Sébastien Hétu

Université de Montréal | UdeM · Department of Psychology

Motor imagery (MI) or the mental simulation of action is now increasingly being studied using neuroimaging techniques such as positron emission tomography and functional magnetic resonance imaging. The booming interest in capturing the neural underpinning of MI has provided a large amount of data which until now have never been quantitatively summa...

The habenula is a hub for cognitive and emotional signals that are relayed to the aminergic centers in the midbrain and, thus, plays an important role in goal-oriented behaviors. Although it is well described in rodents and non-human primates, the habenula functional network remains relatively uncharacterized in humans, partly because of the method...

Motor representations in the human mirror neuron system are tuned to respond to specific observed actions. This ability is widely believed to be influenced by genetic factors, but no study has reported a genetic variant affecting this system so far. One possibility is that genetic variants might interact with visuomotor associative learning to conf...

Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) studies have shown that observing an action induces muscle-specific changes in corticospinal excitability. From a signal detection theory standpoint, this pattern can be related to sensitivity, which here would measure the capacity to distinguish between two action observation conditions. In parallel to these...

Action observation is increasingly considered as a rehabilitation tool as it can increase the cortical excitability of muscles involved in the observed movements and therefore produce effector-specific motor facilitation. In order to investigate the action observation mechanisms, simple single joint intransitive movements have commonly been used. S...

Previous research indicates that the anticipatory shame an individual feels at the prospect of taking a disgraceful action closely tracks the degree to which local audiences, and even foreign audiences, devalue those individuals who take that action. This supports the proposition that the shame system (a) defends the individual against the threat o...

Adequate social functioning during childhood requires context-appropriate social decision-making. To make such decisions, children rely on their social norms, conceptualized as cognitive models of shared expectations. Since social norms are dynamic, children must adapt their models of shared expectations and modify their behavior in line with their...

Needing is related to deprivation of something biologically significant, and wanting is linked to reward prediction and dopamine and usually has more power on behavioral activation than need states alone. The interaction and independence between needing and wanting in terms of brain functioning is not so defined, and it is unclear why sometimes the...

We looked at the overlap between brain areas related to perception of physiologically and socially needed stimuli and how they might regulate serotonin levels. First, we conducted separate ALE meta-analyses on published results pertaining to brain activation patterns when participants perceived food while hungry or water while thirsty, and social i...

Sociomoral reasoning (SMR) is an essential component of social functioning allowing children to establish judgments based on moral criteria. The progressive emergence and complexification of SMR during childhood is thought to be underpinned by a range of characteristics and abilities present in the preschool years. Past studies have mostly examined...

Les conséquences de la COVID-19 sont de plus en plus documentées. À cet effet, la situation sanitaire actuelle amène les adultes à vivre davantage d’émotions négatives, notamment l’émotion de peur. Bien que, dans l’ensemble, la population adulte rapporte vivre davantage de peur, des différences de genre sont observées; les hommes auraient tendance...

Due to their well-known impacts on social functioning, empathy deficits are of considerable importance in the study of pathological personality traits. Recent studies have compared two measures of multidimensional empathy on different personality features: the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI), a widely used measure, and the Affective and Cognit...

Consumption and its excesses are sometimes explained by imbalance of need or lack of control over "wanting". "Wanting" assigns value to cues that predict rewards, whereas "needing" assigns value to biologically significant stimuli that one is deprived of. Here we aimed at studying how the brain activation patterns related to value of wanted stimuli...

La tétrade sombre est composée de quatre traits de la personnalité socialement aversifs et antagonistes, soit la psychopathie, le machiavélisme, le narcissisme et le sadisme, conçus selon une approche dimensionnelle (et non purement diagnostique). Bon nombre d’études démontrent que le manque d’empathie serait la caractéristique centrale de ce const...

Le Journal sur l'identité, les relations interpersonnelles et les relations intergroupes (JIRIRI) est un journal scientifique international publié annuellement au mois d'avril et affilié à l'Université de Montréal. Le JIRIRI a été fondé par la professeure Roxane de la Sablonnière en 2007 et a publié son quatorzième volume à l'hiver 2021. Notre miss...

Recent overarching frameworks propose that various human social interactions are commonly supported by a set of fundamental neuropsychological processes, including social cognition, motivation, and cognitive control. However, it remains unclear whether brain networks implicated in these functional constructs are consistently engaged in diverse soci...

