Negative interpersonal experiences are a key contributor to psychiatric disorders. While previous research has shown that negative interpersonal experiences influence social cognition, less is known about the effects on participation in social interactions and the underlying neurobiology. To address this, we developed a new naturalistic version of a gaze-contingent paradigm using real video sequences of gaze behaviour that respond to the participants’ gaze in real-time in order to create a believable and continuous interactive social situation. Additionally, participants listened to two autobiographical audio-scripts that guided them to imagine a recent stressful and a relaxing situation and performed the gaze-based social interaction task before and after the presentation of either the stressful or the relaxing audio-script. Our results demonstrate that the social interaction task robustly recruits brain areas with known involvement in social cognition, namely the medial prefrontal cortex, bilateral temporoparietal junction, superior temporal sulcus as well as the precuneus. Imagery of negative interpersonal experiences compared to relaxing imagery led to a prolonged change in affective state and to increased brain responses during the subsequent social interaction paradigm in the temporoparietal junction, medial prefrontal cortex, anterior cingulate cortex, precuneus and inferior frontal gyrus. Taken together this study presents a new naturalistic social interaction paradigm suitable to study the neural mechanisms of social interaction and the results demonstrate that the imagery of negative interpersonal experiences affects social interaction on neural levels.

负面的人际交往经历是导致精神障碍的关键因素。虽然之前的研究表明负面的人际交往经历会影响社会认知，但对参与社会交往和潜在神经生物学的影响知之甚少。为了解决这个问题，我们使用真实的凝视行为视频序列开发了一种新的自然主义版本的凝视条件范式，这些视频序列实时响应参与者的凝视，以创造一个可信且持续的互动社交情境。此外，参与者听了两个自传性音频脚本，引导他们想象最近的压力和放松的情况，并在呈现压力或放松的音频脚本之前和之后执行基于凝视的社交互动任务。我们的研究结果表明，社交互动任务有力地招募了已知参与社会认知的大脑区域，即内侧前额叶皮层、双侧颞顶交界处、颞上沟以及楔前叶。与放松的意象相比，负面人际交往经历的意象导致情感状态的长期变化，并在随后的颞顶交界处、内侧前额叶皮层、前扣带回皮层、楔前叶和额下回的社交互动范式中增加了大脑反应。综上所述，这项研究提出了一种新的自然主义社会互动范式，适用于研究社会互动的神经机制，结果表明负面人际体验的意象在神经层面上影响社会互动。