Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience

Fairness decisions often integrate affective responses within a social context, yet emotion regulation in this literature has been largely studied as a self-directed process rather than an interpersonal one. We examined how individual differences in other-directed emotion regulation--measured with the Emotion Regulation of Others and Self (EROS) scale--relate to behavioral and neural responses during fairness decisions in 138 adults completing a variant of the Ultimatum Game with human and computer partners during fMRI. Behaviorally, participants who more strongly endorsed worsening others emotions rejected unfair offers more frequently, and this tendency interacted with offer fairness to amplify rejection of unfair offers. At the neural level, the left anterior insula tracked offer unfairness more strongly in social versus nonsocial contexts, consistent with sociality modulating the neural encoding of fairness. Right dlPFC activation during socially unfair offers was greater among individuals who preferred to improve others emotions. Connectivity analyses revealed that social fairness sensitivity predicted stronger amygdala-orbitofrontal and amygdala-dmPFC coupling; the latter was further amplified among individuals higher in other-directed emotion worsening. Together, these findings identify interpersonal emotion regulation as an understudied source of variation in the affective and prefrontal systems supporting fairness-based social decisions.

As avatars become more commonplace, understanding how the brain processes emotional expressions in virtual faces is critical. We compared behavioral and neural responses to real and virtual faces expressing seven emotions (anger, disgust, fear, joy, sadness, surprise, neutral). In Experiment 1 (n=61), participants rated the similarity between paired faces. Expressions conveying the same emotion were rated as highly similar across face types, whereas mismatched emotions yielded substantially lower similarity ratings, indicating perceived emotional meaning was preserved despite differences in face realism. In Experiment 2 (n=91), functional near-infrared spectroscopy was used to measure brain activity while participants viewed the same stimuli. General-linear-model analyses revealed greater activation limited to visual areas for 1) virtual faces and 2) surprise and neutral expressions. Functional connectivity analyses, however, revealed network level differences between face type and emotion across the brain. Real faces elicited stronger connectivity patterns across frontal, central-temporal, and parietal regions, whereas high-arousal emotions (fear, anger, and joy) were associated with broader network engagement than other expressions. Our results suggest face-type processing occur in early visual areas, and despite perceptual similarity, different emotions on real and virtual faces are associated with distinct patterns of network level connectivity across the brain.

Interpersonal neural synchrony (INS) in mother-child dyads is often interpreted as a neural marker of relational quality and sensitive caregiving, yet findings on its predictors remain heterogeneous. One possible source of this variability is the diversity of interactional paradigms used in hyperscanning research. This study examined how maternal personality, child temperament, and affective states relate to INS across interaction contexts varying in social interactivity. Thirty-three mother-child dyads (n = 20 female children) participated in a functional near-infrared spectroscopy hyperscanning experiment involving passive video co-exposure, a structured cooperative task, and free interaction. Fronto-temporal activity was recorded simultaneously, and INS was computed using wavelet transform coherence. Above-chance levels of INS emerged in inter-brain region combinations primarily involving the mothers left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) and the childs right IFG (adjusted ps < 0.030, Cohens d range = 0.14-0.31). Maternal neuroticism was the only significant predictor of INS, with higher levels associated with increased synchrony during passive video co-exposure (adjusted p = 0.012) and free interaction (adjusted p = 0.021), but not during the structured game. These findings indicate that maternal dispositional traits shape INS in a context-dependent manner. Notably, the positive association between neuroticism and INS suggests that heightened neural synchrony may reflect over-attunement in more anxious caregivers, rather than optimal coordination. Excessive synchrony may therefore index tightly coupled, over-monitoring interaction dynamics, consistent with models of affiliative vigilance in anxious parenting. Overall, INS may follow a non-linear pattern in which moderate levels are most adaptive, highlighting its flexible, dynamic, and context-sensitive nature.

