Theories such as social baseline theory have argued that social groups serve a regulatory functio... more Theories such as social baseline theory have argued that social groups serve a regulatory function but have not explored whether this regulatory process carries costs for the group. Allostatic load, the wear and tear on regulatory systems caused by chronic or frequent stress, is marked by diminished stress system flexibility and compromised recovery. We argue that allostatic load may develop within social groups as well and provide a model for how relationship dysfunction operates. Social allostatic load may be characterized by processes such as groups becoming locked into static patterns of interaction and may ultimately lead to up-regulation or down-regulation of a group’s set point, or the optimal range of arousal or affect around which the group tends to converge. Many studies of emotional and physiological linkage within groups have reported that highly correlated states of arousal, which may reflect failure to maintain a group-level regulatory baseline, occur in the context of...
Strong social ties correspond with better health and well being, but the neural mechanisms linkin... more Strong social ties correspond with better health and well being, but the neural mechanisms linking social contact to health remain speculative. This study extends work on the social regulation of brain activity by supportive handholding in 110 participants (51 female) of diverse racial and socioeconomic origins. In addition to main effects of social regulation by handholding, we assessed the moderating effects of both perceived social support and relationship status (married, cohabiting, dating or platonic friends). Results suggest that, under threat of shock, handholding by familiar relational partners attenuates both subjective distress and activity in a network associated with salience, vigilance and regulatory self-control. Moreover, greater perceived social support corresponded with less brain activity in an extended network associated with similar processes, but only during partner handholding. In contrast, we did not observe any regulatory effects of handholding by strangers, and relationship status did not moderate the regulatory effects of partner handholding. These findings suggest that contact with a familiar relational partner is likely to attenuate subjective distress and a variety of neural responses associated with the presence of threat. This effect is likely enhanced by an individual's expectation of the availability of support from their wider social network.
Social support may normalize stress reactivity among highly anxious individuals, yet little resea... more Social support may normalize stress reactivity among highly anxious individuals, yet little research has examined anxious reactions in social contexts. We examined the role of both state and trait anxiety in the link between social support and the neural response to threat. We employed an fMRI paradigm in which participants faced the threat of electric shock under three conditions: alone, holding a stranger's hand, and holding a friend's hand. We found significant interactions between trait anxiety and threat condition in regions including the hypothalamus, putamen, precentral gyrus, and precuneus. Analyses revealed that highly trait anxious individuals were less active in each of these brain regions while alone in the scanner-a pattern that suggests the attentional disengagement associated with the perception of high intensity threats. These findings support past research suggesting that individuals high in anxiety tend to have elevated neural responses to mild or moderate threats but paradoxically lower responses to high intensity threats, suggesting a curvilinear relationship between anxiety and threat responding. We hypothesized that for highly anxious individuals, shock cues would be perceived as highly threatening while alone in the scanner, possibly due to attentional disengagement, but this perception would be mitigated if they were holding someone's hand. The disengagement seen in highly anxious people under conditions of high perceived threat may thus be alleviated by social proximity. These results suggest a role for social support in regulating emotional responses in anxious individuals, which may aid in treatment outcomes.
The Distress-Relief Dynamic in Attachment Bonding Human beings need other human beings for their ... more The Distress-Relief Dynamic in Attachment Bonding Human beings need other human beings for their general health and well-being (c.f., Baumeister and Leary 1995; Holt-Lunstad et al. 2010). Awareness of the importance of interpersonal bonds grew rapidly in the mid-twentieth century due to the work of psychological pioneers like John Bowlby (e.g., 1969/1982) and Harry Harlow (1958). Their work demonstrated that for infant monkeys and humans, physical touch, sensitive care, and a consistent primary relationship are fundamental to healthy development. Bowlby's (e.g., 1969/1982) attachment theory continues to have a tremendous impact on the field of psychology. His theory predicted both normative and individual differences in the functioning of a putative attachment system. For many years the field focused largely on the individual differences in attachment first documented by Mary Ainsworth and her colleagues (Ainsworth et al. 1978). Despite this focus, as the branches of attachment theory have expanded into areas such as attachment in adults (c.f., Hazan and Shaver 1987; Mikulincer and Shaver 2007), renewed efforts to understand the normative processes that form attachment bonds are receiving attention. Further, insights concerning normative processes are beginning to shed light on the formation of attachment bonds and individual differences in them. In this chapter we explore some of the normative processes that lead to social bonding and the development of attachment styles. First, we explore the distressrelief dynamic as a fundamental process in the formation of feelings of security in adults. Second, we tackle the issue of how and why attachment bonds form, how different styles emerge, and how the distress-relief dynamic contributes to these
ABSTRACT Higher social anxiety corresponded with lower self-stranger, but not self-friend, corre... more ABSTRACT Higher social anxiety corresponded with lower self-stranger, but not self-friend, correlations in threat-related BOLD activation. These results suggest that social anxiety, even at subclinical levels, may decrease one's ability to regard strangers as identified or affiliated with oneself. Social anxiety is characterized by self-focused attention during social situations, which may be exacerbated in situations involving strangers. Interestingly, research has shown that socially anxious individuals may report greater empathic concern for others. However, it is possible this is more related to increased public consciousness and self-presentational concerns than to neural self-other overlap.
