Decision neuroscience and neuroeconomics: Recent progress and ongoing challenges.

Adolescence is a sensitive period for socio-cultural processing and a vast literature has established that adolescents are exceptionally attuned to the social context. Theoretical accounts posit that the social reward of social interactions plays a large role in adolescent sensitivity to the social context. Yet, to date it is unclear how sensitivity to social reward develops across adolescence and young adulthood and whether there are gender differences. The present cross-sectional study (N = 271 participants, age 11–28 years) examined age and gender effects in self-reported sensitivity to different types of social rewards. In order to achieve this aim, the Dutch Social Reward Questionnaire for Adolescents was validated. Findings revealed that each type of social reward was characterized by distinct age and gender effects. Feeling rewarded by gaining positive attention from others showed a peak in late adolescence, while enjoying positive reciprocal relationships with others showed a linear increase with age. Enjoying cruel behavior toward others decreased with age for girls, while boys showed no changes with age and reported higher levels across ages. Reward from giving others control showed a mid-adolescent dip, while enjoying group interactions did not show any changes with age. Taken together, the results imply that the social reward of social interactions is a nuanced and complex construct, which encompasses multiple components that show unique effects with age and gender. These findings enable us to gain further traction on the ubiquitous effects of the social context on decision-making in adolescent’s lives.

The neural underpinnings of decision-making are critical to understanding and predicting human behavior. However, findings from decision neuroscience are limited in their practical applicability due to the gap between experimental decision-making paradigms and real-world choices. The present manuscript investigates the neural markers of buying decisions in a fully natural purchase setting: participants are asked to use their favorite online shopping applications to buy common goods they are currently in need of. Their electroencephalography (EEG) is recorded while they view the product page for each item. EEG responses to pages for products that are eventually bought are compared to those that are discarded. Study 1 repeats this procedure in three batches with different participants, product types, and time periods. In an explorative analysis, two neural markers for buying compared to no-buying decisions are discovered over all three batches: frontal alpha asymmetry peak and frontal theta power peak. Occipital alpha power at alpha asymmetry peaks differs in only one of the three batches. No further significant markers are found. Study 2 compares the natural product search to a design in which subjects are told which product pages to view. In both settings, the frontal alpha asymmetry peak is increased for buying decisions. Frontal theta peak increase is replicated only when subjects search through product pages by themselves. The present study series represents an attempt to find neural markers of real-world decisions in a fully natural environment and explore how those markers can change due to small adjustments for the sake of experimental control. Limitations and practical applicability of the real-world approach to studying decision-making are discussed.

Processing of Social and Monetary Rewards in the Human Striatum

ABSTRACTSocial Determination of Health (SDH)/Collective Health is a Latin American framework that sees the Marxist core concept of social class as fundamental for understanding health inequalities. In contrast to social stratification approaches, Marxist proposals seek to understand health as part of the historical transformations of capitalism’s mode of production. In this article we aim to analyze the relationship between social class and health inequalities using data from the IV Oral Health National Study in Colombia. We conducted hierarchical cluster analyses to classify the population in five class positions and three living conditions clusters, which reflect how the spheres of production and social reproduction relate to social classes in Colombia. To measure oral health we use DMFT, as well as care and treatment needs indexes. Through variance analysis models we found that people from more exploited class positions and worse living conditions have more active disease and higher treatment needs. Despite technical and conceptual challenges, we conclude that a social class analytical framework can be operationalised via the interrelated spheres of production and social reproduction, which sheds light on the relationship between health inequalities and the class structure of the capitalist system.

This article introduces a special issue of the Journal of Traumatic Stress devoted to new directions in the study of moral injury (MI), defined as transgressive harms and the outcomes of those experiences. Although a significant body of research has emerged devoted to the study of the MI construct, a number of conceptual and empirical challenges have arisen; these are summarized and discussed in the present article. In addition, this article proposes ways of overcoming these challenges in order to further research and clinical practice in the field. We then go on to introduce the content and themes of the present collection of articles in this special issue, all of which provide examples of some of the most innovative and forward-looking work on the topic and expand into new conceptual frameworks, new methods of investigation, and new populations and contexts.

