The researchers recruited 85 right-handed-dominant participants, split into 42 younger adults aged 20 to 35 and 43 older adults aged 60 to 79, all community-dwelling and free of neurological or psychiatric disorders. Each participant sat in a dark, acoustically shielded room while 150 trait adjectives flashed on a screen, one every few seconds. The words, drawn from a standardized list of personality descriptors and carefully balanced for positive, negative, and neutral valence, had to be judged as suitable or unsuitable for describing three different targets: the self, a personally chosen close other such as a partner or child, and a favorite famous person selected from a list of Polish celebrities. Sixty-two scalp electrodes recorded the brain’s millisecond-by-millisecond response throughout, allowing the team to track both the timing of neural events and the direction of information flow between brain regions.

The study’s design was deliberately built around two well-characterized electrical signatures. The first is the P1, a positive deflection peaking roughly 100 milliseconds after a stimulus appears, generated in extrastriate visual cortex and famously amplified by attention. The second is the late positive potential, or LPP, a broad frontal-central-parietal wave emerging around 400 to 500 milliseconds that indexes a global, temporary boost of attentional resources devoted to salient or motivationally significant stimuli. Decades of work show that self-relevant material, from one’s own face to self-descriptive words, reliably inflates the LPP. By measuring both components across the three reflection targets, the team could separate early perceptual gating from later evaluative processing and ask whether aging alters one, the other, or both.

The behavioral results already hinted at something interesting. Younger participants endorsed more traits as self-descriptive than they did for the close other or the famous person, a classic self-prioritization effect, while older adults distributed their yes answers more evenly across targets. Reaction times told a familiar story of generalized slowing: older adults were slower overall, and the gap was widest precisely in the self condition, where median responses stretched to nearly 1.2 seconds compared with about 940 milliseconds in the young group. Given that slower responses in the self condition appeared in both age groups relative to the famous-person condition, the data suggest that judging one’s own character is inherently the most demanding version of the task, and that aging amplifies that demand.

The electrophysiology sharpened the picture considerably. At the occipital electrode O1, P1 amplitudes were significantly reduced in older adults across all three conditions, with no condition-specific modulation in either group. This replicates a large literature showing that early visual attentional processing is among the first casualties of normal aging, and it indicates that older brains engage less early attentional amplification when processing socially relevant words, regardless of who those words describe. In other words, the age-related P1 reduction was a blanket effect, not a selective weakening of the self-bias at the perceptual stage.

The LPP results, by contrast, revealed a striking reversal. When the researchers pooled frontal electrodes F1, F3, and F5 and analyzed mean amplitudes in the 400 to 800 millisecond window, they found that self-referential traits produced significantly larger LPPs in older adults than in younger ones, while the close-other and famous-person conditions showed no age differences at all. The authors offer two compatible interpretations. The enhanced LPP may reflect stronger subjective emotional responses to self-related traits in older adults, consistent with developmental theories holding that aging shifts emotional priorities toward internally meaningful information and the self. Alternatively, or additionally, it may signal increased cognitive effort: older adults may need to recruit extra attentional and evaluative resources to accomplish self-judgments that younger brains perform more cheaply, a pattern consistent with compensation models of cognitive aging such as the CRUNCH hypothesis.

The most technically ambitious part of the study went beyond surface potentials entirely. Using the full-frequency directed transfer function, or ffDTF, a Granger-causality measure fitted through multivariate autoregressive modeling, the team estimated the direction and strength of information flow between three scalp-defined regions of interest: a visual input region, a posterior parietal region, and an anterior frontal region. Unlike fMRI connectivity, which is inherently correlational, this approach can in principle distinguish a signal traveling from sensory cortex toward frontal evaluative systems from the reverse, top-down feedback. The electrodes were grouped based on converging neuroimaging evidence linking these territories to default mode network activity and to the distributed networks underlying the LPP, though the authors caution that these are scalp-level approximations rather than direct measurements of anatomical network nodes.

