The psychological, computational, and neural foundations of indebtedness.

Receiving a favor from another person may induce a negative feeling of indebtedness for the beneficiary. In this study, we explore these hidden costs by developing and validating a conceptual model of indebtedness across three studies that combine a large-scale online questionnaire, an interpersonal game, computational modeling, and neuroimaging. Our model captures how individuals perceive the altruistic and strategic intentions of the benefactor.

Py-Feat: Python Facial Expression Analysis Toolbox.

Unlabelled: Studying facial expressions is a notoriously difficult endeavor. Recent advances in the field of affective computing have yielded impressive progress in automatically detecting facial expressions from pictures and videos. However, much of this work has yet to be widely disseminated in social science domains such as psychology.

The Emerging Science of Interacting Minds.

For over a century, psychology has focused on uncovering mental processes of a single individual. However, humans rarely navigate the world in isolation. The most important determinants of successful development, mental health, and our individual traits and preferences arise from interacting with other individuals.

Synchronized affect in shared experiences strengthens social connection.

People structure their days to experience events with others. We gather to eat meals, watch TV, and attend concerts together. What constitutes a shared experience and how does it manifest in dyadic behavior? The present study investigates how shared experiences-measured through emotional, motoric, physiological, and cognitive alignment-promote social bonding.

Characterizing the mechanisms of social connection.

Understanding how individuals form and maintain strong social networks has emerged as a significant public health priority as a result of the increased focus on the epidemic of loneliness and the myriad protective benefits conferred by social connection. In this review, we highlight the psychological and neural mechanisms that enable us to connect with others, which in turn help buffer against the consequences of stress and isolation. Central to this process is the experience of rewards derived from positive social interactions, which encourage the sharing of perspectives and preferences that unite individuals.

Long gaps between turns are awkward for strangers but not for friends.

When people feel connected they tend to respond quickly in conversation, creating short gaps between turns. But are long gaps always a sign that things have gone awry? We analysed the frequency and impact of long gaps (greater than 2 s) in conversations between strangers and between friends. As predicted, long gaps signalled disconnection between strangers.

Similarity Among Friends Serves as a Social Prior: The Assumption That "Birds of a Feather Flock Together" Shapes Social Decisions and Relationship Beliefs.

Social interactions unfold within networks of relationships. How do beliefs about others' social ties shape-and how are they shaped by-expectations about how others will behave? Here, participants joined a fictive online game-playing community and interacted with its purported members, who varied in terms of their trustworthiness and apparent relationships with one another. Participants were less trusting of partners with untrustworthy friends, even after they consistently showed themselves to be trustworthy, and were less willing to engage with them in the future.

Recovering Individual Emotional States from Sparse Ratings Using Collaborative Filtering.

Unlabelled: A fundamental challenge in emotion research is measuring feeling states with high granularity and temporal precision without disrupting the emotion generation process. Here we introduce and validate a new approach in which responses are sparsely sampled and the missing data are recovered using a computational technique known as (CF). This approach leverages structured covariation across individual experiences and is available in , an open-source Python toolbox.

Fast response times signal social connection in conversation.

Clicking is one of the most robust metaphors for social connection. But how do we know when two people "click"? We asked pairs of friends and strangers to talk with each other and rate their felt connection. For both friends and strangers, speed in response was a robust predictor of feeling connected.

Effect sizes and test-retest reliability of the fMRI-based neurologic pain signature.

Identifying biomarkers that predict mental states with large effect sizes and high test-retest reliability is a growing priority for fMRI research. We examined a well-established multivariate brain measure that tracks pain induced by nociceptive input, the Neurologic Pain Signature (NPS). In N = 295 participants across eight studies, NPS responses showed a very large effect size in predicting within-person single-trial pain reports (d = 1.

Endogenous variation in ventromedial prefrontal cortex state dynamics during naturalistic viewing reflects affective experience.

How we process ongoing experiences is shaped by our personal history, current needs, and future goals. Consequently, ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) activity involved in processing these subjective appraisals appears to be highly idiosyncratic across individuals. To elucidate the role of the vmPFC in processing our ongoing experiences, we developed a computational framework and analysis pipeline to characterize the spatiotemporal dynamics of individual vmPFC responses as participants viewed a 45-minute television drama.

Gossip drives vicarious learning and facilitates social connection.

Complex language and communication is one of the unique hallmarks that distinguishes humans from most other animals. Interestingly, the overwhelming majority of our communication consists of social topics involving self-disclosure and discussions about others, broadly construed as gossip. Yet the precise social function of gossip remains poorly understood as research has been heavily influenced by folk intuitions narrowly casting gossip as baseless trash talk.

The Neural Correlates of Cued Reward Omission.

Compared to our understanding of positive prediction error signals occurring due to unexpected reward outcomes, less is known about the neural circuitry in humans that drives negative prediction errors during omission of expected rewards. While classical learning theories such as Rescorla-Wagner or temporal difference learning suggest that both types of prediction errors result from a simple subtraction, there has been recent evidence suggesting that different brain regions provide input to dopamine neurons which contributes to specific components of this prediction error computation. Here, we focus on the brain regions responding to negative prediction error signals, which has been well-established in animal studies to involve a distinct pathway through the lateral habenula.

