Processing of Social Learning and Social Decision Making in Social Anxiety Disorder
Cognitive, Systems and Behavioural Neurobiology
Final Report Abstract
The project "Processing Social Learning and Decision-Making Processes in Patients with Social Anxiety Disorder (SAD)" aimed to investigate changes in the BOLD signal of the ventral striatum (VS) and the associated reward network in individuals with SAD. Additionally, the study sought to formally describe and test disorder-relevant reinforcement learning models. Furthermore, the role of networks associated with the perspective-taking of others' intentions (mentalizing network) was examined, and interactions between these two networks were captured. The models were selected based on their predictive power for these cognitive processes by simulating them over the entire parameter space and then comparing their predictive performance. The key findings of the project reveal that individuals with SAD place stronger weight on feedback concerning themselves and assess their need for social comparison higher on average compared to the control participants (HC). Moreover, SAD participants exhibited higher learning rates and lower decision noise for both self and other feedback. They also rated feedback from others as more unpleasant and arousing than HC. In terms of brain functional data, differences between SAD and HC were observed in the Mentalizing network. Specifically, two distinguishable subregions in Area 39 of the inferior parietal lobule (IPL) exhibited altered brain functional coupling in SAD concerning reward prediction errors for others (RPEOther) and reward prediction errors for the self (RPESelf). With regard to decision-making, Area 9 of the prefrontal cortex and Area 32p of the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) exhibited stronger activation during cooperative decision-making across both groups, while Area 39 of the inferior parietal lobule (IPL) and Area 9 also displayed a tendency towards altered brain activation patterns during social decisions in individuals with SAD. These findings contribute to a deeper understanding of the neurofunctional alterations potentially associated with social anxiety disorder and shed light on the differences in decisionmaking processes and brain networks between individuals with SAD and healthy controls.
Publications
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Responsibility for others’ outcomes differentially affects reinforcement learning in Social Anxiety Disorder. Poster presented at the 46th annual meeting Psychology and Brain (PuG), Tübingen, Germany
Becker, M. P. I., Dehler, A., Stöckmann, C. L., Todorova, J., Diele, J., Pfaff, L. & Straube, T.