The connectivity findings were unambiguous in their overall direction. In all three analyzed time windows, from stimulus onset out to 1200 milliseconds, younger adults showed stronger directed connectivity than older adults. The most robust, multiple-comparison-corrected effects emerged in the intermediate 400 to 800 millisecond window, where younger participants showed stronger feed-forward signaling from visual to anterior regions, from posterior to anterior regions, and from posterior back to visual regions, along with stronger local connectivity within the posterior region itself. This mid-latency concentration suggests a specific processing stage, associated with higher-order perceptual integration, where age-related communication deficits bite hardest. The pattern echoes prior fMRI work showing attenuated default mode network connectivity during self-referential judgments in older adults, but adds the crucial element of directionality that correlational methods cannot provide.

What biological forces might underlie this weakening of neural dialogue? The authors point to a convergence of mechanisms documented in the aging literature: declining white matter integrity that slows conduction between distant regions, loss of dendritic spines and synaptic density, impaired synaptic plasticity, and increased neural noise that degrades the signal-to-noise ratio of cortical communication. Together these support the cortical disconnection hypothesis of aging, which holds that distributed neural systems become slower, less precise, and less coordinated with advancing age. The full picture that emerges is one of paradox: an aging brain that transmits information less efficiently across its networks, yet invests more attentional and emotional resources when the subject of evaluation is the self. Older adults, the study suggests, do not lose their capacity for self-reflection; they pay more for it, both in time and in neural effort, while their sense of who they are may grow only more emotionally charged.

Subject of Research: Age-related changes in the neural correlates of self- and other-referential trait processing in healthy aging

Article Title: Age-related differences in neural activity and functional connectivity during self- and other-referential processing: An EEG study

Article References: Paź, M., Kamiński, M., & Nowicka, A. (2026). Age-related differences in neural activity and functional connectivity during self- and other-referential processing: An EEG study. GeroScience. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11357-026-02571-7

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s11357-026-02571-7

Keywords: aging brain, self-referential processing, EEG, late positive potential, P1 component, functional connectivity, directed transfer function, default mode network, GeroScience, cognitive aging, event-related potentials, self-knowledge

The research team recruited thirty-seven adolescents diagnosed with major depressive disorder and thirty-two demographically matched healthy controls. The depressed group had a mean age of 16.46 years with a standard deviation of 2.02, while the control group averaged 16.54 years with a standard deviation of 2.29, making the two samples closely comparable. Diagnosis followed the criteria of the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, and the study protocol received ethics approval from the Ethics Committee of Shandong Normal University and the Shandong Mental Health Center. Written informed consent was obtained from all participants and their legal guardians, and the work was conducted in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki. Participants received monetary compensation for completing the experimental session, which took place at laboratories affiliated with Shandong Normal University and the Shandong Mental Health Center in Jinan, China.

At the heart of the experiment was a social exclusion scenario imagination task, a paradigm designed to bring the emotional reality of peer rejection into the laboratory without exposing participants to actual social harm. On each trial, participants read a scenario depicting social exclusion and were asked to vividly imagine themselves as the excluded individual. The task then diverged into two conditions. In the regulation condition, participants were instructed to use self-compassionate statements, internally directed expressions of kindness and understanding toward oneself, while continuing to imagine the exclusionary scene, and afterwards they rated how much self-compassion they had actually engaged in. In the non-regulation condition, participants were told not to use such statements and instead rated their negative emotions immediately after the imagination period. This design allowed the researchers to separate the raw emotional impact of exclusion from the modulating effect of deliberate self-compassion.

Throughout the task, the researchers recorded electroencephalographic signals from the participants’ scalps. The data were preprocessed using standard event-related potential techniques, including independent component analysis to remove artifacts, and the analysis centered on the late positive potential, or LPP, a deflection in the EEG signal that emerges roughly several hundred milliseconds after a stimulus and is widely regarded as an index of motivated attention and sustained emotional processing. Larger LPP amplitudes generally indicate that the brain is allocating more resources to an emotionally salient event and continuing to process it. By comparing LPP amplitudes between the regulation and non-regulation conditions, and between the depressed and healthy groups, the team could ask whether self-compassion changes not just what adolescents feel, but how their brains handle the emotional aftermath of rejection.

