The subjective value of genuine smiles guides real-world social behaviour.

The mechanisms that underpin human social behaviour are poorly understood, in part because natural social behaviour is challenging to study. The task of linking the mechanisms thought to drive social behaviour to specific social behaviours in a manner that maintains ecological validity poses an even greater challenge. Here we report evidence that the subjective value people assign to genuine smiles, as measured in the laboratory, determines their responsiveness to genuine smiles encountered in a naturalistic social interaction.

Emotion-behavior decoupling in individuals with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and major depressive disorder.

Failure in translating emotional salience into effortful behavior is thought to be a core feature of anhedonia and avolition in individuals with schizophrenia (SCZ), but little is known about emotion-behavior coupling in individuals with bipolar disorder (BD) and major depressive disorder (MDD). In this study, we compared emotion-behavior correspondence in participants with SCZ, BD, and MDD. Forty-two participants with SCZ, 44 participants with MDD, 43 participants with BD, and 43 healthy controls were recruited.

The subjective value of a smile alters social behaviour.

Face-to-face social behaviour is difficult to explain, leading some researchers to call it the "dark matter" of psychology/neuroscience [1]. We apply an idea from neuroeconomics to this problem, suggesting that how people subjectively value facial expressions should predict usage differences during unconstrained interaction. Specifically, we ask whether the subjective value of smiles is malleable as a consequence of immediate social experience and how this relates to smiling during face-to-face interactions.

Social feedback interferes with implicit rule learning: Evidence from event-related brain potentials.

The human brain can learn contingencies built into stimulus sequences unconsciously. The quality of such implicit learning has been connected to stimulus social relevance, but results so far are inconsistent. We engaged participants in an implicit-intentional learning task in which they learned to discriminate between legal and illegal card triads on the sole basis of feedback provided within a staircase procedure.

The valuation of social rewards in schizophrenia.

Social impairment in schizophrenia is often thought to reflect poor social cognition. Here we examine responses to social rewards, an aspect of social functioning that is not featured prominently in the literature. The goal of this experiment was to explore whether people with schizophrenia (a) undervalue social rewards, and (b) whether the undervaluation of social rewards was related to motivation and pleasure deficits in schizophrenia and decreased social functioning.

The Role of Experimenter Belief in Social Priming.

Research suggests that stimuli that prime social concepts can fundamentally alter people's behavior. However, most researchers who conduct priming studies fail to explicitly report double-blind procedures. Because experimenter expectations may influence participant behavior, we asked whether a short pre-experiment interaction between participants and experimenters would contribute to priming effects when experimenters were not blind to participant condition.

Dissociation between affective experience and motivated behaviour in schizophrenia patients and their unaffected first-degree relatives and schizotypal individuals.

Background: The neuropsychological origins of negative syndrome of schizophrenia remain elusive. Evidence from behavioural studies, which utilised emotion-inducing pictures to elicit motivated behaviour generally reported that that schizophrenia patients experienced similar affective experience as healthy individuals but failed to translate emotional salience to motivated behaviour, a phenomenon called emotion-behaviour decoupling. However, a few studies have examined emotion-behaviour decoupling in non-psychotic high-risk populations, who are relatively unaffected by medication effects.

The Impact of Experience on Affective Responses during Action Observation.

Perceiving others in action elicits affective and aesthetic responses in observers. The present study investigates the extent to which these responses relate to an observer's general experience with observed movements. Facial electromyographic (EMG) responses were recorded in experienced dancers and non-dancers as they watched short videos of movements performed by professional ballet dancers.

Affective experience and motivated behavior in schizophrenia spectrum disorders: Evidence from clinical and nonclinical samples.

Objective: Individuals with schizophrenia have been found to exhibit emotion-behavior decoupling, particularly with respect to anticipated, rather than experienced events. However, previous research has focused on how emotion valence translates into motivated behavior, ignoring the fact that emotion arousal should also modulate emotion-behavior coupling. Few studies have examined emotion-behavior coupling in prepsychotic conditions.

The nature of anhedonia and avolition in patients with first-episode schizophrenia.

Background: Patients with schizophrenia have intact ability to experience emotion, but empirical evidence suggests that they fail to translate emotional salience into effortful behaviour. Previous research in patients with chronic schizophrenia suggests that working memory is important in integrating emotion and behaviour. This study aimed to examine avolition and anhedonia in patients with first-episode schizophrenia and clarify the role of working memory in emotion-behaviour coupling.

Replication study implicates COMT val158met polymorphism as a modulator of probabilistic reward learning.

Previous studies suggest that a single nucleotide polymorphism in the catechol-O-methyltransferase (COMT) gene (val158met) may modulate reward-guided decision making in healthy individuals. The polymorphism affects dopamine catabolism and thus modulates prefrontal dopamine levels, which may lead to variation in individual responses to risk and reward. We previously showed, using tasks that index reward responsiveness (measured by responses bias towards reinforced stimuli) and risk taking (measured by the Balloon Analogue Risk Task), that COMT met homozygotes had increased reward responsiveness and, thus, an increased propensity to seek reward.

CACNA1C risk variant affects reward responsiveness in healthy individuals.

The variant at rs1006737 in the L-type voltage-gated calcium channel (alpha 1c subunit) CACNA1C gene is reliably associated with both bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. We investigated whether this risk variant affects reward responsiveness because reward processing is one of the central cognitive-motivational domains implicated in both disorders. In a sample of 164 young, healthy individuals, we show a dose-dependent response, where the rs1006737 risk genotype was associated with blunted reward responsiveness, whereas discriminability did not significantly differ between genotype groups.

