neuropsychological patients report that damage to the right inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), the top-down control area in this network, impairs facial expression recognition. To investigate how transient disruption of the right IFG affects the wider social brain we combined transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Participants (n=20) were scanned across two sessions while performing a delayed match-to-sample emotion recognition task in which happy or fearful expressions were preceded by a congruent or incongruent word cue. Prior to each scan, thetaburst TMS was delivered over the right IFG or over the vertex control site (session order was balanced across participants). A group whole-brain analysis revealed that TMS to the IFG increased neural activity in multiple regions of the social brain network. These included the bilateral temporal pole, precuneus and medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC). This pattern of results shows that the disruption of top-down control mechanisms localised in the IFG alters the neural processing in remote nodes of the social brain network. Our findings are discussed within the wider context of how we recognise and understand the emotions of other people.

Increasing evidence implicates late chronotype and higher distinctness as two diurnal dimensions associated with a risk for affective dysregulation. Nonetheless, the underlying behavioural and neural mechanisms remain poorly understood. Previous works in depressive and anxious populations have demonstrated an important role of maladaptive self-blaming processes, with pivotal contributions from superior anterior temporal lobes (sATL), involved in social conceptual knowledge, and subgenual anterior cingulate cortex (sgACC), related to self-worth and social affiliative processing. In the current study, we first tested how diurnal rhythm characteristics were associated with self-blaming emotions and related coping mechanisms through hypothetical social scenarios where participants or their close friends acted towards one another against social norms. Secondly, to probe alterations in the neural correlates of self-blaming, the participants underwent functional neuroimaging during reliving of autobiographical guilt memories. On the behavioural level, late chronotypes demonstrated decreased self-distancing and contextually-maladaptive blaming patterns, i.e. increased blaming of the action recipients rather than the agents. This was paralleled by decreased self-blame-related activity in the sATL and sgACC. Distinctness was associated with altered task-dependent sATL connectivity with hippocampus, brainstem and cerebellum. Importantly, some of the neuroimaging findings reflected interactions between the diurnal rhythm characteristics and time-of-day. As such, the current work provides plausible correlates of adverse emotional outcomes in late chronotypes. Furthermore, it suggests that affective processing reflects an interplay between stable trait-like characteristics and dynamic state-like processes varying across the day, contributing to fine-grained understanding of how emotional cognition is embedded in the brain.

How do we come to "see" the same thing differently after hearing someone else's perspective? Revising an interpretation could reflect changes in how the brain represents the meaning of what we see, changes in how we visually sample the input, or both. To disentangle these mechanisms, we developed MindLibs, an adaptive fMRI and eye-tracking paradigm in which participants generate interpretations of ambiguous photographs and then view alternative interpretations chosen in real time to vary in semantic content from their own. Exposure to semantically distant alternatives revealed a strong link between reinterpretation as reported behaviorally and representational shifts in association cortex, but no systematic relationship between reinterpretation and changes in gaze. In particular, representational shifts in lateral default-mode network regions (DMN-B) predicted reinterpretation independently of shifts in frontoparietal, attention, and visual networks, and independently of whether gaze changed. In contrast, shifts in visual cortex tracked reinterpretation only when gaze also shifted, and contributed no unique variance beyond DMN-B. These findings identify higher-order conceptual reconfiguration, rather than perceptual resampling, as the primary account of how people revise the meaning of an ambiguous scene.