Cognitive reappraisal, the deliberate reinterpretation of emotional events, is widely considered an effective emotion regulation strategy, and modulation of the late positive potential (LPP) during negative affect reduction has become the primary electrophysiological evidence for volitional emotional control. Experimental instructions, however, impose dual-task demands that free viewing does not, confounding reappraisal with cognitive load. By including instructions to increase emotional responses to pictures ("enhance") as well as instructions to decrease ("suppress"), different predictions are generated. If the LPP reflects regulation, then, compared to free viewing, suppress instructions should decrease LPP amplitude, and enhance instructions should increase LPP amplitude. If modulation instead reflects cognitive load, both instructions should reduce the LPP, as both impose an additional cognitive task. In a sample of 107 participants, evaluative ratings confirmed that regulation instructions modulated reported emotional intensity in the expected directions (Enhance > View > Suppress), but that both enhance and suppress instructions reduced LPP amplitude compared to free viewing, with Bayesian model comparisons providing strong evidence against direction-specific regulation and in favor of cognitive load. Whole-scalp multivariate pattern analysis confirmed that no instruction-related neural signal exists at any scalp location or latency within the first second after stimulus onset. These data indicate that LPP modulation following both instruction types reflects dual-task cognitive load rather than volitional emotional control. Significance StatementCognitive reappraisal is considered the gold standard of emotion regulation, and reduced late positive potential (LPP) amplitude during negative emotion suppression is the primary neural evidence that humans can voluntarily control emotional responses. The current data are inconsistent with this regulatory account and instead support a cognitive load interpretation. Whether instructed to enhance or suppress emotional responses, LPP amplitude was reduced in both conditions relative to free viewing, consistent with attentional resource competition rather than directional regulatory control. The same participants reported successfully regulating emotional experience in opposite directions, producing a clear dissociation between neural and behavioral measures. These findings challenge a basic tenet of emotional regulation and raise questions concerning LPP modulation as a biomarker of regulatory capacity.

In task-oriented teams, long-term coordination among specialized roles may contribute to shared patterns of cognition and behavior, yet little is known about how such experience is reflected in brain functional organization. Here, we examined whether cross-individual differences in whole-brain functional connectivity were associated with court position and team membership in professional volleyball players. In the resting-state and naturalistic volleyball game-viewing conditions, we analyzed dyadic functional connectivity differences to test whether effects of shared position and team were evident across intrinsic and contextually engaged brain states, controlling for differences in playing time and performance-related statistics. We found that same-position players showed smaller functional connectivity differences. These effects were most prominent and widespread across brain networks during game viewing, whereas at rest they were specific to the somatomotor network. Team membership was also associated with smaller functional connectivity differences during game viewing, although position x team interactions varied across networks after covariate adjustment. A complementary machine learning classifier further showed that shared position could be predicted from intersubject differences in functional connectivity with accuracy exceeding a frequency-based baseline. Together, these findings suggest that shared role-specific and team-based experience may contribute to structured similarity in functional brain organization within a real-world team setting.

Social decision-making relies on dynamic affect-cognition interactions across distributed brain networks, yet how incidental positive affect modulates these mechanisms at a millisecond timescale remains unclear. This study investigated the impact of music-induced positive emotion on the neural dynamics of decision-making in the Ultimatum Game. Fifty-six participants were assigned to either a happy music group or an active control (rain sound) group. Fifty-six participants were assigned to either a happy music group or an active control (rain sound) group, while electroencephalography was recorded to capture rapid neural dynamics. Behaviorally, happy music accelerated reaction times (RTs) and decoupled the ERP-RT correlations observed in the control condition. Neurally, positive affect amplified event-related potential amplitudes during early conflict detection (220-280 ms) and late valuation (520-560 ms) stages. Multivariate pattern analysis further revealed that happy music enhanced the neural separability and temporal stability of decision states (accept vs. reject). Moreover, using support vector regression based on functional network features, we found that decision acceptance rates were predicted with significantly higher accuracy in the happy music group (R = 0.60) compared to controls (R = 0.41). Crucially, feature weight analysis indicated a topological shift in decision strategy: while the control group relied on frontal-central edges (implicating executive control), the happy music group was characterized by central-temporal connections (suggesting integrative processing). Collectively, these findings provide novel evidence that incidental emotion intervenes at the millisecond timescale to bias social choices, offering a dynamic network-based account of the affect-cognition interaction.

