scholarly journals Social information impairs reward learning in depressive subjects: behavioral and computational characterization

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lou Safra ◽  
Coralie Chevallier ◽  
Stefano Palminteri
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Social Context ◽  
Depressive Disorders ◽  
Social Information ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
Reward Processing ◽  
Reward Learning ◽  
Depression And Anxiety ◽  
Cognitive Mechanisms ◽  
The Social

AbstractDepression is characterized by a marked decrease in social interactions and blunted sensitivity to rewards. Surprisingly, despite the importance of social deficits in depression, non-social aspects have been disproportionally investigated. As a consequence, the cognitive mechanisms underlying atypical decision-making in social contexts in depression are poorly understood. In the present study, we investigate whether deficits in reward processing interact with the social context and how this interaction is affected by self-reported depression and anxiety symptoms. Two cohorts of subjects (discovery and replication sample:N= 50 each) took part in a task involving reward learning in a social context with different levels of social information (absent, partial and complete). Behavioral analyses revealed a specific detrimental effect of depressive symptoms – but not anxiety – on behavioral performance in the presence of social information, i.e. when participants were informed about the choices of another player. Model-based analyses further characterized the computational nature of this deficit as a negative audience effect, rather than a deficit in the way others’ choices and rewards are integrated in decision making. To conclude, our results shed light on the cognitive and computational mechanisms underlying the interaction between social cognition, reward learning and decision-making in depressive disorders.

scholarly journals Decision-makers use social information to update their preferences—but choose for others as they do for themselves

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Michael ◽  
Alina Gutoreva ◽  
Huixian Michele Lee ◽  
Peng Ning Tan ◽  
Eleanor M. Bruce ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Social Context ◽  
Social Factors ◽  
Social Information ◽  
Decision Makers ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Risky Decisions

People’s risky decisions can be highly influenced by the social context in which they take place. Across three experiments we investigated the influence of three social factors upon participants’ decisions: the recipient of the decision-making outcome (self, other, or joint), the nature of the relationship with the other agent (friend, stranger, or teammate), and the type of information that participants received about others’ preferences: none at all, information about how previous participants had decided, or information about a partner’s preference. We found that participants’ decisions about risk did not differ according to whether the outcome at stake was their own, another agent’s, or a joint outcome, nor according to the type of information available. Participants were, however, willing to adjust their preferences for risky options in light of social information.

Neurobiological Reward-Related Abnormalities Across Mood Disorders

2019 ◽  
pp. 222-238
Author(s):  
Alexis E. Whitton ◽  
Michael T. Treadway ◽  
Manon L. Ironside ◽  
Diego A. Pizzagalli
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Mood Disorders ◽  
Treatment Strategies ◽  
Reward Processing ◽  
Reward Learning ◽  
Symptom Presentation ◽  
Psychiatric Symptomatology ◽  
Symptom Dimensions ◽  
Psychotherapeutic Interventions ◽  
Primary Focus

This chapter provides a critical review of recent behavioral and neuroimaging evidence of reward processing abnormalities in mood disorders. The primary focus is on the neural mechanisms underlying disruption in approach motivation, reward learning, and reward-based decision-making in major depression and bipolar disorder. Efforts focused on understanding how reward-related impairments contribute to psychiatric symptomatology have grown substantially in recent years. This has been driven by significant advances in the understanding of the neurobiology of reward processing and a growing recognition that disturbances in motivation and hedonic capacity are poorly targeted by current pharmacological and psychotherapeutic interventions. As a result, numerous studies have sought to test the presence of reward circuit dysfunction in psychiatric disorders that are marked by anhedonia, amotivation, mania, and impulsivity. Moreover, as the field has increasingly eschewed categorical diagnostic boundaries in favor of symptom dimensions, there has been a parallel rise in studies seeking to identify transdiagnostic neural markers of reward processing dysfunction that may transcend disorders. The thesis of this chapter is twofold: First, evidence indicates that specific subcomponents of reward processing map onto partially distinct neurobiological pathways. Second, specific subcomponents of reward processing, including reward learning and effort-based decision-making, are impaired across different mood disorder diagnoses and may point to dimensions in symptom presentation that possess more reliable behavioral and neural correlates. The potential for these findings to inform the development of prevention and treatment strategies is discussed.

scholarly journals Individual behavioural traits not social context affects learning about novel objects in archerfish

2021 ◽  
Vol 75 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Nick A. R. Jones ◽  
Helen C. Spence-Jones ◽  
Mike Webster ◽  
Luke Rendell
Keyword(s):  
Social Context ◽  
Social Environment ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
Negative Effects ◽  
Behavioural Phenotype ◽  
Social Species ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Animals ◽  
Novel Objects ◽  
The Individual

