Your Brain Registers Others’ Feelings Even When You Don’t

Summary: A new fMRI study reveals that our brains encode both what others intend to express emotionally and how we consciously infer their feelings—two distinct processes. Researchers trained machine-learning models on brain activity to separately predict the speaker’s self-reported emotions and the observer’s inferences. They found that even when people misjudged someone’s emotions, their brain still carried a latent signature of the speaker’s intended feeling. Alignment between these two brain patterns predicted greater empathic accuracy, offering insights into how social understanding works and why it sometimes fails.