Browsing by Subject "Social"

Although people frequently pursue multiple goals simultaneously, these goals often conflict with each other. For instance, consumers may have both a healthy eating goal and a goal to have an enjoyable eating experience. In this dissertation, I focus on two sources of enjoyment in eating experiences that may conflict with healthy eating: consuming tasty food (Essay 1) and affiliating with indulging dining companions (Essay 2). In both essays, I examine solutions and strategies that decrease the conflict between healthy eating and these aspects of enjoyment in the eating experience, thereby enabling consumers to resolve such goal conflicts.

Essay 1 focuses on the well-established conflict between having healthy food and having tasty food and introduces a novel product offering (“vice-virtue bundles”) that can help consumers simultaneously address both health and taste goals. Through several experiments, I demonstrate that consumers often choose vice-virtue bundles with small proportions (¼) of vice and that they view such bundles as healthier than but equally tasty as bundles with larger vice proportions, indicating that “healthier” does not always have to equal “less tasty.”

Essay 2 focuses on a conflict between healthy eating and affiliation with indulging dining companions. The first set of experiments provides evidence of this conflict and examine why it arises (Studies 1 to 3). Based on this conflict’s origins, the second set of experiments tests strategies that consumers can use to decrease the conflict between healthy eating and affiliation with an indulging dining companion (Studies 4 and 5), such that they can make healthy food choices while still being liked by an indulging dining companion. Thus, Essay 2 broadens the existing picture of goals that conflict with the healthy eating goal and, together with Essay 1, identifies solutions to such goal conflicts.

Public health data show that many everyday reckless behaviors reach a developmental peak in adolescence, with adolescents engaging in more reckless behaviors than both children and adults. In contrast, most studies of decision-making across development do not find laboratory risk-taking to peak in adolescence. Here, I focus on two factors that contribute to the discrepancy between public health and laboratory findings: ambiguity and social context. Everyday decisions tend to involve ambiguous decisions (choices with unknown probabilities), while previous laboratory studies have largely focused on risky decisions (choices with known probabilities). Consequently, little is known about the ambiguity preferences of young children. Across three behavioral studies, I show that ambiguity aversion is absent in 5-year-old children (Chapter 2) and 8- and 9-year-old children (Chapter 3) but present in 15- to 18-year-old adolescents (Chapter 4) and adults (Chapters 2 to 4). The results of Chapters 2 through 4 indicate that the willingness to take ambiguous gambles, like the willingness to take risky gambles, does not peak in adolescence. Everyday decisions also often occur in social contexts when friends are present and outcomes can be shared, whereas most laboratory studies occur in social isolation. In Chapter 5, I use functional magnetic resonance imaging to show that neural response to reward for self and for friend are similar in a sample of young adults (ages 18 to 28), and that neural response to reward linearly decreases with age when participants are watched by their friends but not when they are alone. In Chapter 6, I use behavioral modeling to show that adults value rewards similarly for themselves and for their friend. Adolescents, in contrast, value their own rewards more than those of their friend, but the presence of their friend reduces this valuation difference. The results of Chapters 5 and 6 indicate that the presence of friends prompts adolescents and young adults to engage in behavior that benefits both themselves and their friends. Collectively, the results in this dissertation demonstrate the need to consider contextual influences on decision-making in order to better capture everyday decision behavior in the laboratory.

Emotions guide the way individuals interact with the world, influencing nearly every psychological process from attention, to learning, to metacognition. Constructionist models of emotion posit that emotions arise out of combinations of more general psychological ingredients. These psychological ingredients, however, also form the building blocks of other affective responses such as subjective reactions to rewarding and social stimuli. Here, I propose a domain-general account of affective functioning; I contend that subjective responses to emotional, rewarding, and social stimuli all depend on common psychological and neural mechanisms. I support this hypothesis with three independent studies using both a basic science approach and a clinical approach. In the first study (Chapter 2) I demonstrate that the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), which has been implicated in encoding the value of primary, monetary, and social rewards, also encodes the hedonic value of emotional stimuli. In addition to showing that the mechanisms responsible for processing affective information are shared across reward and emotional processing, I also discuss the relevance of a domain-general constructionist account of affect for clinical disorders. In particular, I hypothesize that in anorexia nervosa (AN), affective disturbances should be manifest across responses to emotional, rewarding, and social stimuli (Chapter 3). In Chapter 4, I provide empirical evidence for this conclusion by demonstrating that when viewing social stimuli, women with a history of AN show disturbances in the insula, a brain region that is responsible for interoceptive and affective processing. This suggests that the interpersonal difficulties frequently observed in patients with AN may be due to biases in domain-general affective responses. In Chapter 5, I support this conclusion by showing that individual differences in harm avoidance in healthy women, women with a current diagnosis of AN, and women who have recovered from AN explain the relationship between disordered eating and social dysfunction. Collectively, these results indicate that subjective affective responses to rewarding, emotional, and social information all rely on common mechanisms as would be suggested by a domain-general theory of affect. Furthermore, the application of a constructionist domain-general account of affect can help to explain the fundamental nature of affective disturbances in psychiatric disorders such as AN.