Surprise Signals Changing Affective Experiences in Naturalistic Sports Spectating.

What role does surprise play in a spectating experience? In this issue of Neuron, Antony et al. (2021) develop and validate a model of surprise to characterize the psychological and neurobiological processes underlying sports fans' experiences as they watch the final minutes of NCAA college basketball games.

Stable distribution of reciprocity motives in a population.

Evolutionary models show that human cooperation can arise through direct reciprocity relationships. However, it remains unclear which psychological mechanisms proximally motivate individuals to reciprocate. Recent evidence suggests that the psychological motives for choosing to reciprocate trust differ between individuals, which raises the question whether these differences have a stable distribution in a population or are rather an artifact of the experimental task.

Movie viewing elicits rich and reliable brain state dynamics.

Adaptive brain function requires that sensory impressions of the social and natural milieu are dynamically incorporated into intrinsic brain activity. While dynamic switches between brain states have been well characterised in resting state acquisitions, the remodelling of these state transitions by engagement in naturalistic stimuli remains poorly understood. Here, we show that the temporal dynamics of brain states, as measured in fMRI, are reshaped from predominantly bistable transitions between two relatively indistinct states at rest, toward a sequence of well-defined functional states during movie viewing whose transitions are temporally aligned to specific features of the movie.

Arbitrating Computational Models of Observational Learning.

How do we learn in the absence of direct experience? In this issue of Neuron, Charpentier et al. (2020) proposes a new computational account of observational learning, which arbitrates between choice imitation and goal emulation.

Intersubject representational similarity analysis reveals individual variations in affective experience when watching erotic movies.

We spend much of our lives pursuing or avoiding affective experiences. However, surprisingly little is known about how these experiences are represented in the brain and if they are shared across individuals. Here, we explored variations in the construction of an affective experience during a naturalistic viewing paradigm based on subjective preferences in sociosexual desire and self-control using intersubject representational similarity analysis (IS-RSA).

FaceSync: Open source framework for recording facial expressions with head-mounted cameras.

Advances in computer vision and machine learning algorithms have enabled researchers to extract facial expression data from face video recordings with greater ease and speed than standard manual coding methods, which has led to a dramatic increase in the pace of facial expression research. However, there are many limitations in recording facial expressions in laboratory settings.  Conventional video recording setups using webcams, tripod-mounted cameras, or pan-tilt-zoom cameras require making compromises between cost, reliability, and flexibility.

A Generalizable Multivariate Brain Pattern for Interpersonal Guilt.

Feeling guilty when we have wronged another is a crucial aspect of prosociality, but its neurobiological bases are elusive. Although multivariate patterns of brain activity show promise for developing brain measures linked to specific emotions, it is less clear whether brain activity can be trained to detect more complex social emotional states such as guilt. Here, we identified a distributed guilt-related brain signature (GRBS) across two independent neuroimaging datasets that used interpersonal interactions to evoke guilt.

Socially transmitted placebo effects.

Medical treatments typically occur in the context of a social interaction between healthcare providers and patients. Although decades of research have demonstrated that patients' expectations can dramatically affect treatment outcomes, less is known about the influence of providers' expectations. Here we systematically manipulated providers' expectations in a simulated clinical interaction involving administration of thermal pain and found that patients' subjective experiences of pain were directly modulated by providers' expectations of treatment success, as reflected in the patients' subjective ratings, skin conductance responses and facial expression behaviours.

Psychopathic traits are related to diminished guilt aversion and reduced trustworthiness during social decision-making.

Individuals with high levels of psychopathic tendencies tend to show a lack of guilt, a lack of empathic concern, and a disregard for the impact of their decisions on others. However, how guilt influences social decision-making for those with high psychopathic traits is still unknown. Here, we investigated how psychopathic traits relate to the capacity to acquire knowledge about social expectations, and to what extent guilt aversion affects subsequent decision-making.

The computational and neural substrates of moral strategies in social decision-making.

Individuals employ different moral principles to guide their social decision-making, thus expressing a specific 'moral strategy'. Which computations characterize different moral strategies, and how might they be instantiated in the brain? Here, we tackle these questions in the context of decisions about reciprocity using a modified Trust Game. We show that different participants spontaneously and consistently employ different moral strategies.

The Flatland Fallacy: Moving Beyond Low-Dimensional Thinking.

Psychology is a complicated science. It has no general axioms or mathematical proofs, is rarely directly observable, and is the only discipline in which the subject matter (i.e.

Expectations in the Ultimatum Game: Distinct Effects of Mean and Variance of Expected Offers.

Being treated fairly by others is an important need in everyday life. Experimentally, fairness can be studied using the Ultimatum Game, where the decision to reject a low, but non-zero offer is seen as a way to punish the other player for an unacceptable offer. The canonical explanation of such behavior is inequity aversion: people prefer equal outcomes over personal gains.