Psychology
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Item DO PRESCHOOLERS TRACK AND EVALUATE SOCIAL INCLUDERS AND EXCLUDERS?(2020) Woodward, Amanda Mae; Beier, Jonathan S; Psychology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Social exclusion is a hurtful experience that can lead to detrimental effects in the social, cognitive, and physiological domains. These consequences can lead to poor, potentially long-lasting, negative outcomes for children. Therefore, it is critical for excluded children to reduce the impact of its negative effects. One helpful strategy to accomplish this is to select social partners who are likely to be inclusive. The current dissertation investigates cognitive processes that may underly children’s partner choice, including the abilities to detect, track, and evaluate social excluders. In Experiment 1, 4-year-old children (n = 32) experienced direct inclusion and exclusion before evaluating target characters. Surprisingly, children in the overall sample did not evaluate excluders more negatively than includers. Experiment 2 further investigated children’s abilities to track and evaluate social excluders using several methodological improvements and a wider age range, including 4- to 6-year-olds (n = 96). With age, children in the overall sample detected social exclusion more often but did not evaluate excluders more negatively. Children who accurately identified includers (n = 68) also evaluated them more positively than excluders. Experiment 3 investigated whether 3- to 6-year-old children who observed third-party games could detect and evaluate social excluders. While children detected and evaluated social excluders, only older children preferred to play with includers. Overall, this work suggests that young children who detect exclusion also evaluate social excluders negatively, although these evaluations may not influence play partner choices until later in development.Item THE NEURAL CORRELATES OF SOCIAL MOTIVATION IN AUTISM SPECTRUM DISORDER DURING A REAL-TIME PEER INTERACTION(2018) Kirby, Laura Anderson; Redcay, Elizabeth; Psychology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is characterized by difficulties with social motivation and social interaction. However, the neural underpinnings of these processes are poorly understood, and past studies investigating this subject have significant methodological limitations. This study is the first to investigate the neural correlates of social interaction in children and adolescents diagnosed with ASD using a naturalistic “chat” paradigm that mimics real-world reciprocal conversations. Despite core weaknesses in social interaction, participants with ASD showed similar brain activation to their neurotypical counterparts while initiating conversations and receiving replies from peers. Two notable group differences emerged, however. Participants with ASD showed blunted responses in the amygdala while initiating conversations and receiving replies, and they showed hyperactive responses in the temporal parietal junction (TPJ) while initiating conversations with peers. Findings have implications for how we understand social motivational and social cognitive weaknesses in ASD.Item White Matter Connectivity and Social Cognitive Impairment in a Transdiagnostic Sample(2018) Dwyer, Kristen R; Blanchard, Jack; Psychology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Social cognitive deficits are impaired mental operations underlying social interactions and are present across psychotic disorders, including schizophrenia spectrum, bipolar, and depressive disorders. It is unclear what neurobiological factors underlie social cognitive impairment, though one possibility is that impaired white matter connections within social cognitive cerebral networks may give rise to social cognitive impairment in psychosis. This study extended current diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) research to a transdiagnostic sample of individuals with psychotic disorders and controls and employed a Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) multiple units of analysis approach. The current study aimed to (1) assess the relation between social cognition (theory of mind and emotion processing), social functioning, negative symptoms, and general cognitive ability, and (2) examine white matter integrity within the uncinate fasciculus (UF) and inferior longitudinal fasciculus (ILF) through fractional anisotropy (FA) values, and to investigate their relation to social cognition and social functioning. Thirty-three participants, 25 with a history of clinically significant psychotic symptoms and 8 controls, completed the research project. Results indicated that social cognition was positively related to general cognitive ability, but not social functioning. However, better theory of mind was related to improved community functioning. Negative symptoms were differentially related to social cognition as there was only a negative association between theory of mind and expressive negative symptoms. More severe negative symptoms were associated with poorer social functioning and cognitive ability. White matter integrity within either identified tract did not contribute to social cognitive ability. Although FA within the left ILF was related to overall functioning and social functioning and FA within the left UF was related to community functioning, these relationships were in the opposite direction as originally predicted with better functioning contributing to lower FA. This is the first study to investigate white matter microstructure in a transdiagnostic sample using an RDoC approach. Our results indicate that there may be unique challenges involved in implementing RDoC. We encourage future researchers to recruit larger sample sizes, administer several behavioral measures of interest to create latent variables, and consider novel imaging methods to better address the difficulties associated with crossing fiber tracts.Item Electrophysiology of Social Reward Processing in Schizophrenia(2018) Catalano, Lauren; Blanchard, Jack J; Psychology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Poor social outcomes have been long observed in schizophrenia. Most studies have identified social cognition as an important contributor to social functioning. Recent research suggests that some people with schizophrenia do not appropriately respond to social rewards, including facial expression of positive affect. The aim of the current study was (1) to use electroencephalogram (EEG) and the event related potential (ERP) technique to examine how people with schizophrenia (SZ) and healthy control (HC) participants anticipate and respond to social (smiles) and nonsocial (money) types of feedback; (2) to examine how deficits in social reward processing are associated with motivation and pleasure deficits and social functioning; and (3) to examine differential contributions of social cognition and social reward processing in understanding functioning. Social and monetary incentive delay tasks were used to characterize reward processing. The stimulus preceding negativity (SPN) was evaluated as an index of reward anticipation, and the reward positivity (RewP) was evaluated as an index of reward sensitivity. Results indicated that HC participants (n = 22) showed significantly more anticipation of reward feedback than neutral feedback, as indexed by the SPN. SZ participants (n = 25) showed similar anticipation regardless of whether there was a potential to win a reward. SZ participants were more sensitive to social rewards than HC participants, as indexed by a larger RewP. We were unable to measure the RewP on the money task; however, exploratory analyses on a P2 component suggested there were no group differences in nonsocial reward sensitivity. Within the SZ group, reduced social reward anticipation was related to greater motivation and pleasure deficits but not social functioning. Social cognition was not significantly related to social functioning or social reward processing in the SZ sample. This is the first study to measure the electrophysiological correlates of social and nonsocial reward processing in schizophrenia. Findings provide preliminary evidence of a generalized anticipatory deficit in schizophrenia that is related to impairments in motivation and pleasure. Reward sensitivity to social rewards appears to be intact. Future experimental design considerations are discussed.Item Developmental Neural Correlates of Social Interaction(2016) Rice, Katherine Ann; Redcay, Elizabeth; Psychology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Children develop in a sea of reciprocal social interaction, but their brain development is predominately studied in non-interactive contexts (e.g., viewing photographs of faces). This dissertation investigated how the developing brain supports social interaction. Specifically, novel paradigms were used to target two facets of social experience—social communication and social motivation—across three studies in children and adults. In Study 1, adults listened to short vignettes—which contained no social information—that they believed to be either prerecorded or presented over an audio-feed by a live social partner. Simply believing that speech was from a live social partner increased activation in the brain’s mentalizing network—a network involved in thinking about others’ thoughts. Study 2 extended this paradigm to middle childhood, a time of increasing social competence and social network complexity, as well as structural and functional social brain development. Results showed that, as in adults, regions of the mentalizing network were engaged by live speech. Taken together, these findings indicate that the mentalizing network may support the processing of interactive communicative cues across development. Given this established importance of social-interactive context, Study 3 examined children’s social motivation when they believed they were engaged in a computer-based chat with a peer. Children initiated interaction via sharing information about their likes and hobbies and received responses from the peer. Compared to a non-social control, in which children chatted with a computer, peer interaction increased activation in mentalizing regions and reward circuitry. Further, within mentalizing regions, responsivity to the peer increased with age. Thus, across all three studies, social cognitive regions associated with mentalizing supported real-time social interaction. In contrast, the specific social context appeared to influence both reward circuitry involvement and age-related changes in neural activity. Future studies should continue to examine how the brain supports interaction across varied real-world social contexts. In addition to illuminating typical development, understanding the neural bases of interaction will offer insight into social disabilities such as autism, where social difficulties are often most acute in interactive situations. Ultimately, to best capture human experience, social neuroscience ought to be embedded in the social world.Item The Effect of Social Interaction on the Neural Correlates of Language Processing and Mentalizing(2014) Rice, Katherine Ann; Redcay, Elizabeth; Psychology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Recent behavioral and neuroscience evidence suggests that studying the social brain in detached and offline contexts (e.g., listening to prerecorded stories about characters) may not capture real-world social processes. Few studies, however, have directly compared neural activation during live interaction to conventional recorded paradigms. The current study used a novel fMRI paradigm to investigate whether real-time social interaction modulates the neural correlates of language processing and mentalizing. Regions associated with social engagement (i.e., dorsal medial prefrontal cortex) were more active during live interaction. Processing live versus recorded language increased activation in regions associated with narrative processing and mentalizing (i.e., temporal parietal junction). Regions associated with intentionality understanding (i.e., posterior superior temporal sulcus) were more active when mentalizing about a live partner. These results have implications for quantifying and understanding the neural correlates of real-world social behavior in typical adults, in developmental populations, and in individuals with social disabilities such as autism.Item Comparing Me to You: Comparison Between Novel and Familiar Goal-Directed Actions Facilitates Goal Extraction and Imitation(2011) Gerson, Sarah A.; Woodward, Amanda L; Psychology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Recognizing the goals of others' actions is critical for much of human development and social life. Origins of this knowledge exist in the first year and are a function of both acting as an intentional agent and observing movement cues in actions. In this dissertation, I explore a new mechanism I believe plays an important role in infants' understanding of novel actions---comparison. In four studies, I examine how the opportunity to compare a familiar action with a novel, tool use action (through physical alignment of the two actions) helps 7- and 10-month-old infants extract and imitate the goal of a tool use action. In Studies 1 and 2, 7-month-old infants given the chance to compare their own reach for a toy with an experimenter's reach using a claw later imitated the goals of an experimenter's tool use actions. In contrast, infants who engaged with the claw, were familiarized with the claw's causal properties, learned the associations between claw and toys, or interacted in a socially contingent manner with the experimenter using the claw did