The behavioral results told a clear and clinically important story. Compared with the non-regulation condition, both groups reported less negative emotion when they used self-compassionate statements, confirming that self-compassion is an effective emotion regulation strategy even in the context of social exclusion. However, the two groups diverged sharply in how well the strategy worked. Adolescents with depression gave significantly lower self-compassion ratings than their healthy peers, indicating that when asked to treat themselves kindly, they felt they had accomplished far less of it. They also showed a significantly smaller decrease in negative emotions between the non-regulation and regulation conditions. In other words, the depressed adolescents were not merely sadder after exclusion; their attempts to soothe themselves produced a weaker emotional payoff.

The correlational analysis added a crucial layer to this picture. Across participants, higher self-compassion ratings were associated with a greater emotion regulation effect, and this relationship was particularly pronounced in the adolescents with depression. This pattern suggests that the degree to which a depressed teenager genuinely engages in self-compassion, rather than merely going through the motions, may be a key determinant of whether the strategy confers emotional relief. For clinicians, this is a potentially actionable insight: simply instructing a depressed adolescent to be kind to themselves may be insufficient if the internal experience of self-compassion is blunted. Interventions may need to focus on strengthening the felt sense of self-kindness before it can serve as an effective regulatory tool.

The neural findings were equally striking. Late positive potential amplitudes were significantly higher in adolescents with depression than in healthy controls during both the regulation and non-regulation conditions. Elevated LPP amplitudes in the depressed group indicate that their brains remained engaged with the emotionally charged exclusion scenarios to a greater degree, regardless of whether they were actively trying to regulate. This sustained neural response is consistent with the clinical observation that depressed individuals ruminate, returning again and again to painful social experiences. Notably, the elevation persisted even in the regulation condition, suggesting that self-compassion instructions did not fully dampen the heightened emotional processing in the depressed brain, which aligns with the group’s smaller behavioral regulation effect.

Taken together, the behavioral and electrophysiological data converge on a single conclusion: adolescents with depression are characterized by an impairment in using self-compassion to downregulate negative emotions when confronted with social exclusion. The authors argue that the consistently elevated LPP amplitudes underscore this brain response as a critical focus for psychophysiologically informed therapies. If the LPP indexes the neural persistence of social pain, then treatments that successfully reduce it, whether through compassion-focused therapy, cognitive behavioral approaches, or neurofeedback-style training that gives patients real-time feedback about their own emotional processing, could be evaluated objectively rather than relying solely on self-report. The measure could also serve as a biomarker for identifying which adolescents are most likely to struggle with self-compassion-based interventions.

The study’s methodological choices deserve attention. Scenario imagination offers a controlled and ethically manageable way to evoke social pain, and the within-subject comparison of regulation and non-regulation conditions isolates the specific contribution of self-compassion from the general distress of exclusion. The use of a demographically matched control group strengthens the inference that the observed differences are tied to depression rather than to age, education, or other background variables. At the same time, the sample sizes, thirty-seven and thirty-two participants, are modest, and the scenario-based paradigm, while powerful, differs from real-world exclusion in intensity and personal relevance. The authors also note that the article was shared early to provide faster access to peer-reviewed, accepted research, with a final version of record to follow.

The broader significance of this work lies in its bridge between affective neuroscience and adolescent mental health practice. Depression frequently emerges during adolescence, a developmental window in which peer acceptance carries extraordinary weight and social rejection can trigger cascades of self-criticism and withdrawal. By demonstrating that the capacity for self-compassion is both subjectively diminished and neurally distinguishable in depressed teenagers, the study gives researchers and clinicians a concrete target. The research was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the Youth Innovation Team in Universities of Shandong Province, and the Shandong Provincial Natural Science Foundation, and the authors declared no competing interests. As self-compassion training continues to gain traction as a low-cost, scalable intervention, this study provides a caution and a promise: the strategy works, but in depressed adolescents it must be cultivated carefully, and the brain’s own signals may show whether that cultivation is taking root.