Abstract Learning can enable rapid behavioural responses to changing conditions but can depend on the social context and behavioural phenotype of the individual. Learning rates have been linked to consistent individual differences in behavioural traits, especially in situations which require engaging with novelty, but the social environment can also play an important role. The presence of others can modulate the effects of individual behavioural traits and afford access to social information that can reduce the need for ‘risky’ asocial learning. Most studies of social effects on learning are focused on more social species; however, such factors can be important even for less-social animals, including non-grouping or facultatively social species which may still derive benefit from social conditions. Using archerfish, Toxotes chatareus, which exhibit high levels of intra-specific competition and do not show a strong preference for grouping, we explored the effect of social contexts on learning. Individually housed fish were assayed in an ‘open-field’ test and then trained to criterion in a task where fish learnt to shoot a novel cue for a food reward—with a conspecific neighbour visible either during training, outside of training or never (full, partial or no visible presence). Time to learn to shoot the novel cue differed across individuals but not across social context. This suggests that social context does not have a strong effect on learning in this non-obligatory social species; instead, it further highlights the importance that inter-individual variation in behavioural traits can have on learning. Significance statement Some individuals learn faster than others. Many factors can affect an animal’s learning rate—for example, its behavioural phenotype may make it more or less likely to engage with novel objects. The social environment can play a big role too—affecting learning directly and modifying the effects of an individual’s traits. Effects of social context on learning mostly come from highly social species, but recent research has focused on less-social animals. Archerfish display high intra-specific competition, and our study suggests that social context has no strong effect on their learning to shoot novel objects for rewards. Our results may have some relevance for social enrichment and welfare of this increasingly studied species, suggesting there are no negative effects of short- to medium-term isolation of this species—at least with regards to behavioural performance and learning tasks.

A Qualitative Study on Friends and the Social Context of Sexual Victimization: Implications for Campus-Based Interventions

2020 ◽  
pp. 107780122095427
Author(s):  
Jessica A. Blayney ◽  
Tiffany Jenzer ◽  
Jennifer P. Read ◽  
Jennifer Livingston ◽  
Maria Testa ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Social Context ◽  
Qualitative Study ◽  
Sexual Victimization ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
Social Consequences ◽  
Potential Danger ◽  
The Social ◽  
Barriers To Implementation ◽  
College Drinkers

Sexual victimization (SV) risk can begin in social contexts, ones where friends are present, though it is unclear how friends might be integrated into SV prevention. Using focus groups, female college drinkers described (a) the role of friends in preventing SV, (b) the strategies friends use to reduce vulnerability, and (c) the barriers to implementation. Friends-based strategies (keeping tabs on one another, using signals to convey potential danger, interrupting escalating situations, taking responsibility for friends, relying on male friends) and barriers (intoxication, preoccupation, situation ambiguity, social consequences) were discussed. Interventions can draw on these strategies, but must address the critical barriers.

scholarly journals Incorporating the social context into neurocognitive models of adolescent decision-making: A neuroimaging meta-analysis

2019 ◽  
Vol 101 ◽  
pp. 129-142 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jorien van Hoorn ◽  
Holly Shablack ◽  
Kristen A. Lindquist ◽  
Eva H. Telzer
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Social Context ◽  
Meta Analysis ◽  
The Social

Profiling “User Bases” of Online Social Contexts

2020 ◽  
pp. 113-126
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Social Context ◽  
Social Norms ◽  
Teaching And Learning ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
Current User ◽  
Social Spaces ◽  
The Social ◽  
Common Practices

One aspect of profiling to enhance teaching and learning involves the various contexts in which learners will engage, such as particular social media ecosystems and their attendant microcultures (the social norms and common practices in these spaces), particularly if learners will be engaging with individuals outside of the formal classroom. Understanding the larger online social context helps define the affordances and constraints of what can be effectively taught and learned. This involves profiling the current user base of the online social spaces where the learners will be engaging and interacting and co-creating knowledge.

scholarly journals Prosocial Influence and Opportunistic Conformity in Adolescents and Young Adults

2020 ◽  
Vol 31 (12) ◽  
pp. 1585-1601 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gabriele Chierchia ◽  
Blanca Piera Pi-Sunyer ◽  
Sarah-Jayne Blakemore
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Young Adults ◽  
Social Context ◽  
Social Influence ◽  
Social Decision ◽  
Charitable Donations ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Decision Making ◽  
Age Range ◽  
Value Of Money

Adolescence is associated with heightened social influence, especially from peers. This can lead to detrimental decision-making in domains such as risky behavior but may also raise opportunities for prosocial behavior. We used an incentivized charitable-donations task to investigate how people revise decisions after learning about the donations of others and how this is affected by age ( N = 220; age range = 11–35 years). Our results showed that the probability of social influence decreased with age within this age range. In addition, whereas previous research has suggested that adults are more likely to conform to the behavior of selfish others than to the behavior of prosocial others, here we observed no evidence of such an asymmetry in midadolescents. We discuss possible interpretations of these findings in relation to the social context of the task, the perceived value of money, and social decision-making across development.