not later imitate the experimenter's goals. Study 3 replicated the finding that engagement in physical alignment facilitated goal extraction and imitation and indicated that this was true for older infants (10-month-olds). It also demonstrated that observation of the same physical alignment did not lead to goal imitation at this age. Finally, Study 4 revealed that 10-month-old infants could learn about the goals of novel actions through the observation of physical alignment when a cue to focus on the goal of the two actions was presented during the alignment process (i.e., a verbal label), indicating that infants gained a conceptual representation of the goal and used structure mapping to extract the common goal between actions. Infants who heard a non-label vocalization during the observation of physical alignment did not later imitate the experimenter's goals. The nature, breadth, and implications of these findings are discussed. Together, these findings indicate that infants can extract the goal-relation of a novel action through comparison processes; comparison could thus have a broad impact on the development of action knowledge.Item A simulated live interaction to examine behavioral correlates of social cognition in individuals with social anhedonia(2010) Park, Stephanie Grace; Blanchard, Jack J; Psychology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Anhedonia, the inability to experience pleasure, is a core negative symptom of schizophrenia and is one of the strongest predictors for the development of schizophrenia-spectrum disorders. However, much is unknown about the processes that underlie social behavior in individuals with social anhedonia. The current study examined differences in social skillfulness, social functioning, and social cognition between these individuals and controls using a simulated live interaction, self-report measures, and assessments of social cognition. Results showed that, compared to controls, individuals with social anhedonia (1) reported lower levels of social functioning and social support, (2) were rated as having poorer overall social skill and affiliation, but (3) did not differ on three assessments of social cognition. Thus, social cognitive processes do not appear to explain the social deficits seen in individuals with social anhedonia, and future research ought to examine the role of other domains such as emotion or motivation.Item Error Observation in Schizophrenia(2009) Mann-Wrobel, Monica Constance; Blanchard, Jack J.; Psychology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Despite the pervasive and impairing nature of social difficulties in schizophrenia, the causes of these problems are not fully understood. It has been suggested that problems with cognitive functioning contribute to the social deficits of schizophrenia. However, little is known about the neural mechanisms that underlie cognitive processes directly linked to social dysfunction in schizophrenia. Recent studies of the mirror neuron system have focused on the error-related negativity (ERN), a negatively-deflected event-related brain potential that is elicited following the commission of an erroneous response. This study examined ERN activity in schizophrenia patients and psychiatrically healthy controls during performance and observation of a confederate performing a computerized flanker task. The lateralized readiness potential (LRP) allowed for a direct comparison of brain activation reflecting response readiness verses error signaling. Correlations between ERN activity during flanker observation, social cognition (i.e., theory of mind), and community social functioning were explored. Finally, correlations between verbal memory, executive functioning, and social functioning were examined and social cognition was explored as a mediator between neurocognition and social functioning. Results indicated that controls produced a robust ERN during execution of the flanker task, whereas ERN activity among patients was comparatively attenuated in amplitude. During observation, there were no significant group differences and no identifiable observation ERN; however, there was greater negative activity following error than correct trials in this condition for all participants. LRP activity did not parallel that of the ERN, supporting the differentiation of motor activity and error-related processing during observation. The only significant correlation to emerge between ERN activity and social cognition and social functioning was between occupational status and execution ERN activity among controls only. Unexpectedly, neurocognition and social functioning were negatively correlated in the patient group. Expectedly, these variables were positively correlated among controls. Therefore, regression analyses were conducted separately by group; however, neither neurocognition nor social cognition predicted a significant proportion of the variance in social functioning. Despite limitations, this research is discussed as a starting point for integrating the study of psychophysiological activity with social behavior and functioning, particularly in a clinical population with pronounced social deficits.Item Measuring Wishful Thinking: The Development and Validation of a New Scale(2007-06-05) Eichelberger, Angela H; Sigall, Harold; Psychology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation describes the development and validation of a 10-item scale measuring individual differences in wishful thinking, or the degree to which individuals' desires bias their judgments. A study was conducted to investigate the new scale's psychometric properties, as well as its relationships with other self-report measures. The wishful thinking measure demonstrated convergent validity with other measures of bias, including self-deceptive enhancement, belief in a just world, and social desirability. Wishful thinking showed discriminant validity with several dimensions of problem-focused coping. Wishful thinking was related to optimism and greater use of positive reinterpretation and growth, an emotion-focused coping response. Next, the new measure was used to distinguish optimists who were wishful thinkers from those who were realistic. An experimental study was conducted to investigate hypothesized differences between wishful thinkers and realistic optimists. In this study, participants were asked to make judgments about their future performance. When success at the task was important to wishful thinkers, they judged success as more likely than when success was not important to them. Realistic optimists did not vary their judgments as a function of importance. The optimal margin of illusion hypothesis was not supported; extreme levels of optimism and wishful thinking were not associated with overconfidence and poor performance. Potential uses of the wishful thinking measure for future research are discussed.