Dance is increasingly delivered as an intervention for social and affective functioning, but a live dyadic encounter confounds several distinct ingredients - social attention, verbal engagement, coordinated movement, and in-the-moment generation - so its neural effects cannot be assigned to any one of them. We recorded dual-brain mobile EEG from adult human participants of both sexes (16 female, 2 male) and a dance instructor across six five-minute conditions that vary these ingredients independently: solitary rest, direct eye gaze, conversation, teacher-led and participant-led mirroring, and free improvisation, with concurrent head-mounted accelerometry. Referencing each condition to eye gaze - socially engaging but nearly motionless - rather than to solitary rest partitioned the response. The components proved dissociable. Nonverbal social attention alone reorganized the power spectrum, flattening the aperiodic exponent (g = -0.97) and desynchronizing alpha-band oscillations (g = -0.90), while leaving inter-regional connectivity unchanged (amplitude g = +0.15; phase g = +0.11). Verbal engagement added high-frequency amplitude coupling (g = +2.61) without further spectral change. Coordinated movement added a decrease in theta/alpha coupling involving the frontoparietal-control network (g = -0.59), the signature of an externally directed state, alongside a further spectral shift (g = -0.61). Movement-vigor covariates, corticokinematic coherence, and aperiodic-adjusted power indicated that the spectral effects were cortical rather than myogenic. Four weeks of improvisational dance training increased empathic responsiveness to others' distress relative to a movie control (g = 0.82). Coordinated social movement thus acts on the brain componentially, with mutual attention rather than motor load establishing the engaged state.

Emotions are thought to emerge from co-activation among distributed brain systems, yet traditional fMRI analyses typically examine localized responses and pairwise connections, potentially overlooking interactions among groups of regions. Here, we use time-resolved higher-order topology to characterize these group interactions during naturalistic viewing of 14 films totaling over 2.5 h, continuously annotated across 50 affective features. The homological scaffold, representing evolving group-level topology, most closely tracks recurrent emotional states and best predicts fine-grained affective profiles. This sensitivity diminishes when emotion is compressed into dimensions of valence, arousal, and power, where pairwise connectivity captures the dominant arousal signal. Across three independent datasets, arousal predictions transfer most robustly through pairwise connectivity, while the relative geometry of broad affective states remains conserved across film narratives despite poor valence generalization. These findings reveal complementary neural representations of emotion: higher-order topology captures fine-grained affective structure, whereas pairwise connectivity provides a portable readout of broad arousal.

The adolescent social environment and dynamics therein have been linked to divergent brain organization and greater risk of psychopathology later in life, suggesting the neural underpinnings of mental health may depend on social context. To examine this, we leveraged longitudinal ABCD Study data to identify dynamic social envirotypes, or distinct trajectories of social environment change over four years. Dynamic social envirotypes differed in mental health outcomes, changes in mental health, and whole-brain functional connectivity, with each dynamic social envirotype exhibiting a characteristic pattern of brain network organization. Crucially, functional connectivity associations with internalizing and externalizing problems diverged across dynamic social envirotypes, with the highest and lowest social resource envirotypes showing largely opposing associations between connectivity and symptom severity. These findings suggest that dysconnectivity is contextual: there is no single brain connectivity pattern that is universally associated with better mental health. Rather, adolescent brain connectivity relates to mental health in context-specific ways, challenging normative narratives of the neural underpinnings of psychopathology and centering the role of context for understanding and treating mental health.

Consensus is rarely a one-off achievement. In a changing world, groups must repeatedly update judgments they have already agreed upon, making consensus updating a common feature of real-world collective decisions. However, previous research on collective decision-making has focused mainly on how groups reach a single consensus, leaving the updating of established consensus largely unexamined. This raises two unanswered questions: does consensus updating involve biases analogous to sunk cost, and are such biases related to the cost of the previous consensus? Building a Fake Consensus paradigm, we manipulated consensus-formation cost and examined how dyads updated a subjectively established consensus after new information arrived. An independent individual experiment provided information-matched updating baselines, allowing us to determine whether dyads updated less or more than individuals responding to the same evidence. Contrary to sunk-cost predictions, low-cost consensus led dyads to update less than the individual baseline, whereas medium- and high-cost consensus led them to update more. The pathway through perceived consensus sharedness was significant, and the association between sharedness and updating was stronger at higher left temporoparietal junction inter-brain synchrony. These findings indicate that the history of consensus formation shapes subsequent updating by altering the psychological meaning of shared endorsement, while interpersonal alignment determines how this shared experience translates into coordinated behavior. To our knowledge, this is the first experimentally controlled study of consensus updating in teams to isolate formation history from actual disagreement, providing a new paradigm for studying how collective judgments change after agreement.

