Decoding Inter-individual Relations from Spatial Similarity of Brain Activity

Classification-based data analysis is receiving increasing attention in neuroimaging. Here we decode the real-life relation between senders and perceivers of facial signals of affect by measuring the similarity of their brain activity during affective communication. Our results show that the brain activity of romantic partners is more similar during ongoing affective communication than the brain activity of strangers, and that this difference can be used to successfully classify romantic partners and strangers.