The paragraph summarizing the experiment is clarifying: > Significance. > Humans interacting with other humans must be able to understand their interaction pa

The paragraph summarizing the experiment is clarifying: > Significance. > Humans interacting with other humans must be able to understand their interaction partner’s affect and motivations, often without words. We examined whether people are attracted to others whose affective behavior they can easily understand. For this, we asked participants to watch different persons experiencing different emotions. We found the better a participant thought they could understand another person’s emotion the more they felt attracted toward that person. Importantly, these individual changes in interpersonal attraction were predicted by activity in the participant’s reward circuit, which in turn signaled how well the participant’s “neural vocabulary” was suited to decode the other’s behavior. This research elucidates neurobiological processes that might play an important role in the formation and success of human social relations.