An Investigation of the Psychometric Properties of the Farsi Version of the Saint Louis University Mental Status Examination.

Dominance hierarchies are a pervasive feature of social organization across species. They structure access to resources, mating opportunities, and social influence. These hierarchies generate systematic asymmetries in behavior, physiology, and decision-making, making them central to understanding social cognition and adaptive behavior. To navigate such environments effectively, individuals must learn not only their own position within a hierarchy but also the relative relationships among others. Previous research has identified the brain systems supporting the learning of simple, linear hierarchies (i.e. members ranked: r < r < … < r) (–). However, real-world social structures are typically more complex, often involving relationships such as equality and branching dependencies. How the brain learns and represents these richer social structures, and how such representations support flexible inferences, remains poorly understood. In this study, we address this gap by investigating the neurocomputational mechanisms underlying the learning and memory of rank relationships in social networks (). A second, largely unexplored dimension of social hierarchy learning concerns the in which rank relationships are learned. In everyday social environments, individuals must simultaneously track their own position relative to others (self-oriented hierarchies) and the relationships among third parties that do not directly involve them (other-oriented hierarchies). A large body of social neuroscience research indicates that these two forms of processing rely on partially distinct brain systems (, ). Self-referential representations, including those required to evaluate one’s own skills compared to others during competitive interactions, preferentially engage egocentric value computations in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), whereas evaluating others from a third-party perspective recruits allocentric and mentalizing regions, such as the dorsomedial PFC (dmPFC), anterior cingulate cortex gyrus (ACCg) and amygdalo–hippocampal regions (, , ). For example, the anterior mPFC is more engaged in learning a linear social hierarchy when one belongs to it (egocentric frame) compared to a hierarchy in which one is not included (other-related) (), whereas a more dorsomedial PFC region represents self–other mergence in relation to estimation of others’ abilities (). Based on these findings, one could expect engagement of distinct medial PFC regions and/or differential engagement of the amygdala–hippocampal complex for learning social networks in self- vs other-oriented reference frames. A third key dimension concerns how neuromodulatory systems influence the learning and representation of social hierarchies. We focus on the neuropeptide oxytocin, an evolutionarily conserved hormone, because it acts on the same neural circuits implicated in social hierarchy learning, notably the amygdala–hippocampal complex and the medial prefrontal cortex (–, –). Converging evidence from animal studies shows that oxytocin contributes both to the formation of dominance relationships and to social memory processes (–). In nonhuman primates and rodents, oxytocin modulates sensitivity to social rank cues and can reshape hierarchical organization by altering dominance-related behaviors (–). At the same time, its effects on amygdalo–hippocampal circuits support the encoding and retrieval of social memory (, –). In humans, oxytocin has been shown to differentially modulate self- versus other-oriented reward learning (, –) and in-group/out-group decisions (), suggesting that its effects on social memory may depend upon the reference frame (e.g. whether one is embedded in the social hierarchy or not). Together, these findings position oxytocin as a key candidate for modulating the neurocomputational mechanisms that underlie the learning and memory of social rank relationships. However, its role in shaping these processes in social networks, particularly across self- versus other-oriented reference frames, remains unknown.