The dorsomedial prefrontal cortex plays a causal role in mediating in-group advantage in emotion recognition: A TMS study

- Emotions are better recognized in-group vs. out-group members' faces.
- The neural bases of the in-group advantage in emotion recognition are still unclear.
- Here we applied TMS over dmPFC and rTPJ, two regions of the mentalizing network.
- TMS over dmPFC (but not TPJ) affected the in-group advantage in emotion recognition.

Consistent evidence suggests that emotional facial expressions are better recognized when the expresser and the perceiver belong to the same social group (in-group advantage). In this study, we used transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to investigate the possible causal involvement of the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC) and of the right temporo-parietal junction (TPJ), two main nodes of the mentalizing neural network, in mediating the in-group advantage in emotion recognition. Participants performed an emotion discrimination task in a minimal (blue/green) group paradigm. We found that interfering with activity in the dmPFC significantly interfered with the effect of minimal group-membership on emotion recognition, reducing participants' ability to discriminate emotions expressed by in-group members. In turn, rTPJ mainly affected emotion discrimination per se, irrespective of group membership. Overall, our results point to a causal role of the dmPFC in mediating the in-group advantage in emotion recognition, favoring intragroup communication.