Infection threat shapes our social instincts

How do social fears in adolescence develop? Fear conditioning shapes attention orienting to social threat cues.

Social fears emerging in adolescence can have negative effects on emotional well-being. Yet the mechanisms by which these risks occur are unknown. One possibility is that associative learning results in fears to previously neutral social stimuli. Such conditioned responses may alter subsequent processing of social stimuli. We used a novel conditioning task to examine how associative processes i...

SOCIAL IDENTITY SHAPES SOCIAL VALUATION Running head: SOCIAL IDENTITY SHAPES SOCIAL VALUATION Social Identity Shapes Social Valuation: Evidence from Prosocial Behavior and Vicarious Reward

Moral Disgust and The Tribal Instincts Hypothesis

Last changes: 11/15/10 Word Count: 6776 (main text); 9803 (total w/ footnotes)

What shapes social decision making?

Outcome transparency and the weight given to social information both play important roles in decision making, but we argue that an overarching influence is the degree to which individuals can and do gather information. Evolution, experience, and development may shape individual specializations in social decision making that carry over across contexts, and these individual differences may influe...

Social reward shapes attentional biases.

Paying attention to stimuli that predict a reward outcome is important for an organism to survive and thrive. When visual stimuli are associated with tangible, extrinsic rewards such as money or food, these stimuli acquire high attentional priority and come to automatically capture attention. In humans and other primates, however, many behaviors are not motivated directly by such extrinsic rewa...