Matthew Brook O'Donnell

Neural Responses to Exclusion Predict Susceptibility to Social Influence

PURPOSEnSocial influence is prominent across the lifespan, but sensitivity to influence is especially high during adolescence and is often associated with increased risk taking. Such risk taking can have dire consequences. For example, in American adolescents, traffic-related crashes are leading causes of nonfatal injury and death. Neural measures may be especially useful in understanding the basic mechanisms of adolescents vulnerability to peer influence.nnnMETHODSnWe examined neural responses to social exclusion as potential predictors of risk taking in the presence of peers in recently licensed adolescent drivers. Risk taking was assessed in a driving simulator session occurring approximately 1 week after the neuroimaging session.nnnRESULTSnIncreased activity in neural systems associated with the distress of social exclusion and mentalizing during an exclusion episode predicted increased risk taking in the presence of a peer (controlling for solo risk behavior) during a driving simulator session outside the neuroimaging laboratory 1 week later. These neural measures predicted risky driving behavior above and beyond self-reports of susceptibility to peer pressure and distress during exclusion.nnnCONCLUSIONSnThese results address the neural bases of social influence and risk taking; contribute to our understanding of social and emotional function in the adolescent brain; and link neural activity in specific, hypothesized, regions to risk-relevant outcomes beyond the neuroimaging laboratory. Results of this investigation are discussed in terms of the mechanisms underlying risk taking in adolescents and the public health implications for adolescent driving.

Buffering social influence: Neural correlates of response inhibition predict driving safety in the presence of a peer

Adolescence is a period characterized by increased sensitivity to social cues, as well as increased risk-taking in the presence of peers. For example, automobile crashes are the leading cause of death for adolescents, and driving with peers increases the risk of a fatal crash. Growing evidence points to an interaction between neural systems implicated in cognitive control and social and emotional context in predicting adolescent risk. We tested such a relationship in recently licensed teen drivers. Participants completed an fMRI session in which neural activity was measured during a response inhibition task, followed by a separate driving simulator session 1 week later. Participants drove alone and with a peer who was randomly assigned to express risk-promoting or risk-averse social norms. The experimentally manipulated social context during the simulated drive moderated the relationship between individual differences in neural activity in the hypothesized cognitive control network (right inferior frontal gyrus, BG) and risk-taking in the driving context a week later. Increased activity in the response inhibition network was not associated with risk-taking in the presence of a risky peer but was significantly predictive of safer driving in the presence of a cautious peer, above and beyond self-reported susceptibility to peer pressure. Individual differences in recruitment of the response inhibition network may allow those with stronger inhibitory control to override risky tendencies when in the presence of cautious peers. This relationship between social context and individual differences in brain function expands our understanding of neural systems involved in top–down cognitive control during adolescent development.

Neural Correlates of Susceptibility to Group Opinions in Online Word-of-Mouth Recommendations

The present study examines the relationship between social influence and recommendation decisions among adolescents in the new media environment. Participants completed the App Recommendation Task—a task that captures neural processes associated with making recommendations to others, with and without information about peer recommendations of the type commonly available online. The results demonstrate that increased activity in the striatum and orbitofrontal cortex in response to peer recommendations is significantly correlated with participants changing their recommendations to be consistent with this feedback within subjects. Furthermore, individual differences in activation of the temporoparietal junction during feedback that peer recommendations varied from those of the participant correlated with individual differences in susceptibility to influence on recommendation decisions between subjects. These brain regions have previously been implicated in social influence and the concept of being a “successful idea salesperson,” respectively. Together, they highlight a potential combination of internal preference shifts and consideration of the mental states of others in recommendation environments that include peer opinions.

Exploring text-initial words, clusters and concgrams in a newspaper corpus

Abstract The notion of ‘textual colligation’ predicts that certain lexical items have a tendency to occur at particular points in a text, i.e. the beginning or end of texts, paragraphs or sentences. This paper describes new corpus-based methods developed to identify the profile of words, clusters (n-grams) and concgrams (non-contiguous patterns in variant order) in terms of their most common textual locations. Groups of co-occurring text-initial items are then analyzed in terms of their discourse function in relation to theories of newspaper structure. This analysis illustrates how methods from corpus linguistics, when targeted to specific textual positions, can complement text-linguistic analyses.