Few aspects of human cognition are more personal than the choices we make. Our decisions — from the mundane to the impossibly complex — continually shape the courses of our lives. In recent years, researchers have applied the tools of neuroscience to understand the mechanisms that underlie decision making, as part of the new discipline of decision neuroscience. A primary goal of this emerging field has been to identify the processes that underlie specific decision variables, including the value of rewards, the uncertainty associated with particular outcomes, and the consequences of social interactions. Here, across three independent studies, I focus on the neural circuitry supporting social valuation — which shapes our social interactions and interpersonal choices. In the first study (Chapter 2), I demonstrate that social valuation relies on the posterior ventromedial prefrontal cortex (pVMPFC). Extending these findings, I next show that idiosyncratic responses within pVMPFC predict individual differences in complex social decision scenarios (Chapter 3). In addition, I also demonstrate that decisions involving other people (e.g., donations to a charitable organization) produce increased activation in brain regions associated with social cognition, particularly the temporal-parietal junction (TPJ). Finally, in my last study (Chapter 4), I employ functional connectivity analyses and show that social cognition regions — including the TPJ — exhibit increased connectivity with pVMPFC during social valuation, an effect that depends upon individual differences in preferences for social stimuli. Collectively, these results demonstrate that the computation of social value relies on distributed neural circuitry, including both value regions and social cognition regions. Future research on social valuation and interpersonal choice must build upon this emerging theme by linking neural circuits and behavior.

No corner of the world's oceans is untouched by humans. Yet in marine science, management, and conservation, oceans are consistently treated as 'unpeopled', that is, human systems are divorced systematically from ecological systems, and assumptions of human/environmental relationships are oversimplified. This dissertation aims to contribute to interdisciplinary, or 'peopled', approaches to marine sciences and management by integrating biophysical and social sciences, specifically historical ecology and resilience thinking on social-ecological systems. Herein, I examine this theoretically (Chapter 2) and empirically by investigating the coral reefs of Hawaii Island's Kona Coast historically, through the oral histories of 'ocean experts', diverse locally-living people from diverse knowledge systems. I investigate human, biophysical, and social-ecological aspects of 'ecological change.'

Chapter 3 demonstrates that currently there are six expert ocean knowledge systems surrounding Kona's reefs: Native Hawaiians, dive shop operators, tropical aquarium collectors, shoreline fishers, scientists, and conservationists. These are distinct in what experts know about Kona's reefs, and how they know it. The giving and taking of authority between ocean experts, and among people and marine management, influences the condition of the biophysical, social, and management dimensions of Kona's reef systems.

Chapter 4 examines the biophysical dimensions of change, specifically the historic abundance and distribution of 271 coral reef species. Ocean expert's observations of ecological change are surprisingly consistent, regardless of perspective. Historically, species tend to follow one of eight trends in abundance and distribution, grouping into what I term 'social-ecological guilds'. Analyzing these data with Western scientific frameworks (e.g., trends in apex predators, herbivores, corallivores) proved inappropriate, compared to qualitative approaches. Engaging a multiplicity of perspectives reveals historical ecology broader and richer than from any one knowledge system alone.

Chapter 5 identifies coupled aspects of marine social-ecological systems, or what I call 'keystone social-ecological features'. I examine 8 features in detail and show how they are central to understanding 'sea change' through such diverse perspectives. Comparing expert's perceptions and responses to ecological through keystone features, I show that 'change' differs based on sociopolitical, economic, etc. perspective. Understanding relationships between and among people, the ecosystem, and marine management institutions is critical for improved ocean management.

The ultimate goal of the nervous systems of all animals is conceptually simple: Manipulate the external environment to maximize one's own survival and reproduction. The myriad means animals employ in pursuit of this goal are astoundingly complex, but constrained by common factors. For example, to ensure survival, all animals must acquire the necessary nutrients to sustain metabolism. Similarly, social interaction of some form is necessary for mating and reproduction. For some animals, the required social interaction goes far beyond that necessary for mating. Humans and many other primates exist in complex social environments, the navigation of which are essential for adaptive behavior. This dissertation is concerned with processes of transforming sensory stimuli regarding both nutritive and social information into motor commands pursuant to the goals of survival and reproduction. Specifically, this dissertation deals with these processes in the rhesus macaque. Using a task in which monkeys make decisions simultaneously weighing outcomes of fruit juices and images of familiar conspecifics, I have examined the neurophysiology of social and nutritive factors as they contribute to choice behavior; with the ultimate goal of understanding how these disparate factors are weighed against each other and combined to produce coherent motor commands that result in adaptive social interactions and the successful procurement of resources. I began my investigation in the lateral intraparietal cortex, a well-studied area of the primate brain implicated in visual attention, oculomotor planning and control, and reward processing. My findings indicate the lateral intraparietal cortex represents social and nutritive reward information in a common neural currency. That is, the summed value of social and nutritive outcomes is proportional to the firing rates of parietal neurons. I continued my investigation in the striatum, a large and functionally diverse subcortical nuclei implicated in motor processing, reward processing and learning. Here I find a different pattern of results. Striatal neurons generally encoded information about either social outcome or juice rewards, but not both, with a medial or lateral bias in the location of social or juice information encoding neurons, respectively. In further contrast to the lateral intraparietal cortex, the firing rates of striatal neurons coding social and nutritive outcome information is heterogeneous and not directly related to the value of the outcome. This dissertation represents a few incremental steps toward understanding how social information and the drive toward social interaction are incorporated with other motivators to influence behavior. Understanding this process is a necessary step for elucidating, treating, and preventing pathologies