Subject of Research: Neural mechanisms of impaired self-compassion during social exclusion in adolescents with major depressive disorder

Article Title: Neural mechanisms of impaired self-compassion in depressed adolescents during social exclusion

Article References: Sun, H., Zou, W., Wang, D., Zhang, Y., Bai, C., Li, W., Xiao, Y., Niu, X., Shao, X., Wang, X., Hommel, B., Yang, Y., & Wang, K. (2026). Neural mechanisms of impaired self-compassion in depressed adolescents during social exclusion. BMC Psychiatry. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12888-026-08610-z

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12888-026-08610-z

Keywords: adolescent depression, self-compassion, social exclusion, emotion regulation, EEG, late positive potential, event-related potentials, major depressive disorder, social neuroscience, psychophysiology, mental health, BMC Psychiatry

The study was motivated by a persistent puzzle in environmental psychology. Human activities account for roughly 72 percent of total greenhouse gas emissions, and virtually every daily choice—what to eat, how to travel, what to buy—contributes to the problem. Yet motivating individuals to change their behavior remains notoriously difficult. Climate change is an extensive, protracted, and uncertain problem, which can evoke feelings of powerlessness or a sense of inequity when tackled at the individual level. One promising remedy is to reframe climate change as a collective social issue, harnessing the power of social norms: people constantly compare their own behavior to that of others and adjust accordingly, a process psychologists call social conformity.

But social norms carry what the researchers describe as a double-edged power. Observing neighbors adopt greenhouse gas-reducing behaviors can encourage imitation, and surveys show that people increase pro-climate behavior when they perceive such norms around them. Conversely, social influence can also inhibit sustainable action: visible littering, for example, increases the probability that others will litter, in line with the broken windows effect. Because there is no single, unambiguous social norm about climate behavior, understanding the mechanisms of conformity in both pro-climate and anti-climate directions—and whether those effects last—became the central question of the new work.

To answer it, a team led by Dahye Yeon and Ji-Bum Chung of Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology, together with colleagues at Hanyang University, recruited 50 students and analyzed data from 47 after exclusions. Participants rated their intention to perform 113 pro-climate behaviors drawn from the UN’s 170 climate change actions and Korean government guidance, expressed on a continuous scale from 0 to 100 percent. Immediately after each rating, a fictitious group opinion—presented as the average intention of fellow UNIST students—appeared alongside their own response. The group opinion was algorithmically manipulated in real time along two dimensions: deviation from the participant’s initial answer (congruent, moderately incongruent at about 15 percent, or highly incongruent at about 35 percent) and direction (pro-climate, meaning the group was more climate-friendly, or anti-climate, meaning it was less).

Participants then repeated their ratings twice: once immediately afterward, allowing the researchers to compute immediate conformity as the change from the first to the second response, and once seven days later, capturing sustained conformity as the change from the first to the third response. This three-session design, rare in environmental psychology, allowed the team to distinguish transient compliance from genuine attitude change. Linear mixed-effects models with crossed random intercepts for participants and stimulus items analyzed 5,311 valid trials, and additional analyses controlling for regression to the mean confirmed that the effects could not be explained by participants simply drifting back toward average responses.

The behavioral results were clear. Immediate conformity increased systematically with greater deviation from the norm, regardless of direction: in the anti-climate condition, ratings shifted by −1.50 under congruent norms, −3.09 under moderately incongruent norms, and −5.43 under highly incongruent norms, while the pro-climate condition produced mirror-image positive shifts up to +5.31. The dramatic difference emerged one week later. Conformity toward highly incongruent pro-climate norms was amplified over time, with the estimated effect growing to 12.91 points, whereas conformity toward anti-climate norms remained comparatively weak and did not strengthen. According to the authors, immediate conformity likely reflects normative influence—complying with group pressure to avoid disapproval—while sustained conformity reflects informational influence and internalization, in which norms are accepted as credible evidence about what is genuinely appropriate.