Objective:Recent findings suggest that diminished processing of positive contextual information about others during interactions may contribute to social impairment in the schizophrenia spectrum. This could be due to general social context processing deficits or specific biases against positive information. We studied the impact of positive and negative social contextual information during social interactions using functional neuroimaging and probed whether these neural mechanisms were associated with real-life social functioning in schizophrenia spectrum disorders.Methods:Patients with a schizophrenia spectrum disorder (N = 23) and controls disorder (N = 25) played three multi-round trust games during functional magnetic resonance imaging scanning, with no, positive and negative information about the counterpart’s trustworthiness, while all counterparts were programmed to behave trustworthy. The main outcome variable was the height of the shared amount in the trust game, i.e. investment, representing an indication of trust. The first investment in the game was considered to be basic trust, since no behavioural feedback was given yet. We performed region-of-interest analyses and examined the association with real-life social functioning using the experience sampling method.Results:Social contextual information had no effect on patients’ first investments, whereas controls made the lowest investment after negative and the highest investments after positive contextual information was provided. Over trials, patients decreased investments, suggesting reduced social reward learning, whereas controls increased investments in response to behavioural feedback in the negative context. Patients engaged the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex less than controls during context presentation and showed reduced activity within the caudate during repayments. In patients, lower investments were associated with more time spent alone and social exclusion and lower caudate activation was marginally significantly associated with higher perceived social exclusion.Conclusion:The failure to adapt trust to positive and negative social contexts suggests that patients have a general insensitivity to prior social information, indicating top-down processing impairments. In addition, patients show reduced sensitivity to social reward, i.e. bottom-up processing deficits. Moreover, lower trust and lower neural activation were related to lower real-life social functioning. Together, these findings indicate that improving trust and social interactions in schizophrenia spectrum needs a multi-faceted approach that targets both mechanisms.

Nicotine-induced plasma corticosterone is attenuated by social interactions in male and female adolescent rats

Impaired social reward processing in individuals with Internet gaming disorder and its relationship with early face perception

Introduction and Objective: Habit theory describes context stability as important for the development of habit automaticity, but its role in insulin habit automaticity and adherence is unknown. The objective of the study was to examine the roles of context and context stability on insulin habit automaticity and adherence in adults with T1D. Methods: Adults with T1D (N = 63) completed a 7-day ecological momentary assessment (EMA) protocol using a time-contingent prompt schedule corresponding to approximate mealtimes (morning, afternoon, and evening). Physical, social, and emotional contexts were assessed at each timepoint. Generalized linear mixed-effects models tested associations between specific contexts with momentary insulin habit automaticity and insulin adherence. Spearman correlations were used to assess the strength of associations of context stability with insulin habit automaticity and insulin adherence. Results: The median age of the sample was 49 years, 58.7% were female, 96.8% were using a pump and CGM, and 76.3% were using automated insulin delivery. Feeling fatigued, stressed, and depressed reduced the likelihood of adherence to insulin but were not associated with automaticity. Those who reported feeling stressed were 56% less likely to adhere to insulin compared to those who reported no stress at all. As the extent of feeling fatigued increased, the likelihood of adherence decreased. More stable emotional contexts were associated with higher insulin habit automaticity scores and with greater insulin adherence. Greater stability in emotional context was also associated with less variability in both insulin habit automaticity and insulin adherence. Social context demonstrated a similar pattern of associations to that of emotional context for adherence but not for automaticity. Conclusion: Negative emotional contexts and emotional context stability appear to be important in insulin adherence and insulin habit automaticity. Disclosure J.Y. Stone: None. M.S. Dietrich: None. L.S. Mayberry: None. K. Clouse: None. S.A. Mulvaney: None. Funding Vanderbilt Institute for Clinical and Translational Research (UL1 TR002243)

While video anomaly detection has been an active area of research for several years, recent progress is limited to improving the state-of-the-art results on small datasets using an inadequate evaluation criterion. In this work, we take a new comprehensive look at the video anomaly detection problem from a more realistic perspective. Specifically, we consider practical challenges such as continual learning and few-shot learning, which humans can easily do but remains to be a significant challenge for machines. A novel algorithm designed for such practical challenges is also proposed. For performance evaluation in this new framework, we introduce a new dataset which is significantly more comprehensive than the existing benchmark datasets, and a new performance metric which takes into account the fundamental temporal aspect of video anomaly detection. The experimental results show that the existing state-of-the-art methods are not suitable for the considered practical challenges, and the proposed algorithm outperforms them with a large margin in continual learning and few-shot learning tasks.

Several studies investigated the neural and functional mechanisms underlying action observation in contexts with objects. However, actions seen in everyday life are often embedded in emotional contexts. The neural systems integrating emotion cues in action observation are still poorly understood. Previous findings suggest that the processing of both action and emotion information recruits motor control areas within the cerebello-thalamo-cortical pathways. It is therefore hard to determine whether social emotional contexts influence action processing via a direct modulation of motor representations coding for the observed action or via the affective state and implicit motor preparedness elicited in observers in response to emotional contexts. Here we designed a novel fMRI task to identify neural networks engaged by the affective appraisal of a grasping action seen in two different emotional contexts, while keeping the action kinematics constant. Results confirmed that observing the same acts of grasping but in different emotional contexts modulated activity in supplementary motor area, ventrolateral thalamus, anterior cerebellum. Moreover, changes in functional connectivity between left supplementary motor area and parahippocampus in different emotional contexts suggested a direct neural pathway through which emotional contexts may drive the neural motor system. Taken together, these findings shed new light on the malleability of motor system as a function of emotional contexts.