Humans coordinate their actions while their bodies and brains synchronize in social interactions, yet how behavioral, physiological, and neural dynamics interact during interpersonal coordination remains largely unknown. We investigated how respiration and individual differences influence behavioral and inter-brain synchrony in a musical synchronization task, which requires precise temporal alignment. Eighty-eight individuals first produced a familiar melody at their most comfortable rate to measure their spontaneous production rate (SPR). They then synchronized the melody with a randomly assigned unfamiliar partner under natural (unpaced), instructed in-phase, and instructed anti-phase breathing conditions, while hyperscanning 64-channel electroencephalography (EEG), respiration, auditory-motor timing, and perceived social connectedness were recorded. Relative to natural respiration, both in-phase and anti-phase breathing increased inter-brain phase-locking and perceived social closeness but reduced behavioral synchrony; the instructed respiratory phase relationship was mirrored in their inter-brain relative phase. Differences in phase of respiratory cycles (inhalation and exhalation) also influenced coordination: Inhalation was associated with stronger inter-brain synchronization but less precise and stable behavioral coordination than was exhalation. Moreover, Individual differences influenced coordination: Partners with the faster SPR consistently preceded the slower partners and exhibited an alpha-band inter-brain phase advance in synchronization, whereas dyads with similar SPR showed greater behavioral synchrony and smaller inter-brain phase difference. Our findings identify respiration as a previously overlooked factor that organizes behavioral and neural synchronization, while individual intrinsic rhythms constrain how interacting partners align in time. Together, these findings reveal a dynamic interplay between the rhythms of the body and brain during human social interactions.

Neuromarketing mainly seeks to enhance the prediction of marketing stimuli success, such as commercials and movie trailers, by integrating neurophysiological measures with traditional behavioral measures. In the current study, the authors tested whether neural activity could predict consumer valuation and how preferences change after watching commercials, both immediately and over time. Participants (n=161) watched images of products followed by commercials advertising those products while their neural activity was recorded using electroencephalograph (EEG). They watched the product images again a week later without EEG recordings. Immediately after each stimulus exposure, participants stated their willingness to pay (WTP) for the product and how much they liked the commercial. Standard EEG measures showed weak and inconsistent relationships with behavior and yielded near-chance predictions. In contrast, deep learning models applied to the raw neural data achieved substantially higher predictive accuracy, successfully predicting both immediate and delayed WTP and ad liking. Importantly, the authors were able to successfully predict preferences for new participants and/or new products the models were not trained on. However, accuracy declined as generalization demands increased. Moreover, prediction performance declined as value differences narrow. Together, these findings show that neural responses carry reliable and temporally persistent information about consumer valuation and its evolution over time.

Worry is an important contributor to anxiety and depressive disorders, particularly in adolescence. Underlying changes in brain networks are thought to drive development of pathological worry, yet the degree to which neural correlates of worry vary by age is unknown. Here, we use multivariate pattern analysis (MVPA) to investigate individual variance in brain activity during worry in a cross-sectional sample of adolescents and adults varying in worry symptoms. Participants (n=69; ages 12-31) completed a personalized worry-induction fMRI task. Brain activity was averaged across k=268 brain regions from the Shen atlas. Participants also completed self-reports assessing trait worry (PSWQ), anxiety (SCARED), and depression (MFQ) severity. A random-forest model was trained on estimated parameters from worry vs. neutral blocks using leave-one-subject-out cross-validation. Age and symptomatology measures were correlated with model performance metrics. The overall cross-validated model had accuracy=66.71%, balanced accuracy=62.61%, sensitivity=80.43%, and specificity=44.78%. Trial-level accuracy increased with in-scanner worry ratings regardless of condition (b =0.62, p<.001). Accuracy (r=0.30, p=.01) and balanced accuracy (r=0.31, p=.01) significantly correlated with age but did not relate to symptom severity. Brain patterns associated with worry become more differentiated across adolescence, suggesting that neural processes of worry consolidate across this period. Thus, early adolescence may be an opportune time for interventions to alter worry, but interventions adapted from adult populations may require tailoring for adolescent patients.