Obesity is a growing public health concern with more than 40% of adults meeting criteria for obesity in the United States. Although many treatments seek to lower individuals weight, few treatments have focused on cognitive strategies to change the way individuals think about food, therefore, decreasing consumption of non-nutrient-dense foods. Cognitive reappraisal is one strategy that involves changing the way one thinks about a situation and can be used to downregulate responses to those stimuli. Leveraging this intuitive, cost-effective strategy to decrease ones desire to eat unhealthy food and therefore, decrease overeating, could improve physical and mental health. The present study identified brain regions that are differentially activated when using cognitive reappraisal to downregulate responses to food (FR) versus when using the same strategy to downregulate negative emotions (ER). We collected functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data in 63 undergraduate students while participants completed both tasks. There was increased reappraisal-related activation in widespread regions across both tasks, including in expected subcortical (i.e., striatum) and cortical areas (i.e., visual, frontoparietal). We also found domain-specific activity, with greater insula activation in the FR than the ER task and greater hippocampal activation in the ER than the FR task. These results reveal domain-general and domain-specific effects of cognitive reappraisal in FR and ER tasks that inform future work examining eating behavior. Taken together, a better explication of the overlapping and discrete processes of food regulation, as it compares to other applications of this regulatory strategy can inform new intervention targets.

Intermittent explosive disorder (IED) is associated with impulsive aggression in ambiguous social contexts. Prior neuroimaging studies have treated IED as a homogenous group, but identical social situations may elicit divergent responses across IED individuals. Here, we test the hypothesis that IED is characterized by idiosyncratic neural responses to social cues during naturalistic social-emotional processing. IED individuals and healthy controls completed a validated paradigm where they were presented with video vignettes of interpersonal interactions while undergoing fMRI. We computed the intersubject correlation (ISC) in neural time courses between pairs of participants to quantify neural similarity, and assessed whether similarity differed between Healthy-Healthy and IED-IED dyads using Bayesian multilevel models, controlling for self-reported emotional responses and intention attributions for each vignette. Healthy-Healthy dyads showed significantly higher ISC than IED-IED dyads, indicating that neural responses to the videos were similar among healthy participants, but idiosyncratic in IED individuals. These effects were observed in regions in the default mode and salience networks, including the precuneus, medial prefrontal cortex, superior temporal sulcus, insula, and dorsal anterior cingulate cortex. Individuals with IED exhibited idiosyncratic neural responses during naturalistic social-emotional processing, even after accounting for differences in emotional reaction and intention attribution. This neural idiosyncrasy may reflect atypical integration of social cues, giving rise to maladaptive interpretations and impulsive aggression. Assessing neural synchrony during ecologically valid paradigms offers a promising tool for identifying neural markers of interpersonal dysfunction and informing targeted interventions.

Transcendent thinking (TT) is an enduring affective and cognitive process characterized by abstract meaning-making, moral reflection, self-referential integration, and strong emotional engagement. Despite growing interest in its developmental and affective significance, the intrinsic neural dynamics that predict individual differences in disposition to TT remain poorly understood. Most prior work has relied on linear functional connectivity measures, which may be insufficient to capture the nonlinear and multiscale nature of brain dynamics underlying higher-order affective dispositions like TT. Here, we introduce a nonlinear functional brain network (FBN) framework based on multiscale entropy (MSE) to investigate whether intrinsic resting-state nonlinear brain dynamics predict disposition to TT in adolescents. Functional connectivity was defined as inter-regional similarity in MSE profiles derived from resting-state fMRI, yielding weighted networks that capture scale-dependent dynamical correspondence rather than linear synchrony. Graph-theoretical, spectral, and information-theoretic measures were computed and evaluated against signal-level and network-level null models. Predictive performance was assessed using machine-learning models and compared with conventional time series-based FBNs. Global intelligence (IQ) was examined as a control cognitive variable. MSE-based network features, particularly spectral energy and Shannon entropy, showed significant associations with TT and enabled reliable prediction of individual differences, whereas time series-based network measures failed to predict TT. No network measures reliably predicted IQ. Overall, these results indicate that intrinsic nonlinear brain dynamics carry predictive information about affective dispositions, rather than domainspecific or network-localized cognitive abilities such as IQ. This work demonstrates that nonlinear, multiscale network representations of resting-state brain activity provide a principled and predictive framework for modeling individual differences in enduring affective dispositions.