Neuroimaging studies using the social-exclusion paradigm Cyberball indicate increased dorsal ante... more Neuroimaging studies using the social-exclusion paradigm Cyberball indicate increased dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC) and right insula activity as a function of exclusion. However, comparatively less work has been done on how social status factors may moderate this finding. This study used the Cyberball paradigm with 85 (45 females) socioeconomically diverse participants from a larger longitudinal sample. We tested whether neighborhood quality during adolescence would predict subsequent neural responding to social exclusion in young adulthood. Given previous behavioral studies indicating greater social vigilance and negative evaluation as a function of lower status, we expected that lower adolescent neighborhood quality would predict greater dACC activity during exclusion at young adulthood. Our findings indicate that young adults who lived in low-quality neighborhoods in adolescence showed greater dACC activity to social exclusion than those who lived in higher quality neighborhoods. Lower neighborhood quality also predicted greater prefrontal activation in the superior frontal gyrus, dorsal medial prefrontal cortex and the middle frontal gyrus, possibly indicating greater regulatory effort. Finally, this effect was not driven by subsequent ratings of distress during exclusion. In sum, adolescent neighborhood quality appears to potentiate neural responses to social exclusion in young adulthood, effects that are independent of felt distress.
Neurobiological investigations of empathy often support an embodied simulation account. Using fun... more Neurobiological investigations of empathy often support an embodied simulation account. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we monitored statistical associations between brain activations indicating self-focused threat to those indicating threats to a familiar friend or an unfamiliar stranger. Results in regions such as the anterior insula, putamen and supramarginal gyrus indicate that self-focused threat activations are robustly correlated with friend-focused threat activations but not stranger-focused threat activations. These results suggest that one of the defining features of human social bonding may be increasing levels of overlap between neural representations of self and other. This article presents a novel and important methodological approach to fMRI empathy studies, which informs how differences in brain activation can be detected in such studies and how covariate approaches can provide novel and important information regarding the brain and empathy.
Social proximity and interaction attenuate cardiovascular arousal, facilitate the development of ... more Social proximity and interaction attenuate cardiovascular arousal, facilitate the development of nonanxious temperament, inhibit the release of stress hormones, reduce threat-related neural activation, and generally promote health and longevity. Conversely, social subordination, rejection and isolation are powerful sources of stress and compromised health. Drawing on the biological principle of economy of action, perception ⁄ action links, and the brain's propensity to act as a Bayesian predictor, Social Baseline Theory (SBT) proposes that the primary ecology to which human beings are adapted is one that is rich with other humans. Moreover, SBT suggests that the presence of other people helps individuals to conserve important and often metabolically costly somatic and neural resources through the social regulation of emotion.
Not much is known about the neural and psychological processes that promote the initial condition... more Not much is known about the neural and psychological processes that promote the initial conditions necessary for positive social bonding. This study explores one method of conditioned bonding utilizing dynamics related to the social regulation of emotion and attachment theory. This form of conditioning involves repeated presentations of negative stimuli followed by images of warm, smiling faces. L. Beckes, J. Simpson, and A. Erickson (2010) found that this conditioning procedure results in positive associations with the faces measured via a lexical decision task, suggesting they are perceived as comforting. This study found that the P1 ERP was similarly modified by this conditioning procedure and the P1 amplitude predicted lexical decision times to insecure words primed by the faces. The findings have implications for understanding how the brain detects supportive people, the flexibility and modifiability of early ERP components, and social bonding more broadly.
A semi-parametric model for estimating hemodynamic response function (HRF) from multi-subject fMR... more A semi-parametric model for estimating hemodynamic response function (HRF) from multi-subject fMRI data is introduced within the context of the General Linear Model. The new model assumes that the HRFs for a fixed brain voxel under a given stimulus share the same unknown functional form across subjects, but differ in height, time to peak, and width. A nonparametric spline-smoothing method is developed to evaluate this common functional form, based on which subject-specific characteristics of the HRFs can be estimated. This semi-parametric model explicitly characterizes the common properties shared across subjects and is flexible in describing various brain hemodynamic activities across different regions and stimuli. In addition, the temporal differentiability of the employed spline basis enables an easy-to-compute way of evaluating latency and width differences in hemodynamic activity. The proposed method is applied to data collected as part of an ongoing study of socially mediated emotion regulation. Comparison with several existing methods is conducted through simulations and real data analysis.