Interpersonal neural synchrony research using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) frequently relies on wavelet transform coherence (WTC) to quantify temporal correspondence between cortical signals. Yet, whether WTC reliably recovers experimentally defined differences in signal correspondence remains insufficiently established. Here, we evaluated WTC using an auditory-guided finger-tapping paradigm in which matching and non-matching temporal structures were compared within participants and between dyad members during individual and joint performance. Task-evoked analyses confirmed reliable recruitment of contralateral motor and premotor regions across both contexts, whereas the ipsilateral motor cortex was significantly recruited only during joint performance and was the only region differing between sessions. WTC sensitivity was strongly modulated by social co-presence. Within participants, WTC failed to discriminate matching from non-matching temporal structures during individual performance, whereas robust matching-related increases emerged during joint performance, particularly in contralateral motor and premotor regions. Between participants, WTC showed limited and region-specific discrimination when participants were tested separately, but higher coherence for matching temporal structures emerged during joint performance, particularly in motor regions. These findings show that WTC can recover experimentally defined temporal correspondence between fNIRS signals, but that this sensitivity is not context-independent. The within-participant results further suggest that social co-presence may alter the temporal dynamics of the individual neural signals themselves. WTC should therefore be interpreted as a context-sensitive measure whose meaning depends on the functional and social processes generating the signals being compared.

Introduction: Observation of a partner in pain elicits empathy-related cortical responses and social support can modulate pain. Objective: The aim of this study was to investigate empathy and the cortical response during observation of a romantic partner in pain with and without consoling touch. Methods: A total of 40 participants (20 couples) completed validated measures of handedness, pain and empathy. Each member of the couple was randomly assigned to be either the recipient of cold pressor pain or the consoling partner undergoing EEG. EEG activity was recorded from the consoling partner during baseline and pain conditions (with and without consoling touch) to investigate how observation of a partner in pain could alter mu rhythms. Results: Observing a romantic partner in pain significantly enhanced mu at electrodes C4 and Cz, yet addition of consoling touch did not significantly change mu rhythms. Personal Distress was positively associated with mu rhythm enhancement at electrode C4 during pain without consoling touch (r = .576, p = .008). Conclusion: Viewing a romantic partner in pain significantly increased mu rhythms, that was not further changed by offering consoling touch. The association between increases in mu rhythms and Personal Distress in the current study suggests that self-oriented distress may be especially relevant to sensorimotor cortex responses when witnessing a partner in pain, particularly when consoling touch is not possible. Keywords: pain; empathy, EEG, mu rhythms, cold pressor

Background. Trait aggression shows substantial interindividual variability, yet its neurobiological architecture across structural, functional, molecular, and macroscale organizational levels remains poorly understood. Methods. We developed a convergent multiscale framework to characterize the neurobiological architecture associated with trait aggression. We first integrated a large-sample voxel-based morphometry analysis (n = 922) with published neuroimaging studies using two complementary coordinate-based meta-analytic approaches, activation likelihood estimation and seed-based d mapping (total N = 3,671). Convergent meta-analytic findings were subsequently mapped onto functional connectivity networks, and their molecular signatures were characterized using imaging transcriptomics and neurotransmitter mapping. Finally, we examined whether the spatial organization of aggression-related networks was embedded within intrinsic multimodal brain hierarchies spanning morphometric, functional, transcriptomic, and neurochemical dimensions. Results. Across complementary analyses, trait aggression converged on a reproducible structural-functional network centered on the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex and dorsal anterior cingulate cortex. This architecture exhibited distinct molecular signatures, including gene-expression patterns enriched for synaptic functions and robust spatial associations with serotonergic, dopaminergic, and noradrenergic transporter systems. Moreover, the spatial organization of the aggression-related functional network was systematically predicted by the brain's intrinsic multimodal gradients, indicating that it is embedded within broader principles of cortical hierarchical organization. Conclusions. these findings move beyond the localization of aggression to discrete brain regions and identify a reproducible multiscale architecture linking aggression-related structural variation to functional network organization, molecular signatures, and the brain's intrinsic multimodal hierarchy. This integrative framework provides a systems-level account of the neurobiological basis of individual differences in trait aggression.