Resilience among children and adolescents at risk for depression: Mediation and moderation across social and neurobiological contexts

2007 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 841-865 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer S. Silk ◽  
Ella Vanderbilt-Adriance ◽  
Daniel S. Shaw ◽  
Erika E. Forbes ◽  
Diana J. Whalen ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Social Context ◽  
Children And Adolescents ◽  
Emotional Reactivity ◽  
Depressive Disorders ◽  
Stress Reactivity ◽  
Socialization Of Emotion ◽  
Falling Asleep ◽  
The Social ◽  
Mediation And Moderation ◽  
Risk For Depression

This article offers a multilevel perspective on resilience to depression, with a focus on interactions among social and neurobehavioral systems involved in emotional reactivity and regulation. We discuss models of cross-contextual mediation and moderation by which the social context influences or modifies the effects of resilience processes at the biological level, or the biological context influences or modifies the effects of resilience processes at the social level. We highlight the socialization of emotion regulation as a candidate process contributing to resilience against depression at the social context level. We discuss several factors and their interactions across levels—including genetic factors, stress reactivity, positive affect, neural systems of reward, and sleep—as candidate processes contributing to resilience against depression at the neurobehavioral level. We then present some preliminary supportive findings from two studies of children and adolescents at high risk for depression. Study 1 shows that elevated neighborhood level adversity has the potential to constrain or limit the benefits of protective factors at other levels. Study 2 indicates that ease and quickness in falling asleep and a greater amount of time in deep Stage 4 sleep may be protective against the development of depressive disorders for children. The paper concludes with a discussion of clinical implications of this approach.

scholarly journals Dialog Structure Through the Lens of Gender, Gender Environment, and Power

2017 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 21-55
Author(s):  
Vinodkumar Prabhakaran ◽  
Owen Rambow
Keyword(s):  
Social Context ◽  
Human Behavior ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Gender Information ◽  
The Social ◽  
Computer Scientists ◽  
Automatic Methods ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Textual Content

Understanding how the social context of an interaction affects our dialog behavior is of great interest to social scientists who study human behavior, as well as to computer scientists who build automatic methods to infer those social contexts. In this paper, we study the interaction of power, gender, and dialog behavior in organizational interactions. In order to perform this study, we first construct the Gender Identified Enron Corpus of emails, in which we semi-automatically assign the gender of around 23,000 individuals who authored around 97,000 email messages in the Enron corpus. This corpus, which is made freely available, is orders of magnitude larger than previously existing gender identified corpora in the email domain. Next, we use this corpus to perform a largescale data-oriented study of the interplay of gender and manifestations of power. We argue that, in addition to one’s own gender, the “gender environment” of an interaction, i.e., the gender makeup of one’s interlocutors, also affects the way power is manifested in dialog. We focus especially on manifestations of power in the dialog structure — both, in a shallow sense that disregards the textual content of messages (e.g., how often do the participants contribute, how often do they get replies etc.), as well as the structure that is expressed within the textual content (e.g., who issues requests and how are they made, whose requests get responses etc.). We find that both gender and gender environment affect the ways power is manifested in dialog, resulting in patterns that reveal the underlying factors. Finally, we show the utility of gender information in the problem of automatically predicting the direction of power between pairs of participants in email interactions.

scholarly journals No differences between autistic and non-autistic adults in social influence on risky decision-making

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lydia Hickman ◽  
Connor Keating ◽  
Jennifer Cook ◽  
Elliot Andrew Ludvig
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Social Influence ◽  
Social Information ◽  
Risky Choice ◽  
Social Cues ◽  
Risky Decision Making ◽  
Risky Decision ◽  
The Social ◽  
Comparable Performance ◽  
Autistic Adults

Everyday risky decisions are susceptible to influence from a variety of sources, including the social context in which decisions take place. In the general population, people update their risk preferences based on knowledge of choices made by previous participants. In this study, we examined the influence of social information on the risky decision-making of autistic adults, a group in which differences in social processing have been observed. Autistic and non-autistic adults completed a risky decision-making task in the presence of both social and non-social information, either choosing for themselves or someone else on each trial. Notably, the social information comprised tokens that represented preferences of previous participants and was thus devoid of overt social cues such as faces or gestures. The non-social condition comprised a previously validated method where tokens represented “preferences” generated by weighted roulette wheels. Participants significantly shifted their choices when the influence (social or non-social) suggested a less risky choice. There were no group differences in risky decision-making when deciding for oneself compared to others. Interestingly, no differences in the effects of social and non-social influence were found between autistic and non-autistic adults. Considering previous evidence of social influence differences when using overtly social cues, we suggest that the removal of social cues in our paradigm led to comparable performance between the autistic and non-autistic groups. The current study paves the way for future studies investigating a confounding effect of social cues, which will lead to important insight for theories of social influence in autism.

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