The electroencephalographic recordings added a crucial layer. EEG was captured during the first two sessions from 31 electrodes, and the team analyzed two event-related potentials linked to conformity in prior research: feedback-related negativity (FRN), a frontocentral deflection peaking roughly 200 to 400 milliseconds after feedback that signals error detection and social conflict, and the late positive potential (LPP), appearing from about 300 to 400 milliseconds onward and associated with the perception of social approval and elaborative evaluation. The prediction, grounded in social norm theory and the Value-Identity-Personal (VIP) framework, was that because pro-climate behavior is morally positive, discrepancies with anti-climate norms would register as errors, whereas discrepancies with pro-climate norms would feel consistent with participants’ moral self-concept.

The neural data largely fit that profile. FRN modulation was observed only in anti-climate conditions, with a significant contrast between congruent and highly incongruent trials, suggesting that large deviations toward anti-climate group opinions were weakly processed as error signals or negative social feedback, while pro-climate discrepancies produced no comparable conflict response. The LPP, measured at the Pz electrode in a 500 to 700 millisecond window, showed a significant deviation-by-direction interaction: under anti-climate pressure, larger discrepancies elicited greater LPP amplitudes, consistent with heightened cognitive engagement with norm-incongruent information, whereas under pro-climate pressure, LPP amplitudes were attenuated at higher discrepancy levels—possibly because participants accepted pro-climate norms as socially desirable standards rather than processing them as errors. The authors caution that these ERP effects were limited and exploratory, but they illustrate how neurophysiology can reveal processing differences invisible to self-report, which is vulnerable to social desirability and experimenter demand biases.

The study also examined whether personal predispositions moderate conformity, using a questionnaire based on the VIP theory assessing biospheric values, environmental identity through the nature relatedness scale, and personal norms of moral obligation. Demographics influenced baseline intentions—women and supporters of non-conservative parties reported higher pro-climate intentions—but neither sex nor political affiliation affected conformity itself, suggesting norm-based interventions can work across demographic groups. Personal norms emerged as the most consistent moderator: individuals with strong personal norms resisted social pressure and defended their initial positions, particularly against pro-climate norms, indicating they had already internalized those attitudes. Biospheric values similarly predicted resistance to anti-climate pressure over the week-long delay.

The authors acknowledge limitations, including a homogeneous sample of Korean science and technology students with likely elevated climate awareness, the absence of a no-norm control condition, and the treatment of all pro-climate behaviors as roughly equivalent in cost and effort. Cross-cultural replication is needed, especially since South Korea is a context of heightened sensitivity to collective consensus—making the durability of pro-climate conformity there all the more telling. Still, the policy implications are provocative: messages emphasizing anti-climate descriptive norms, such as how many people are failing to act, may generate only fleeting compliance, while communicating pro-climate behaviors as socially validated, credible standards can produce lasting shifts in intention. As the authors conclude, presenting pro-climate social norms and highlighting when individuals fall short of them may be a more reliable route to sustainable behavior than moral appeals alone.

Subject of Research: Social conformity in pro-climate behavior examined through behavioral experiments and EEG measures of social norm influence

Article Title: Exploring social conformity in pro-climate behavior: behavioral and neurophysiological responses

Article References: Yeon, D., Kim, J., Lee, B., Shim, M., Sul, S., Kim, S.-P., & Chung, J.-B. (2026). Exploring social conformity in pro-climate behavior: behavioral and neurophysiological responses. Current Psychology, 45(18), Article 1524. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-026-10066-z

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12144-026-10066-z

Keywords: social conformity, pro-climate behavior, social norms, EEG, event-related potentials, feedback-related negativity, late positive potential, environmental psychology, sustainability, climate change behavior, social influence, personal norms