Do social utility judgments influence attentional processing?

Research shows that social judgments influence decision-making in social environments. For example, judgments about an interaction partners' trustworthiness affect a variety of social behaviors and decisions. One mechanism by which social judgments may influence social decisions is by biasing the automatic allocation of attention toward certain social partners, thereby shaping the information people acquire.

Predictive and reactive mechanisms in smile reciprocity.

During face-to-face interactions, people reciprocate their conversation partners' genuine and polite smiles with matching smiles. In the research reported here, we demonstrated that predictive mechanisms play a role in this behavior. In natural interactions (Study 1), participants anticipated a substantial proportion of genuine smiles but almost no polite ones.

Learning from social rewards predicts individual differences in self-reported social ability.

The ability to adapt face-to-face social behavior in response to an interaction's changing contingencies is an important aspect of social skill. Individual differences in social ability may depend on how well people learn from social rewards and punishments. Here we relate people's social aptitude to their ability to learn from differences in the reward values of two common social reinforcers, genuine and polite smiles.

COMT val158met predicts reward responsiveness in humans.

A functional variant of the catechol-O-methyltransferase (COMT) gene [val158met (rs4680)] is frequently implicated in decision-making and higher cognitive functions. It may achieve its effects by modulating dopamine-related decision-making and reward-guided behaviour. Here we demonstrate that individuals with the met/met polymorphism have greater responsiveness to reward than carriers of the val allele and that this correlates with risk-seeking behaviour.

The value of genuine and polite smiles.

Humans show remarkable ability to adapt their social behavior to suit the changing requirements of their interactions. An interaction partner's social cues, particularly facial expressions, likely play an important role in motivating and reinforcing this behavioral adaptation. Over three studies, we test a key aspect of this idea.

Imagining the future: degraded representations of future rewards and events in schizophrenia.

Over the course of life, most people work toward temporally distant rewards such as university degrees or work-related promotions. In contrast, many people with schizophrenia show deficits in behavior oriented toward long-term rewards, although they function adequately when rewards are more immediately present. Moreover, when asked about possible future events, individuals with schizophrenia show foreshortened future time perspectives relative to healthy individuals.

Reward processing in schizophrenia: a deficit in the representation of value.

Patients with schizophrenia demonstrate deficits in motivation and learning that suggest impairment in different aspects of the reward system. In this article, we present the results of 8 converging experiments that address subjective reward experience, the impact of rewards on decision making, and the role of rewards in guiding both rapid and long-term learning. All experiments compared the performance of stably treated outpatients with schizophrenia and demographically matched healthy volunteers.

Decision-making impairments in the context of intact reward sensitivity in schizophrenia.

Background: Deficits in motivated behavior and decision-making figure prominently in the behavioral syndrome that characterizes schizophrenia and are difficult both to treat and to understand. One explanation for these deficits is that schizophrenia decreases sensitivity to rewards in the environment. An alternate explanation is that sensitivity to rewards is intact but that poor integration of affective with cognitive information impairs the ability to use this information to guide behavior.

Learning-related changes in brain activity following errors and performance feedback in schizophrenia.

In previous studies of self-monitoring in schizophrenia, patients have exhibited reductions in the amplitude of the error-related negativity (ERN), a component of the event-related brain potential (ERP) elicited most prominently immediately following the execution of incorrect responses. In the current study, we examined the ERN and a related component, the feedback negativity (FBN) in 26 schizophrenia outpatients and 27 psychiatrically healthy comparison subjects during a probabilistic learning task in which participants could learn stimulus-response pairs by attending to feedback indicating response accuracy. The validity of the feedback varied in three conditions.

Patients with schizophrenia demonstrate dissociation between affective experience and motivated behavior.

Self-reported emotional experience does not differ between patients with schizophrenia and healthy individuals, suggesting that the anhedonia in schizophrenia instead reflects decoupling of affect from motivated behavior. In 2 behavioral conditions, participants with schizophrenia and healthy participants were able to prolong or decrease exposure to stimuli while stimuli were present or alter the likelihood of future exposure to stimuli on the basis of internal representations. They also provided self-reports of affective experience.

Delay discounting in schizophrenia.

Background: It is well known that individuals with schizophrenia have dopaminergic abnormalities as well as memory-related difficulties, both of which are associated with impulsive decision making. We used a delay discounting measure to test the degree to which patients make future-oriented decisions.

Methods: 42 patients with schizophrenia and 29 healthy participants completed a delay discounting measure along with tests of cognitive function and, in patients, symptom ratings.

Interpersonal consequences of social anxiety.

The behavioral manifestations of social anxiety may have implications for social outcomes. Unfortunately, little is known about how anxiety shapes social interaction. The present study examined social interactions in dyads consisting of either 2 nonsocially anxious (NSA) individuals or 1 socially anxious (SA) and 1 NSA individual.

Early psychotherapy process and cluster B and C personality pathology: similarities and differences in interactions with symptomatic and interpersonal distress.

Abstract In a prior study (Kolden & Klein, 1996), the authors found that the relationships between global personality pathology and early psychotherapy change processes (as defined by the Generic Model of Psychotherapy) were moderated by the extent of the patient's acute symptomatic and interpersonal distress. In the current study, the authors reanalyzed the same data to examine similarities and differences between personality disorder Clusters B (dramatic, emotional, or erratic) and C (anxious or fearful) in therapy process. In general, we found that more distressed patients reported greater defensiveness.