# Social Pain Disrupts Emotion-Action Brain-State Dynamics in Adolescents with Non-Suicidal Self-Injury

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11155 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.11155/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 4 of its 75 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Oct 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [A Time Series is Worth 64 Words: Long-term Forecasting with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.14730/) (2022)
- [Deep Domain Confusion: Maximizing for Domain Invariance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.3474/) (2014)
- [Model-Agnostic Interpretability of Machine Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.05386/) (2016)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Non-suicidal self-injury (NSSI) is prevalent among adolescents with depression, but the rapid brain-state dynamics linking social distress to maladaptive behavior remain unclear. We combine an experimental pain paradigm, electroencephalography (EEG) microstate analysis, and interpretable deep sequence modeling to investigate NSSI-related neurodynamics in 106 adolescents with depression, including 67 with NSSI (DN+) and 39 without NSSI (DN-), during social pain, physical pain, and resting-state conditions. A model integrating disease-specific, domain-adversarial, consistency, and contrastive learning captures higher-order dependencies in microstate sequences. Social pain yields the strongest NSSI discrimination, with 68.55% accuracy, outperforming the best baseline by 8.94% points. Model interpretation and conventional microstate analyses reveal weakened bidirectional transitions between MS3 and MS5 in DN+ adolescents during social pain. Source reconstruction associates MS3 with emotional/interoceptive processing and MS5 with action preparation, suggesting disrupted emotion-action coupling. Time-resolved analyses show greater early-to-middle action-state recruitment and later emotion-state recruitment in DN+ adolescents. In DN- adolescents, MS5-to-MS3 dynamics mediate associations between social-evaluation sensitivity and affective outcomes, whereas this mediation is absent in DN+; conversely, MS3-to-MS5 transitions are associated with greater negative affect in DN+. Together, these findings identify disrupted emotion-action coupling as a key neurodynamic mechanism underlying altered social pain processing in adolescents with NSSI, providing a mechanistically interpretable neural signature for objective identification of NSSI.