Lou Safra

The role of shared visual information for joint action coordination

Highlights • In joint action tasks, co-actors have a choice between different coordination mechanisms.• How joint actions are coordinated depends on shared perceptual information.• In the absence of shared visual information, co-actors rely on a general heuristic strategy.• When shared visual information is available, co-actors switch to a communicative strategy.

Measuring Social Motivation Using Signal Detection and Reward Responsiveness

Background Recent trends in psychiatry have emphasized the need for a shift from categorical to dimensional approaches. Of critical importance to this transformation is the availability of tools to objectively quantify behaviors dimensionally. The present study focuses on social motivation, a dimension of behavior that is central to a range of psychiatric conditions but for which a particularly small number of assays currently exist. Methods In Study 1 (N = 48), healthy adults completed a monetary reward task and a social reward task, followed by completion of the Chapman Physical and Social Anhedonia Scales. In Study 2 (N = 26), an independent sample was recruited to assess the robustness of Study 1’s findings. Results The reward tasks were analyzed using signal detection theory to quantify how much reward cues bias participants’ responses. In both Study 1 and Study 2, social anhedonia scores were negatively correlated with change in response bias in the social reward task but not in the monetary reward task. A median split on social anhedonia scores confirmed that participants with high social anhedonia showed less change in response bias in the social reward task compared to participants with low social anhedonia. Conclusions This study confirms that social anhedonia selectively affects how much an individual changes their behavior based on the presence of socially rewarding cues and establishes a tool to quantify social reward responsiveness dimensionally.

Neighborhood Deprivation Negatively Impacts Children’s Prosocial Behavior

Children show stronger cooperative behavior in experimental settings as they get older, but little is known about how the environment of a child shapes this development. In adults, prosocial behavior toward strangers is markedly decreased in low socio-economic status (SES) neighborhoods, suggesting that environmental harshness has a negative impact on some prosocial behaviors. Similar results have been obtained with 9-year-olds recruited from low vs. high SES schools. In the current study, we investigate whether these findings generalize to a younger age group and a developing country. Specifically, we worked with a sample of thirty-nine 6- to 7-year-olds in two neighborhoods in a single city in Romania. Using a “Quality Dictator Game” that offers greater resolution than previous measures, we find that children living in the harsher neighborhood behave less prosocially toward a stranger than children living in the less harsh neighborhood.

No strong evidence that authoritarian attitudes are driven by a lack of control

Kakkar and Sivanathan (1) provide new evidence of the link between economic crises and the preference for dominant leaders and strengthen previous evidence of the influence of economic crises on authoritarianism (2⇓⇓–5). However, the authors’ interpretation of why economic uncertainty favors dominant leaders entails two further predictions that are not borne out by our follow-up analyses of their dataset. According to the authors, individuals choose more dominant leaders in times of uncertainty “to reduce the aversive state of low personal control when plagued by collective uncertainty”; in other words, “seek[ing] a dominant leader [is] a compensatory strategy to restore their sense of personal control” (1). This hypothesis predicts that people should prefer dominant leaders compared … [↵][1]1To whom correspondence should be addressed. Email: lou.safra{at}gmail.com. [1]: #xref-corresp-1-1

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

Depression 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.

Distinct effects of social motivation on face evaluations in adolescents with and without autism

Individual differences in social motivation have an influence on many behaviours in both clinical and non-clinical populations. As such, social motivation has been identified as a biological trait that is particularly well-suited for dimensional approaches cutting across neuropsychological conditions. In the present paper, we tested whether social motivation had a similar impact in the general population and in a neuropsychological condition characterized by diminished social motivation: Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). More precisely, we evaluated the effect of social motivation on face evaluations in 20 adolescents with ASD and 20 matched controls using avatars parametrically varying in dominance and trustworthiness. In line with previous research, we found in the control group that participants with higher levels of social motivation relied more on perceived trustworthiness when producing likeability judgments. However, this pattern was not found in the ASD group. Social motivation thus appears to have a different effect in ASD and control populations, which raises questions about the relevance of subclinical or non-clinical populations to understand ASD.

Minimal group membership biases early neural processing of emotional expressions

Mere affiliation with a social group alters peoples perception of other individuals. One suggested mechanism behind such influence is that group membership triggers divergent visual facial representations for in‐group and out‐group members, which could constrain face processing. Here, using electroencephalography (EEG) under functional magnetic resonance imagery (fMRI) during a group categorization task, we investigated the impact of mere affiliation to an arbitrary group on the processing of emotional faces. The results indicate that in‐ and out‐group members trigger differential event‐related potential activity, appearing 150 ms after presentation of group membership information, which correlated with medial prefrontal fMRI activity. Additionally, EEG activity in the earliest stages of face processing (30–100 ms after expression onset) dissociated unexpected group‐related emotions (in‐group anger and out‐group joy) from expected ones and correlated with temporo‐parietal junction fMRI activity. We discuss the possibility that such dissociation may result from top‐down influences from divergent representations for in‐group and out‐group members. Taken together, the present results suggest that mere membership in an arbitrary group polarized expectations which constrain the first steps of face processing.