3.The fusiform face area (FFA) preferentially responds to faces within the first months of life. One hypothesis is that higher-order social responses in middle medial prefrontal cortex (MMPFC) or face responses in superior temporal sulcus (STS) drive the development of face-selective responses in FFA, with right-hemisphere dominance in FFA eventually arising from lateralised connections to these regions. Another hypothesis proposes an innate face template in the amygdala guides attention to face-like shapes. This study opportunistically examined the development of the FFA, MMPFC, STS, and amygdala in childhood using an open cross-sectional movie-viewing fMRI dataset with 3-12-year-olds (N=117, M=6.77 years) and adults (N=33, M=24.77 years). We tested for correlations between FFA development and development in MMPFC, STS, and amygdala on the premise that associations between these regions may be observable even in children, and such associations could constrain hypotheses and analytic approaches in future studies with infants. First, we measured functional maturity-how similar each childs response to the movie was to an adult average response timecourse. In all regions, older childrens responses were more adult-like. Next, we tested whether FFA maturity correlated with functional connectivity with, or functional maturity of, MMPFC, STS, or amygdala. Children with more mature right FFA responses showed stronger right FFA-right MMPFC connectivity. Children with more mature FFA responses also had more mature STS responses, bilaterally. This study provides preliminary evidence that FFA co-develops with higher-order social brain regions and specific metrics to take forward in future research with infants. HighlightsO_LIWhat drives face selective responses in FFA is the subject of recent debate. C_LIO_LI117 children aged 3 to 12 years watched a short movie while undergoing fMRI. C_LIO_LIRight FFA development correlated with functional connectivity to right MMPFC C_LIO_LIFFA development correlated with STS development, bilaterally. C_LIO_LIFFA codevelops with higher-order social brain regions (controlling for age). C_LI

Systematic focus training is increasingly recognized for its therapeutic benefits, with equanimity, the ability to maintain an open and accepting attitude towards all experience, identified as a critical mechanism for improving well-being. Physiologically, experienced meditators demonstrate reduced activity in the posterior cingulate cortex (PCC), a hub of the default mode network (DMN), and increased segregation between the DMN and the central executive network (CEN). This study investigated whether non-invasive neuromodulation could facilitate these neural and behavioral shifts in novice practitioners. We conducted a single-blind, randomized controlled trial with 24 meditation-naive participants who engaged in a two-week "Body Focus" mindfulness training program. Participants were randomized to receive either active (n=16) or sham (n=8) suppressive transcranial focused ultrasound (tFUS) targeting the PCC during four in-person meditation sessions. Resting-state fMRI analysis revealed a robust Condition x Session interaction in functional connectivity. While the sham group showed a trend toward increased coupling, the active tFUS group demonstrated significant decoupling (increased segregation) between the DMN and CEN, a pattern characteristic of advanced meditators. Subnetwork analysis indicated these effects were driven primarily by the decoupling of the core self-referential system in DMN (DMNA) from the external-oriented control system of the CEN (CENB). Behaviorally, greater reductions in DMN-CEN connectivity within the active group predicted larger increases in self-reported acceptance and longer duration of voluntary meditation practice. These findings suggest that tFUS targeting the PCC can acutely redirect neuroplastic trajectories during early mindfulness training, potentially accelerating the acquisition of equanimity and distinct network configurations associated with effortless awareness. Significance StatementThis study demonstrates that transcranial focused ultrasound (tFUS) targeting the posterior cingulate cortex (PCC) can synergistically enhance mindfulness training in novices. By inducing a robust decoupling between the default mode and central executive networks - a neural signature typically acquired only after hundreds of hours of practice - this intervention effectively redirected the neural trajectory of novice practitioners toward that of experienced meditators in just two weeks. These findings suggest that targeted neuromodulation can bypass early obstacles in meditation practice, offering a promising "precision wellness" avenue for accelerating the acquisition of equanimity and its associated well-being benefits.

BackgroundDepression is associated with social dysfunction, but the mechanisms linking affective symptoms to disrupted close relationships remain poorly understood. One possibility is that depression alters how people experience rewards shared with close others and how they interpret partners actions. It remains unclear whether neural sensitivity to shared reward predicts social valuation during more complex interactions such as reciprocated trust. MethodsIn this preregistered fMRI study, participants completed a reward-sharing task and a Trust Game with a close friend, a stranger, and a computer. We measured striatal shared reward sensitivity (SRS; friend > computer) and tested whether it related to subsequent investment behavior and brain responses to trust reciprocation. Depressive symptoms and perceived closeness were assessed via self-report. ResultsIn a final sample of n = 123, participants reporting more depressive symptoms invested more in their friend than in the computer. Striatal SRS predicted temporoparietal junction responses to reciprocated trust, but this association depended jointly on social closeness and depression -- with depression reversing the expected pattern among individuals reporting closer relationships. Striatal SRS was also inversely associated with connectivity between the default mode network and cerebellum during reciprocity. ConclusionsThese findings suggest that closeness calibrates the striatal SRS link to regional activity and network-level responses during social exchange, while depression alters how striatal SRS relates to regional activity, potentially disrupting how individuals interpret and respond to close others.

