Schedule of Events | Symposia

Identification of four dialogue modes in daily conversations and their neural responses: an fMRI study

Poster Session D - Monday, March 31, 2025, 8:00 – 10:00 am EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Yin May Zin Han¹ (yin.may.zin.han.q3@dc.tohoku.ac.jp), Yichuan Huang¹, Sachihiro Shirahama¹, Ayumi Takemoto², Hyeonjeong Jeong², Motoaki Sugiura²; ¹Tohoku University, ²Institute of Development, Aging and Cancer, Tohoku University

In our daily communication, we have different social motivations to interact with others including intrinsic and extrinsic factors. For instance, engaging in social interaction may be rooted in intentions of personal joy or seeking approval from others. However, major social motivations for continued conversation in daily life and the neural mechanisms associated with motivation have not been identified. In this study, the dialogue modes (DM) which are characterized by social motivations for daily enjoyable conversations and the neural mechanisms of each dialogue modes were identified by conducting two steps of experiments, behavioral and functional magnetic resonance image (fMRI) experiments. First, to identify DMs, an online qualitative survey was conducted to generate the potential item survey measuring enjoyable daily conversations. This was followed by a quantitative survey and identified four DMs through factor analysis, including Relief (finding common worries with others), Novelty (talking with strangers), Comfort (chitchats with close people) and Interest (sharing hobbies). Secondly, the fMRI study was conducted with the short interactive conversational tasks with human-like avatars. The neural patterns across four DMs revealed distinct results. Precuneus associated with metacognition in Relief and social cognition processing areas e.g. SMG and left IPL in Comfort were more activated than other modes. However, decreased neural activities were found in mentalizing areas such as bilateral IPL for Novelty, and right TPJ and MTG etc. for Interest. This study suggests that there are four principal dialogue modes for daily chats, and various intrinsic-extrinsic motivations are involved in enjoyable daily conversations.

Topic Area: EMOTION & SOCIAL: Emotion-cognition interactions