Envy is the painful or resentful awareness of another’s advantage combined with a desire to possess that same advantage. Recent neuroscientific research has begun to shed light on the brain regions that process the experience of envy, including regions of the prefrontal cortex involved in emotional processing and social cognition. It is still unclear, however, which regions of the brain are functionally connected during the experience of envy. We recorded functional neuroimaging data while inducing simulated envy in participants, experienced through a perspective-taking hypothetical scenario task. In this task, participants took the perspective of a protagonist portrayed in a written description and compared themselves to either i) a self-similar/superior individual, ii) a self-dissimilar/superior individual, or iii) a self-dissimilar/average individual. During each comparison, participants also reported how much envy they experienced while taking the protagonists perspective. We demonstrate an inverse relationship in the connectivity of the left superior frontal gyrus to both the right supramarginal gyrus and the precuneus with respect to self-reported envy ratings across participants. In other words, we show that the greater the functional connectivity that the left superior frontal gyrus shares with the right supramarginal gyrus and precuneus, the less reported envy a participant experiences. Overall, our results are in line with previous research implicating the superior frontal gyrus in the reappraisal of negative emotions and extend these findings by showing this region is also involved in modulating the simulated experience of the social comparative, negative emotion of envy.

嫉妒是对他人优势的痛苦或怨恨意识，同时又渴望拥有同样的优势。最近的神经科学研究开始揭示处理嫉妒体验的大脑区域，包括参与情绪处理和社会认知的前额叶皮层区域。然而，目前还不清楚，在嫉妒的经​​历中，大脑的哪些区域在功能上是相连的。我们记录了功能性神经影像数据，同时在参与者中引起了模拟嫉妒，通过透视假设情景任务来体验。在这项任务中，参与者从书面描述中描绘的主角的角度将自己与 i) 自我相似/优越的个体，ii) 自我不同/优越的个体进行比较，或 iii) 一个自我差异/普通的个体。在每次比较期间，参与者还报告了他们在从主角的角度来看时经历了多少嫉妒。我们证明了左侧额上回与右侧缘上回和楔前叶的连接性与参与者自我报告的嫉妒评分呈负相关。换句话说，我们表明，左侧额上回与右侧缘上回和楔前叶共享的功能连接性越大，参与者经历的嫉妒就越少。总体，