Author: Katherine E. PowersPublisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 286
Book Description
The need for social connection is a pervasive and powerful human drive. When this fundamental need is not fulfilled, people place greater emphasis on forming social bonds and are motivated to behave in ways consistent with accomplishing these social goals. The present thesis leverages knowledge of the specific cognitive and neural mechanisms involved in the processing of nonsocial rewards and related motivational behaviors to examine how social interactions may similarly be conceptualized as a class of rewards responsible for shaping instrumental learning and evoking approach behaviors. In nonsocial domains, the rewarding properties of stimuli are crucially involved in the development and implementation of goal-directed behaviors, and function to guide animals towards resources that can satisfy unmet needs. Previous research has identified a specific set of brain regions (i.e., the mesolimbic dopamine circuit including the ventral striatum) that are responsible for coding information about rewards and facilitating learned associations between cues and subsequent rewards. The experiments described here provide evidence that 1) the same neural mechanism that facilitates associative learning and reward detection in nonsocial domains similarly functions in the social domain, 2) activity in this neural system tracks the motivational relevance of social stimuli, and 3) these motivational influences bias the perception and interpretation of social cues. Taken together, these results suggest that the neural reward system is highly attuned to social context and functions to advantageously support social relations by translating the value of social cues into motivated action.