Adaptive behaviour requires the flexible allocation of attention between sensory information arising from the external environment (exteroception) and signals originating within the body (interoception). While the neural mechanisms supporting exteroceptive attention have been extensively characterised, considerably less is known about how attention is allocated between competing interoceptive and exteroceptive sources of information. To address this question, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to compare cardiac interoceptive attention during heartbeat counting with a carefully matched visual target counting task. Importantly, external visual input was held constant during both tasks, and behavioural accuracy and subjective confidence ratings for task difficulty did not differ significantly between conditions. This provided a controlled comparison in which attention was selectively allocated between internal bodily signals and external sensory information. Cardiac interoceptive and visual exteroceptive attention engaged largely distinct cortical networks. Cardiac interoceptive attention recruited a distributed insula-centred network supporting interoceptive processing and cognitive control. In contrast, visual target counting engaged a dorsal frontoparietal attention network and selectively shaped activity within visual cortex, enhancing regions representing task-relevant central visual information while suppressing regions representing task-irrelevant peripheral visual information. Despite this functional segregation, activity within these systems was not independent of where attention was directed. Exteroceptive attention suppressed activity within the posterior insula, suggesting down-regulation of interoceptive processing. Conversely, peripheral visual regions remained suppressed during interoceptive attention, suggesting that externally directed sensory processing is also down-regulated when attention is directed towards the body. More accurate heartbeat counting was additionally associated with less engagement of the right inferior parietal lobule, consistent with reduced bottom-up attentional capture by external sensory information. Together, these findings are consistent with competitive allocation of attentional resources between neural systems supporting internal bodily signals and external sensory information. More broadly, they provide a system-level account of how the human brain flexibly balances internal and external information during goal-directed behaviour.

Effective verbal communication requires individuals to align their communicative intentions through the precise use of utterances, yet how this is achieved in dynamic, open-ended communication remains unclear. Combining predictive deep language models (DLMs) with cognitive computational modeling, we tested a computational division of labor between context-sensitive global constraint on the utterance space and partner-sensitive local adjustment of selection priorities. We formalized local adjustment using an active inference inspired updating rule within a statistical-pragmatic hybrid model. Thirty dyads performed a dynamic, open-ended collaborative word-generation task during functional near infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) hyperscanning. Interlocutors converged in their lexical choices, and lexical alignment was best explained by a hybrid model integrating contextual selection priors with interaction-specific local adjustment among the models tested. This hybrid process formed a dynamic hypothesis landscape comprising a global semantic search region and local selection priorities. Critically, interaction did not simply reduce uncertainty: within individuals, the hypothesis space of global semantic search progressively narrowed while local uncertainty among plausible alternatives increased; between partners, both global hypothesis space and local selection became increasingly aligned, with alignment of local selection priorities most strongly predicting subsequent lexical alignment. The contribution of local adjustment was stronger during precise verbal communication than in the control tasks. Neural analyses further identified correlates of the local adjustment process: temporoparietal and anterior temporal regions supported partner-related inference and semantic prediction error, respectively, and their activity during thinking predicted subsequent inferior frontal activity associated with self-updating during speaking. The participant's own hypothesis landscape was also represented in the left inferior parietal-supramarginal cortex. The main findings generalized across language models and an independent Czech dataset. Together, these findings reveal that alignment in open-ended communication emerges from complementary statistical and pragmatic computations, providing a framework for understanding human and human-AI communication.