A fresh view of the structure of hard news stories

Using a corpus of newspaper articles divided into two categories based on textual position: TISC (text-initial sentences) and NTISC (all other sentences), the collocates and local patterns of a text-initial key word, fresh, are analyzed. Patterns of fresh + CONTROVERSY NOUN (row, controversy, blow, embarrassment) are particularly distinctive in first sentences including the elements FACE/SPARK ABOUT TIME AFTER, e.g. faced fresh embarrassment over… yesterday when… Using corpus annotation the extent and variation of this pattern is revealed and related to discourse functions, drawing in particular on White;s (1997) characterisation of hard news articles and the notion of the NUCLEUS to describe text beginnings.

Social in, Social out: How the Brain Responds to Social Language with More Social Language

Social connection is a fundamental human need. As such, peoples brains are sensitized to social cues, such as those carried by language, and to promoting social communication. The neural mechanisms of certain key building blocks in this process, such as receptivity to and reproduction of social language, however, are not known. We combined quantitative linguistic analysis and neuroimaging to connect neural activity in brain regions used to simulate the mental states of others with exposure to, and retransmission of, social language. Our results link findings on successful idea transmission from communication science, sociolinguistics, and cognitive neuroscience to prospectively predict the degree of social language that participants utilize when retransmitting ideas as a function of (1) initial language inputs and (2) neural activity during idea exposure.

Associations between coherent neural activity in the brain’s value system during antismoking messages and reductions in smoking.

Objective: Worldwide, tobacco use is the leading cause of preventable death and illness. One common strategy for reducing the prevalence of cigarette smoking and other health risk behaviors is the use of graphic warning labels (GWLs). This has led to widespread interest from the perspective of health psychology in understanding the mechanisms of GWL effectiveness. Here we investigated differences in how the brain responds to negative, graphic warning label-inspired antismoking ads and neutral control ads, and we probed how this response related to future behavior. Method: A group of smokers (N = 45) viewed GWL-inspired and control antismoking ads while undergoing fMRI, and their smoking behavior was assessed before and one month after the scan. We examined neural coherence between two regions in the brain’s valuation network, the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) and ventral striatum (VS). Results: We found that greater neural coherence in the brain’s valuation network during GWL ads (relative to control ads) preceded later smoking reduction. Conclusions: Our results suggest that the integration of information about message value may be key for message influence. Understanding how the brain responds to health messaging and relates to future behavior could ultimately contribute to the design of effective messaging campaigns, as well as more broadly to theories of message effects and persuasion across domains.

Big data in the new media environment.

Bentley et al. argue for the social scientific contextualization of big data by proposing a four-quadrant model. We suggest extensions of the east-west (i.e., socially motivated versus independently motivated) decision-making dimension in light of findings from social psychology and neuroscience. We outline a method that leverages linguistic tools to connect insights across fields that address the individuals underlying big-data media streams.

Response Inhibition in Adolescents is Moderated by Brain Connectivity and Social Network Structure

Self-control is vital for a wide range of outcomes across our lifespan, yet the developmental trajectory of its core components during adolescence remains elusive. Many adolescents can successfully regulate their behavior even when they do not show strong activation in brain regions typically recruited during self-control in adults. Thus, adolescents may rely on other neural and cognitive resources to compensate, including daily experiences navigating and managing complex social relationships that likely bolster self-control processes. Here, we tested whether activity and connectivity in brain systems associated with social cognition (i.e., self-processing and mentalizing) facilitated successful self-control. We measured brain activity using fMRI as 62 adolescents completed a Go/No-Go response inhibition task. Recruitment of social brain systems, especially the self-processing system, was associated with better response inhibition in adolescents. Interestingly, the reliance on the self-processing system was stronger in adolescents with weaker activation in the canonical response inhibition system, suggesting a compensatory role for social brain systems during adolescent development. Furthermore, we examined the importance of social context by computing the size, number of communities, and modularity of our participants’ real-life social network. We found that adolescents with more friends and more communities in their social networks demonstrated a stronger relationship between response inhibition and recruitment of social brain systems. Collectively, our results identify the importance of social context and its moderating role on the relationship between brain activity and behavior. Furthermore, our results indicate a critical role for social brain systems during the developmental trajectory of self-control throughout adolescence. Significance Statement We employed a network neuroscience approach to investigate the role of social context and social brain systems in facilitating self-control in adolescents. We found that recruitment of social brain systems was associated with better response inhibition in adolescents, especially for adolescents with weaker activation in the response inhibition system. Moreover, adolescents with more friends and communities in their social networks showed stronger relationships between response inhibition and recruitment of social brain systems. Our results advance understanding of how brain systems facilitate self-control in adolescents, and how these brain responses are associated with features of an adolescent’s real-life social network. Bringing together findings related to brain networks and social networks provides key insights into how biology and environment mutually influence development.