Biology subjects

Golbabaei, S.

Publications and source records attributed to Golbabaei, S..

3 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2026

Shared Pain, Shared Decisions: How Empathy Shapes Social Conformity Through Physiology and Visual Attention

Empathy enables individuals to attune to others experiences through shared affective, sensorimotor, and neural representations, but its influence on higher-level decision-making and social alignment remains unknown. We examined whether empathy promotes social conformity and whether this effect depends on physiological arousal, visual attention, and socio-emotional traits. Seventy-three participants completed an empathy-for-pain task followed by a modified random-dot task in which they interacted with previously seen empathy targets, while physiological signals and eye movements were recorded. Drift-diffusion modeling showed that feedback from empathy targets increased conformity, reflected in stronger decision bias toward targets, faster evidence accumulation, and reduced decision conservatism. Visual attention to the eyes or mouth was linked to greater conformity depending on the context. Heart rate variability was unrelated to conformity, whereas phasic skin conductance was associated with smaller bias changes and greater conservatism. Alexithymia and autistic traits further shaped the empathy-conformity relationships. These findings suggest that empathic shared representation extends beyond affective resonance to influence social alignment in decision-making.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2025

Empathy Accelerates Subjective Time Perception, Independent of Physiology but Not of Visual Attention

Recent work suggests that empathic engagement can influence cognitive and perceptual processes, yet its impact on time perception remains unclear. Whereas internal clock models would predict that empathy-induced physiological arousal lengthen perceived duration, other frameworks offer opposite predictions. Specifically, findings that empathy reduces perceived distance, combined with construal level, and motivational dimensional theory, together predict that empathy accelerate the subjective passage of time. Moreover, although eye-movements are crucial in empathy, it remains unclear how visual attention modulates time perception during empathic experiences. Thus, we employed an empathy-for-pain and duration estimation task, while measuring participants heart rate, skin conductance, and eye-movements, to investigate how empathy and physiological arousal influence time perception. Our findings show that empathy leads to a faster perceived passage of time. Despite increases in physiological arousal during empathy, arousal was not associated with changes in time perception. Instead, greater visual attention to the eyes predicted stronger temporal contraction. Furthermore, trait empathy and autism quotient were related to this effect, whereas alexithymia was not. These results provide the first empirical evidence that empathy alters time perception, elucidate the contribution of physiological and visual mechanisms to this phenomenon and extend current theories of time perception and empathy.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2024

Anterior thalamus functional connectivity with cortical regions underpinning prospective memory: a 7-Tesla fMRI seed-based study

Prospective memory, or memory for future intentions, engages particular cortical regions. Lesion studies also implicate the thalamus, with prospective memory deterioration following thalamic stroke. Neuroimaging, anatomical, and lesion studies suggest the ANT (anterior nuclei of the thalamus) in particular are involved in episodic memory, with electrophysiological studies suggesting an active role in selecting neural assemblies underlying particular memory traces. Here we hypothesized that the ANT are engaged in realizing prospectively-encoded intentions, detectable using ultra-high-field strength functional MRI. Using a within-subject design, participants (N = 14; age 20-35 years) performed an ongoing n-back working memory task with two cognitive loads, each with and without a prospective memory component, during 7-Tesla functional MRI. Seed-to-voxel whole brain functional connectivity analyses were performed to establish whether including a prospective memory component in an ongoing task results in greater connectivity between ANT and cortical regions engaged in prospective memory. Repeated measures ANOVAs were applied to behavioral and connectivity measures, with the factors Task Type (with prospective memory or not) and N-Back (2-back or 3-back). Response accuracy was greater and reaction times faster without the prospective memory component, and accuracy was higher in the 2-than 3-back condition. Task Type had a main effect on connectivity with an ANT seed, with greater ANT-DLPFC (dorsolateral prefrontal cortex) and ANT-STG (superior temporal gyrus) connectivity when including a prospective memory component. Post hoc testing based on a significant interaction showed greater ANT-DLPFC connectivity (p-FWE = 0.007) when prospective memory was included with the low and ANT-STG connectivity (p-FWE = 0.019) with the high cognitive load ongoing task. Direct comparison showed greater functional connectivity between these areas and the ANT than DMNT (dorsomedial nucleus of the thalamus) during prospective remembering. Enhanced ANT-DLPFC connectivity, a brain region with an established role in strategic monitoring for prospective memory cues, arose with a low cognitive load ongoing task that enabled monitoring. This connectivity was significantly less on direct comparison with increasing the cognitive load of the ongoing task without prospective memory, suggesting specificity for prospective memory. Greater ANT-STG connectivity on prospective memory inclusion in the higher cognitive load ongoing task fits with reported STG activation on prospective memory through spontaneous retrieval. Lower connectivity on direct comparison with a DMNT seed suggests ANT specificity. The findings fit with a coordinating role for the ANT in prospective remembering. Given the small sample, these findings should be considered preliminary, with replication required.

neuroscience↗