From Cognition and Brain Plasticity Unit, Learning from Reward

will present the talk titled

The neurophysiological correlates of social reward in healthy young adults

Abstract

Over the last few years, there has been a growing interest in social reward, that is, the positively reinforcing nature of social interactions. However, the study of social reward is limited by the difficulty of manipulating face-to-face social situations in the laboratory and the poor ecological validity of existing paradigms. In this scenario, a more ecological approach would be to use stimuli adapted from social media, especially since social interactions are increasingly taking place online via social media platforms. In the current study, we designed and developed a novel paradigm for the study of social reward, using ecological stimuli based on social media. Specifically, we modified a well-validated reward paradigm, the Monetary Incentive Delay (MID) task, substituting monetary rewards with social rewards such as “Likes” and comments adapted from Instagram, one of the most popular social media platforms. Once we designed and pilot-tested the novel task, we validated it using electroencephalography (EEG) experiments in 30 healthy young adults (18-30 years old) recruited from the University of Barcelona (Barcelona, Spain). In this seminar, we present the results from this first EEG study, and we show that the newly developed Social Incentive Delay (SID) task works well in healthy populations. Indeed, analysis of event-related potentials (ERPs) and time-frequency responses during both social reward anticipation (cue phase) and social reward consumption (feedback phase) showed that the electrophysiological correlates of reward observed in previous studies, specifically increased P3 amplitudes for emotionally salient events and increased theta activity for loss and reward prediction errors, are also present in the newly developed paradigm. Overall, our results suggest that in a society where social media has become a modern arena for human life, ‘Likes’ and ‘comments’ on popular social media platforms such as Instagram indeed function as social rewards (e.g., signals of social approval) and evoke similar ERP components and time-frequency responses to those found in monetary reward paradigms.  Most importantly, our results from this first EEG study suggest that the newly developed task works as intended in healthy populations and is ready to be taken to clinical populations such as patients with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD), who are especially sensitive to social stimuli and experience severe social dysfunction.

Location: Online Zoom Link: https://ub-edu.zoom.us/j/96877265625
Or in person attendance: Modular Building, room 1.5