Humans are inherently social beings, and the quality of their interactions is essential for maintaining physical and mental health. Effective social interaction involves understanding not just people's visible behavior but also the underlying factors like thoughts and emotions. This review investigates the convergence and divergence of meta-analytic brain activation for mentalizing, empathy, and social interaction engagement. To achieve this, we re-analyzed data from our prior meta-analysis on mentalizing and empathy using the same methodology as an existing meta-analysis on social interaction engagement. The comparison of brain activation maps focused on the question of whether the co-activation of cognitive and affective brain systems is an overarching characteristic of intermediate mentalizing/empathy tasks and social interaction engagement. Our findings support the general assumption that social interaction engagement co-recruits cognitive and affective brain systems also implicated in mentalizing and empathy. However, we found little direct overlap of brain activation for intermediate mentalizing/empathy tasks and social interaction engagement. Finally, applying a network neuroscience perspective, we suggest that social interaction engagement, affective/empathy, and intermediate mentalizing/empathy tasks are collectively characterized by co-recruitment of the default mode network and control networks.
Keywords: meta-analysis; social cognition; social interaction; theory of mind.