Mechanisms Regulating Complex Social Behavior

Project Summary Social relationships among individuals shape many health outcomes. For example, social support systems improve adherence to difficult treatment regimens, whereas dysfunctional social cognition exacerbates the mental health challenges of depression and anxiety. In the previous period of support, our team provided evidence supporting a two-stage model that cleaved the neural and computational processes that establish a social context from those that guide subsequent social control. Those processes have been recently advanced as part of a consilient, cross-species framework that explains adaptive decision making in social situations. Here, we test the hypothesis that these processes reflect the core elements necessary for aligning behavior with the current demands of the social environment. In this project, we will determine how social relationships, social contexts, and the complexity of the social environment impact decision processes. Our three aims rely on tightly integrated and theoretically well-motivated experiments that use primate electrophysiology, human electrophysiology and neuroimaging, and manipulations of brain function; that adopt parallel tasks and social context manipulations; and that analyze behavior through common computational models. Our work builds on progress from the previous grant cycle that demonstrates how our team is uniquely positioned to achieve these aims.