Incorporating connectivity into the design of marine protected areas (MPAs) has met with conceptual, theoretical, and practical challenges, which include: 1) the need to consider connectivity for multiple species with different dispersal abilities, and 2) the role played by variable habitat quality in determining the spatial patterns of connectivity. We propose an innovative approach, combining biophysical modeling with a routinely‐used tool for marine‐reserve design (Marxan), to address both challenges by using ecologically‐informed connectivity parameters. We showed how functional demographic connectivity for four candidate reef‐associated species with varying dispersal abilities and a suite of connectivity metrics weighted by habitat quality can be used to set conservation objectives and inform MPA placement. Overall, the strength of dispersal barriers varied across modeled species and, also across species, we found a lack of spatial concordance of reefs that were high‐quality sources, self‐persistent, and stepping‐stones. Including spatially‐heterogeneous habitat quality made a considerable difference to connectivity patterns, significantly reducing the potential reproductive output from many reefs. We also found that caution is needed in combining connectivity data from modeled species into multi‐species matrices, which do not perform reliably as surrogates for all connectivity metrics of individual species. We then showed that restricting the habitat available for conservation has an inequitable impact on different connectivity objectives and species, with greatest impact on betweenness centrality and long‐distance dispersers. We used Brazilian coral reefs as a case study but our approach is applicable to both marine and terrestrial conservation planning, and offers a holistic way to design functionally‐connected reserves to tackle the complex issues relevant to planning for persistence.

This synthesis chapter discusses how methodological paradigms and theoretical frameworks from the wider fields of psycholinguistics and cognitive science have contributed to a more nuanced understanding of the (psycho)linguistic profiles of various types of bi- and multilingual language users. It highlights the importance of experiential factors, beyond age as a unidimensional variable, as a critical avenue for future research, and it advocates going beyond comparisons between predefined learner groups towards exploring experiential individual-difference variables that shape language processing across learner types and across the lifespan more broadly. To do so, psycholinguistic approaches to SLA must position themselves squarely within mainstream psycholinguistics, a discipline that has traditionally focused on (presumed) monolingual native speakers. The chapter concludes with a discussion of methodological, theoretical, and practical challenges that allow the field to grow (further) into a cumulative quantitative discipline, and to extend the empirical scope of psycholinguistic research on bilingualism to social and linguistic contexts beyond the Global North and the typologically closely related languages typically involved in these contexts.

The aim of this paper is to illustrate that courts play an important role in the domestic protection of socio-economic rights. In order to ensure that socio-economic rights are effectively protected and enforced, this paper identifies and discusses the framework for protecting socio-economic rights under the 2013 Constitution. The paper discusses the role of the courts in the domestic framework for protecting socio-economic rights under the 2013 Constitution. Secondly, the study discusses the role of the courts in the protection of socio-economic rights. The paper further identifies some of the major conceptual and practical challenges that are likely to arise in the adjudication of socio-economic rights. In that regard, the study attempts to come up with solutions meant to overcome the conceptual and practical challenges that are faced in the enforcement of socio-economic rights. For example, instead of adopting a purely legal-centric approach in interpreting socio-economic rights, it is suggested that courts should adopt a multidisciplinary approach taking into account founding values, historical background, political background, international human rights law norms and comparative law.

Donor backed rural water supply sector is crucial for improving public health and enhancing livelihoods. However, despite various donor interventions, scaling up these solutions remains a complex task due to factors. This paper explores the challenges and opportunities local donors face in scaling rural water supply solutions in Tanzania. Theoretical frameworks such as Sustainable Development Theory, Institutional Theory, Community-Based Resource Management (CBRM), Public-Private Partnerships (PPP) offer valuable insights into the practical and conceptual challenges that local donors encounter. This paper explores the challenges and opportunities local donors face in scaling rural water supply solutions in Tanzania. The rural water supply sector is crucial for improving public health and enhancing livelihoods. However, despite various donor interventions, scaling up these solutions remains a complex task due to factors such as financial constraints, political influences, institutional weaknesses, and technological challenges. Theoretical frameworks such as Sustainable Development Theory, Institutional Theory, Community-Based Resource Management (CBRM), Public-Private Partnerships (PPP) offer valuable insights into the practical and conceptual challenges that local donors encounter. Drawing on empirical evidence, the article discusses these challenges and presents recommendations for overcoming them.