Study shows how brain activity reflects dramatic social relationships

When watching a drama, we quickly learn who is friends with whom–and, just as importantly, who stands against whom. But how does the brain organize this web of alliances, rivalries, and conflicts? Researchers from – the University of Osaka have shown that social relationships learned through a television drama are reflected in patterns of brain activity, especially when those relationships are antagonistic. These findings will be published in Communication Psychology.

Humans need to understand not only individual people but also the relationships among them. Previous neuroscience studies have examined social networks by focusing on the number of connections or a person's position within a group. However, real relationships are not simply "connected" or "not connected." They also carry emotional meaning, including friendship, trust, competition, and hostility.

The research team asked 21 university students to watch six episodes of the television drama SUITS. Participants underwent fMRI scans before and after viewing the drama while looking at faces of eight main characters. After viewing, they rated all character pairs for relationship strength and whether the relationship was affiliative or antagonistic. Using representational similarity analysis, the researchers compared these ratings with brain activity patterns. They found that antagonistic relationships were strongly reflected in the left anterior supramarginal gyrus and right medial prefrontal cortex. In contrast, affiliative relationships did not show significant effects under the same criteria.

These findings suggest that the brain builds a multidimensional social map from narrative experience, and that rivalries and conflicts may serve as powerful anchors. The results could deepen understanding of story comprehension, social cognition, entertainment engagement, and future AI systems that infer human relationships.

Professor Tamami Nakano notes that "when we imagine a drama's character map, we pay attention not only to who is close, but also to who is in conflict. This study shows that such natural social understanding is reflected in the brain."