The development of speech in human children is a protracted process that depends on social experience. From early life, young children produce vocalizations in the presence of others, which affords unique opportunities for feedback about how to communicate successfully. However, for feedback to happen, young childrens speech needs to effect change in the brains of their caregivers. Using dual-brain functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) to measure real-time communication between caregivers and their 2- to 3-year-old children (n = 56), we found that children's vocalizations selectively modulated caregivers' brain activity. Parents' brains showed a rapid response to children's production of speech that was communicatively advanced (multiword utterances) vs. less advanced (babble). The findings imply that if part of learning to talk is figuring out how to get your communication partner to listen, then early conversations likely present continuous opportunities for feedback that guide children toward advances in spoken language.

Psychedelic compounds such as N,N-dimethyltryptamine (DMT) induce rapid and profound changes in conscious experience, requiring neuroimaging measures that capture how brain dynamics evolve across space and time. Emerging evidence suggests that rotational (vortex-like) dynamics may contribute to the coordination of large-scale neural activity. Here, we introduce two vorticity-based metrics; spiral vorticity (SV) and spatial spiral vorticity dispersion (SSVD), to quantify the rotational organization and spatial heterogeneity of large-scale cortical phase dynamics. Using fMRI data acquired under placebo and DMT in a within-subject design, we assessed these measures globally, across resting-state networks, and regionally to examine their relationship to subjective intensity. DMT increased SV and SSVD and reduced temporal irreversibility, indicating stronger rotational organization, greater spatial heterogeneity, and altered directional structure of cortical dynamics. Effects were non-uniform across functional systems, with the largest changes in default mode, visual, frontoparietal, and dorsal attention networks. Both vorticity measures tracked the temporal evolution of subjective intensity globally, while network-level analyses revealed spatially heterogeneous brain-experience coupling. Spatiotemporally resolved analyses further showed that the strongest reorganization of spiral dynamics emerged during offset and recovery rather than at peak subjective intensity. These findings identify spiral dynamics as a time-resolved neural signature of the DMT experience. By quantifying the rotational structure and spatial heterogeneity of cortical phase flow, vorticity-based measures provide a framework for linking large-scale brain dynamics to evolving subjective experience.

Voluntary cognitive regulation can increase or decrease pain, but direction-sensitive neural correlates may emerge at different analytical levels. We reanalyzed 3,201 thermal-stimulation trials from 33 participants, integrating 0-200 warmth/pain ratings, regional fMRI activity, and trial-wise lagged coupling. Both instructions shifted ratings in the intended direction, with no reliable difference in mean success. Down-regulation was associated with lower bilateral S2/opercular and insular activity and higher left dlPFC/IFJ activity after FDR correction across 32 regions; run-matched comparisons were weaker and none survived the corresponding correction. Contrast-map Neurologic Pain Signature attenuation did not replicate in a rating-adjusted FWL-LSS trial-wise analysis despite strong temperature sensitivity. Up-regulation success covaried with an exploratory, post selection lagged dlPFC/IFJ-valuation composite (r = -0.546, 95% CI [-0.764, -0.270]). The association exceeded matched reverse-direction, zero-lag, and time-reversed controls, lay outside permutation and circular-shift nulls, and persisted after AR(1) prewhitening. A transition-level analysis across 297 up-regulation transitions preserved a negative success-by-source interaction (adjusted three-target mean beta = -0.163, cluster-bootstrap 95% CI [-0.290, -0.054], Freedman-Lane p = 0.010). Six session-wise DCM variants showed no consistent regulation-versus-passive effective-connectivity effect and did not independently validate an up-specific directed mechanism. These analyses identify a down-regulation-associated regional pattern and a candidate prefrontal-valuation coupling association requiring independent confirmation.