Arousal and valence are fundamental dimensions of affective experience signifying levels of activation and pleasantness, respectively. These dimensions play a crucial role in shaping emotional responses and behaviors, with significant implications for psychopathology. Previous machine learning studies had some success decoding these states from brain activation patterns observed during task-based functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), but the results have varied across studies. Moreover, prior studies have often been limited by small sample sizes, weak decoding performance, and non-whole-brain analyses, leaving the neural representations of arousal and valence largely unresolved. Here we successfully decoded arousal and valence from whole-brain task-fMRI data collected from 132 participants during exposure to 300 unique emotional stimuli, including 150 movie clips and 150 text scenarios that reliably induced a wide range of arousal and valence states. Mass univariate general linear models identified block-level activation (emotion stimuli > washout) from all gray matter voxels. Multivariate regression analysis predicted arousal and valence ratings based on these gray matter activations. Patterns in the fMRI data underlying arousal and valence were robust, as they were successfully decoded across both induction modalities using five different linear multivariate regression models. Although significant, decoding from scenarios was less successful than from movies, likely due to their more imaginative nature. In particular, decoding arousal from scenarios only showed low predictive utility. Representations of arousal and valence were widespread throughout the brain, and we reveal cerebellar and brainstem contributions that have largely been absent in past fMRI decoding studies. These findings clarify the distributed neural basis of arousal and valence and provide a foundation for future clinical research on the role of these constructs in affective dysregulation.

Individual differences in susceptibility to attentional capture may reflect stable differences in large-scale brain organization. Using task-based fMRI (N = 33), we tested whether default mode network (DMN) connectivity predicts distractor interference after spatial probability learning. Participants were exposed to spatial bias applied either to same-dimension distractors (SS group, n = 16) or to different-dimension distractors (DS group, n = 17). DMN connectivity predicted capture specifically for the distractor dimension associated with location learning. Cross-prediction analyses further showed that this relationship generalized across groups for the location-learning but not for the comparison dimensions. Although this asymmetry may partly reflect the greater reliability of the more frequently sampled biased-dimension measure, the overall pattern is consistent with vulnerability expressed in the location-learning context rather than with fixed dimension-specific susceptibility. These findings suggest that DMN connectivity indexes a trait-like vulnerability to learned suppression failure.

Arousal relates to cognitive performance, but the neural underpinnings of this relationship remain unclear. One candidate marker is switching rate, a dynamic measure that has been linked to cognition and has been speculated to be sensitive to arousal. However, whether switching rate is altered across arousal states has not been directly tested. Here, using fMRI together with concurrent eye monitoring and EEG, we examined how the switching rates of the default mode, salience, and central executive networks are altered across arousal states. Default mode and anterior salience networks exhibited significant differences in switching rates across arousal states determined with eye tracking. Notably, thalamic subregions showed arousal-dependent changes in switching rate that were replicated across independent datasets and arousal measures. Additionally, arousal moderated the relationship between average network switching and performance on a relational processing task. Together, these findings suggest that switching rate may index neural underpinnings of arousal-dependent cognition.

Research on the relationship between digital media and neurocognitive function has blossomed with the rising digital age and advent of social media, producing a growing literature focused on how technological developments may be affecting users brains. Much of the science has focused on the involvement of specific brain systems that support reward (e.g., nucleus accumbens, orbitofrontal cortex), cognitive control (e.g., lateral prefrontal, anterior cingulate), and socio-emotional processes (e.g., temporo-parietal junction) and why they might be especially relevant to digital media engagement. However, a broad and systematic analysis of the consistency of findings across neuroimaging studies has not yet been published. Here, we conducted a coordinate-based meta-analysis based on published structural and functional MRI studies exploring habitual digital media engagement. Adopting a granular approach to summation of this literature, we use Activation Likelihood Estimation (ALE) and find that the most consistent effects arise in the anterior insular cortex, a region implicated in the integration of social and emotional information that has not been frequently highlighted in the prior literature on digital media effects in the brain. This discovery encourages reconsideration of how the brain is likely to affect, and be affected by, digital media engagement and online behavior.

