However, successful social interactions require both the ability to detect others' emotions and to adapt our behavior to theirs.
Social brain function, which allows us to adapt our behavior to social context, is poorly understood at the single-cell level due largely to technical limitations.
These results confirm the role of empathy in regulating social interactions and our ability to adapt our behavior to others' emotional state (e.g., [51]), as shown, for example, by the well-known literature on emotional contagion (e.g., [52]).
To adapt our behavior to a changing world, we need to be able to use our experience in order to transfer known solutions to new situations.
Yet paradoxically, we don't feel that each situation is new, often finding it familiar, and overall we are able to adapt our behavior to each one".
Previous studies have already shown that we are able to identify ourselves or empathize with our avatar and to adapt our behavior accordingly (Yee & Bailenson, 2007, 2009; Yee, Bailenson, & Ducheneaut, 2009).
The DLPFC has been proposed to be involved in the executive "top-down" control of behavior such as when we need to adapt our behavior to a changing environment, override habitual responses or shift between different tasks (Miller and Cohen 2001; Passingham and Sakai 2004; Hoshi 2006; Mansouri et al. 2009).
This ability to adapt our behavior relies on 2 fundamental (and interacting) properties of the human brain: the capacity to build and maintain mental representations that guide our actions and the capacity to find similarities between these distinct representations, for example, between past experiences and the present situation.
Analogical reasoning is thus central for learning and abstract thinking (Gentner 1983; Kotovsky and Gentner 1996; Gentner and Holyoak 1997; Holyoak and Thagard 1997), to solve new problems and to make predictions, to adapt our behavior to changing situations, and for creative thinking (Holyoak and Kroger 1995; French 2002; Bowdle and Gentner 2005; Geake and Hansen 2005).
Like an athlete who learns to deal with the constant load of weight training, we learn to manage, or "adapt," our behavior and attitudes to the load we are under.