Activity changes in dopaminergic neurons encode the ongoing discrepancy between expected and actual value of a stimulus, providing a teaching signal for a reward prediction process. Previous work comparing a cohort of long-term Zen meditators to controls demonstrated an attenuation of reward prediction signals to appetitive reward in the striatum....

Early childhood educational investment produces positive effects on cognitive and non-cognitive skills, health, and socio-economic success. However, the effects of such interventions on social decision-making later in life are unknown. We recalled participants from one of the oldest randomized controlled studies of early childhood investment-the Ab...

COVER ILLUSTRATION: Social comparison is ubiquitous in human life. Downward comparison (better than others) engages consistent involvement of the reward-related regions such as ventral striatum, while upward comparison (worse than others) engages consistent involvement of regions implicated in aversive feelings such as anterior insula.

Social comparison is ubiquitous across human societies with dramatic influence on people's well-being and decision making. Downward comparison (comparing to worse-off others) and upward comparison (comparing to better-off others) constitute two types of social comparisons that produce different neuropsychological consequences. Based on studies expl...

As models of shared expectations, social norms play an essential role in our societies. Since our social environment is changing constantly, our internal models of it also need to change. In humans, there is mounting evidence that neural structures such as the insula and the ventral striatum are involved in detecting norm violation and updating int...

Little is still known about the mentalizing capacities of childhood sexual abuse (CSA) survivors. This study is aimed at measuring and describing the mentalizing capacities of 30 adult CSA survivors using an interview discussing disclosure of experiences as coded by the Trauma-Specific Reflective Functioning Scale. Forty percent of the sample prese...

Empathy is an important driver of human social behaviors and presents genetic roots that have been studied in neuroimaging using the intermediate phenotype approach. Notably, the Val66Met polymorphism of the Brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) gene has been identified as a potential target in neuroimaging studies based on its influence on emot...

Data underlying the findings reported in the manuscript. (XLSX)

Emotion perception has been extensively studied in cognitive neurosciences and stands as a promising intermediate phenotype of social cognitive processes and psychopathologies. Exciting imaging genetic studies have recently identified genetic and epigenetic variants affecting brain responses during emotion perception tasks, but characterizing how t...

Introduction: Purposeful activity is believed to yield better results than meaningless exercises during motor rehabilitation. The objective of this paper is to provide a narrative review of the literature regarding the influence of object affordance on motor performance, a factor that contributes to the purposefulness of a task. Method: Thirty-fiv...

I had just received my badge, the conference program, and the complimentary laptop sleeve; I turned around and stood face to face with John, who was also waiting in line to register for the conference. We exchanged a short word of greeting and we shook hands wholeheartedly. When this encounter was over, I bumped into Mary; we both expressed our sur...

Results from contrast analyses. List and coordinates of the regions showing greater blood oxygenation level-dependent signal response obtained from the contrast analyses. Contrast 1 identified regions activated during action observation and contrast 2 regions activated during action execution. The effect of visual perspective was investigated with...

Coordinates of the areas resulting from the conjunction analysis. List and coordinates of the areas that showed overlapping activity for the OBSERVE-BASELINE and EXECUTE-BASELINE contrasts. Coordinates are in Montreal Neurological Institute (MNI) stereotaxic space. (DOC)

The coupling process between observed and performed actions is thought to be performed by a fronto-parietal perception-action system including regions of the inferior frontal gyrus and the inferior parietal lobule. When investigating the influence of the movements' characteristics on this process, most research on action observation has focused on...

It is generally considered that hand amputation changes primary motor cortex (M1) stump muscle representations. Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) studies show that the corticospinal excitability of a stump muscle and its homologous muscle on the intact side is not equivalent, and that the resting level of excitability is higher in the stump m...

Observation of hand movements has been repeatedly demonstrated to increase the excitability of the motor cortical representation of the hand. Little attention, however, has been devoted to its effect on somatosensory processing. Movement execution is well known to decrease somatosensory cortical excitability, a phenomenon termed 'gating'. As execut...

Recent evidence shows that the primary motor cortex continues to send motor commands when amputees execute phantom movements. These commands are retargeted toward the remaining stump muscles as a result of motor system reorganization. As amputation-induced reorganization in the primary motor cortex has been associated with phantom limb pain we hypo...