Flow, as defined by Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi (1975), is a holistic sensation experienced when individuals are fully immersed in an activity, resulting in a mental state characterized by a diminished sense of self and altered perception of time. To investigate the global neural dynamics underlying flow, we employed EEG microstate analysis to capture the spatial and temporal properties of dominant transient global brain states (Lehmann et al., 1998). In a study involving 43 participants playing the video game Thumper for 25 minutes, we extracted three four-minute EEG segments from each session corresponding to reported experiences of flow, boredom, and frustration, as determined by self-reports and performance metrics. Across conditions, six distinct microstate topographies (A-F) accounted for most of the global variance. Given that reduced self-referential processing is a key feature of flow, we hypothesized that flow would modulate the properties of microstates C and E, which have been associated with brain regions resembling the default mode network (DMN). Compared to boredom and frustration, the flow condition showed significantly decreased global explained variance, mean duration, time coverage, and occurrence frequency of microstate E, as well as reduced mean duration and time coverage of microstate C. These findings suggest that microstates associated with self-referential processing are shorter and less frequent during flow than during boredom and frustration. This supports the notion that the flow experience modulates global brain dynamics, particularly within the DMN. Furthermore, our results align with previous research reporting reduced DMN activity during meditative and psychedelic states, reinforcing the idea of diminished self-awareness in such conditions.

Pain captures attention and interferes with executive and motor processes but task performance may be preserved at the cost of more effort. In a preregistered fMRI study, 40 participants performed a visuomotor force-matching task at two force levels under individually calibrated painful or non-painful thermal stimulation, while reporting the intensity of perceived effort. Maintaining task performance under pain was associated with increased perceived effort and recruited brain regions involved in pain modulation and cognitive control. Region-of-interest analysis showed perceived effort was consistently linked to decreased anterior midcingulate cortex activity, whereas supplementary motor area contributions varied depending on its role in motor execution or pain processing. Across experimental condition, motor, pain-modulatory and cognitive-control regions were associated with effort perception. Independently of condition, effort perception was modulated by ventromedial prefrontal cortex and ventral striatum. These findings indicate that effort perception reflects brain activity within areas involved in motor, executive and valuation processes.

Cooperative behavior is a cornerstone of human interaction. Although both "betrayal aversion" (the affective cost of being betrayed) and "loss aversion" (the financial detriment incurred from betrayal) are established determinants of cooperative behavior, their relative potency remains undetermined. Here, we investigated these effects by integrating computational modeling and event-related potential (ERP) techniques. In two tasks involving risk and cooperation, participants decided whether to take financial risks or to cooperate under possible betrayal. Our results showed that betrayal aversion had a stronger effect on reducing cooperation compared to loss aversion. Furthermore, ERP data demonstrated sequential processing: betrayal was encoded early in decision-making, reflected by increased P3 with weaker betrayal aversion, whereas loss aversion manifested later, marked by increased LPP. By dissociating the contributions of betrayal and loss, our finding provides novel insights into the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying cooperative behavior.

Previous brain decoding studies indicate that an individuals pain experience can be robustly predicted from distributed patterns of brain activity. Two brain decoders have notably been associated respectively with the nociceptive and cognitive aspects of pain experience, the Neurologic Pain Signature (NPS) and the Stimulus-Intensity Independent Pain Signature (SIIPS). Yet, we still do not know if these brain patterns are also causally related to pain experience. To evaluate this possibility, we used high-field (7-Tesla) fMRI to test whether humans can alter their pain experience by bidirectionally modulating their pain-related brain activity in decoded neurofeedback paradigm. In a double-blind design, participants were trained to up- and down-regulate the NPS or the SIIPS. Our results indicate that participants can achieve bidirectional control of both signatures. NPS expression reliably increased during pain stimulation and covaried with both stimulus intensity and subjective ratings. In contrast, SIIPS expression did not show consistent stimulus-locked effects in the primary analyses. Importantly, reduction in pain rating was specific for SIIPS-training, whereas NPS has failed to show any consistent behavioral effect. Based on these preliminary findings, we hereby preregister a follow-up study, with specified rationale, hypotheses, experimental design, and analysis protocols.