The good, the bad, and the in-between: an exploratory study of how different groups may be represented in the brain.

Overview

1. Psychology and Educational Sciences, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Brussels, Belgium

Abstract

Introduction: Social categorization is a fundamental aspect of social perception, enabling individuals to process vast amounts of information efficiently. This exploratory fMRI study investigated whether different types of social groups are represented in the brain as stable memory representations.

Methods: We used repetition suppression as a proxy-measurement for such stable representation, examining four groups categorized by their warmth and competence into the quadrants of the Stereotype Content Model (SCM). Participants judged the typicality of behavioral sentences associated with these groups, presented in pairs that either repeated the same group, or not.

Results: A repetition suppression pattern was observed in the posterior temporal sulcus (pSTS) for groups with mixed warmth and competence; specifically the rich (low warmth, high competence) and the poor (high warmth, low competence). By contrast, no suppression was detected for non-mixed groups (military people and welfare recipients).

Discussion: We theorize that mixed groups elicit greater ambiguity, which may prompt the brain to form more robust representations to quickly assess their functional relevance. These findings suggest that stable group representations are not uniformly applied across all group types and may reflect social complexity and motivational salience. The results highlight the pSTS as a key node in group representation and invite further research into its functional role.

Reproduced under the paper's license (CC BY), from the paper cited above.

Code

The paper links to its data, not to its authors' code: see the Data section.

The paper's code and data availability statement is in the Data section.

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Data

Datasets cited

• osf:tdxyu, at OSF; found in “Data availability statement”

Data availability statement

All requested (pseudonymized or anonymous) fMRI data are available upon request, excluding data that allow identifying individual participants. All manuals and code for processing the data is also available together with the data. Behavioral data, stimulus materials, pilot data, and its analyses are available via the Open Science Framework at https://osf.io/tdxyu.

Reproduced under the paper's license (CC BY), from the paper cited above.

Versions

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Version 1, 28 September 2026: the first record

Recorded: type, language, journal, volume, pages, dates, 2 authors, 6 keywords, 73 references.

Cite

This paper

Delplanque, J., & Van Overwalle, F. (2026). The good, the bad, and the in-between: an exploratory study of how different groups may be represented in the brain. Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience, 20, 1773300. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnbeh.2026.1773300

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