The role of aversive learning in social interactions

It could be argued that our survival as humans hinges on our ability to interact socially with others. Our social interactions are influenced by evaluations of each other: we cooperate with those we like and avoid or are aggressive towards those we dislike or are afraid of. The aim of this thesis was to investigate how we come to learn to fear or dislike other individuals based on who they are; and how such learned evaluations influence actual social interactive behaviors. One elegant way to study how humans respond and react to threats in the environment is classical fear conditioning, where we can study how emotional values are created, upheld and changed. Research using classical fear conditioning has found that people are predisposed to develop stronger associations between threatening events and certain categories of stimuli (e.g., snakes, angry faces, and faces of individuals belonging to social out-groups). These biased aversions tend to persist even when circumstances change and the threat is no longer present. Though the fear system underlying this type of learning may be useful under some circumstances, it may also be at the root of some persistent social problems affecting modern societies (e.g., xenophobia). To address these questions experimentally, this thesis aimed to identify how we learn to associate threats to different social groups (e.g., racial and hierarchical) (Study I & Study II); whether learned aversions influence anti-social interactive behaviors (Study III); and to study the mechanisms of maladaptive reciprocal punishments in dyadic interactions (Study IV). In Study I, we found that activity linked to both conditioned fear and perception of racial out-group members jointly contributed to the expression of race-based biases in learning and behavior. Importantly, we showed that brain activity in the fear-learning-bias network was related to participants' discriminatory interactions with new out-group members at a later time. In Study II, we investigated the interaction between learned social dominance and social out-group (i.e., ethnicity) threats to understand if dominance hierarchy knowledge (i.e., observation of threats) can change direct experience with out-group members. We found a dissociation between implicit and explicit measures of out-group biases, such that implicit measures (i.e., Implicit Association Task and skin-conductance responses) of the participants revealed out-group biases, whereas their explicit measures (i.e., modern racial prejudice scale and a social interactive task; the modified ‘Cyberball’ game) did not. In Study III, we found that learned aversions influenced future retaliation in a social context. Our results suggest that aggressive traits, when paired with aversive learning experiences, enhance the likelihood to act anti-socially toward others. In Study IV, we demonstrate that participants punish co-players, despite the cost of receiving punishment back. These findings describe a form of self-punitive behavior previously documented in animals. Participants’ tendencies to administer shocks were exacerbated when the co-player initiated punishment, indicating that a small initial offense motivated punishing behavior over time. This finding suggests a simple experimental model of a vicious cycle of punishments. Together these findings highlight the role of aversive learning in social interactions

Contextual and endogenous effects on physiology during a haunted house fear induction

Threat exposure elicits physiological and psychological responses, the frequency and intensity of which, and concordance between, has implications for survival. Ethical and practical limitations on human laboratory fear inductions make it essentially impossible to measure response to extreme threat. Furthermore, ecologically valid investigations of group effects on fear are lacking in humans. The current preregistered study measured tonic and phasic electrodermal activity in 156 human participants while they participated in small groups in a 30 minute sequence of threats of varying intensity (a haunted house). Results revealed that (i) friends increased overall arousal, (ii) unexpected attacks elicited greater phasic responses than expected attacks, (iii) subjective fear increased frequency of phasic spikes, and (iv) startle had dissociable effects on frequency and amplitude of phasic reactivity. Findings show that etiology of emotional contagion varies depending on relationship type (increased among friends) and subjective fear is associated with temporal aspects of physiological arousal

Seven Computations of the Social Brain

The social environment presents the human brain with the most complex of information processing demands. The computations that the brain must perform occur in parallel, combine social and nonsocial cues, produce verbal and non-verbal signals, and involve multiple cognitive systems; including memory, attention, emotion, learning. This occurs dynamically and at timescales ranging from milliseconds to years. Here, we propose that during social interactions, seven core operations interact to underwrite coherent social functioning; these operations accumulate evidence efficiently – from multiple modalities – when inferring what to do next. We deconstruct the social brain and outline the key components entailed for successful human social interaction. These include (1) social perception; (2) social inferences, such as mentalizing; (3) social learning; (4) social signaling through verbal and non-verbal cues; (5) social drives (e.g., how to increase one’s status); (6) determining the social identity of agents, including oneself; and (7) minimizing uncertainty within the current social context by integrating sensory signals and inferences. We argue that while it is important to examine these distinct aspects of social inference, to understand the true nature of the human social brain, we must also explain how the brain integrates information from the social world

Valence from conflict : Stroop interference influences likeability of shapes presented in the past

Research on perception and action reveals that fluent/effortless processing engenders a\ud positive valence toward ambient stimuli. This, however, may not be a complete picture\ud of how valence arises from processing dynamics. In this first investigation on valence\ud from the Stroop effect, participants experienced response interference moments after\ud being presented with a subliminal nonsense shape. Interference engendered a positive\ud valence toward the shape, but only when interference and shape were temporally\ud contiguous (separated by 200 ms). No effects were found for two conditions without\ud response interference, or when the interference and shape were not temporally\ud contiguous. Building on previous findings, these data illuminate how some processing-dynamics\ud are preferred over others