Official websites use. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites. The right hemisphere of the human brain is known to be involved in processes underlying emotion and social cognition. Clinical neuropsychology investigations and brain lesion studies have linked a number of personality and social disorders to abnormal white matter WM integrity in the right hemisphere. Here, we tested the hypothesis that interpersonal competencies are associated with integrity of WM tracts in the right hemisphere of healthy young adults.
Fractional Anisotropy FA was used to quantify water diffusion. Higher interpersonal competencies are related to higher WM integrity in several major tracts of the right hemisphere, in specific the uncinate fasciculus, the cingulum, the forceps minor, the infero-fronto occipital fasciculus, the inferior longitudinal fasciculus, and the superior longitudinal fasciculus.
These results provide the first direct analysis of the neuroanatomical basis of interpersonal competencies and young adult self-reported skills in social contexts. Human beings are highly social animals, and in complex societies where social interaction is pervasive, nuanced, and extremely diverse, maintaining effective and sensitive social ties places a heavy burden on cognitive and emotional capacities of the individual.
For example, developing and sustaining social relationships require competent and flexible social cognition including the ability to represent relationships between oneself and others and the capacity to apply those representations to effectively guide social behavior Adolphs, During the transition to adulthood, when young adults must navigate a vast and complex array of novel social contexts with sharply varying social protocols, deficiencies in interpersonal competence are likely particularly problematic.
Given the importance of interpersonal competence to young adult success and the fundamental roles that social and emotional cognition play in interpersonal competence, we were surprised to find that no social neuroscience studies have attempted to directly investigate brain mechanisms that underlie interpersonal competence. Because interpersonal competence entails the integration of cognitive and socioemotional resources, such as language processing, empathy, theory of mind, visual processing of socioemotional cues, and working memory, there is reason to believe that brain networks are involved in the development and maintenance of interpersonal competence.