Estimation and inferences for the hemodynamic response functions (HRF) using multisubject fMRI da... more Estimation and inferences for the hemodynamic response functions (HRF) using multisubject fMRI data are considered. Within the context of the General Linear Model, two new nonparametric estimators for the HRF are proposed. The first is a kernel-smoothed estimator, which is used to construct hypothesis tests on the entire HRF curve, in contrast to only summaries of the curve as in most existing tests. To cope with the inherent large data variance, we introduce a second approach which imposes Tikhonov regularization on the kernel-smoothed estimator. An additional bias-correction step, which uses multisubject averaged information, is introduced to further improve efficiency and reduce the bias in estimation for individual HRFs. By utilizing the common properties of brain activity shared across subjects, this is the main improvement over the standard methods where each subject's data is usually analyzed independently. A fast algorithm is also developed to select the optimal regularization and smoothing parameters. The proposed methods are compared with several existing regularization methods through simulations. The methods are illustrated by an application to the fMRI data collected under a psychology design employing the Monetary Incentive Delay (MID) task.
Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 2012
Relationships are an ideal context within which to explore correlations in psychophysiological an... more Relationships are an ideal context within which to explore correlations in psychophysiological and brain imaging data, but correlational analyses in functional magnetic resonance imaging are often poorly understood, and fears of non-independent correlational “voodoo” may arouse concern whenever they are used. This paper illustrates how correlations have been used to measure both within-relationship and within-subject covariance in ways that illuminate important relationship processes and linkages. We will outline historical and contemporary examples of correlational approaches that have been utilized in unique and important ways in relationship research, and discuss our own research using innovative correlational approaches to explore interpersonal empathy and identification.
For this functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study, we assessed the impact of early soci... more For this functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study, we assessed the impact of early social experiences on the social regulation of neural threat responding in a sample of 22 individuals that have been followed for over a decade. At 13 years old, a multidimensional measure of neighborhood quality was derived from parental reports. Three measures of neighborhood quality were used to estimate social capital-the level of trust, reciprocity, cooperation, and shared resources within a community. At 16 years old, an observational measure of maternal emotional support behavior was derived from a mother/child social interaction task. At 24 years old, participants were asked to visit our neuroimaging facility with an opposite-sex platonic friend. During their MRI visit, participants were subjected to the threat of electric shock while holding their friend's hand, the hand of an anonymous opposite-sex experimenter, or no hand at all. Higher adolescent maternal support corresponded with less threat-related activation during friend handholding, but not during the stranger or alone conditions, in the bilateral orbitofrontal cortex, inferior frontal gyrus and left insula. Higher neighborhood social capital corresponded with less threat-related activation during friend hand-holding in the superior frontal gyrus, supplementary motor cortex, insula, putamen and thalamus; but low childhood capital corresponded with less threat-related activation during stranger handholding in the same regions. Exploratory analyses suggest this latter result is due to increased threat responsiveness during stranger handholding among low social capital individuals, even during safety cues. Overall, early maternal support behavior and high neighborhood quality may potentiate soothing by relational partners, and low neighborhood quality may decrease the overall regulatory impact of access to social resources in adulthood.
Integrating ideas from Mikulincer and Shaver's (2003) process model of attachment and Nelson... more Integrating ideas from Mikulincer and Shaver's (2003) process model of attachment and Nelson and Panksepp's (1998) neurobiological theory of an integrated social emotion system, we predicted novel attachment-related learning effects. In two experiments, we tested for a unique form of conditioning based on the social regulation of emotion. Consistent with this theoretical integration, the results indicated that people develop more positive and less negative associations with faces of people who display genuine smiles if those faces have been implicitly paired with a distressing stimulus (e.g., a striking snake). These findings could have broad implications and should be of interest to researchers who study attachment, social and affective neuroscience, emotion, learning and memory, attitudes, and interpersonal relationships.
Reflections on the nature (and nurture) of cultures Richerson and Boyd present a strong case for ... more Reflections on the nature (and nurture) of cultures Richerson and Boyd present a strong case for viewing the origins of human social behavior beyond the confines of purely gene-centered theories and models. With considerable skill and carefully chosen examples, they articulate why the full gamut of human social behavior-particularly instances of apparent selfless and occasional self-sacrificial cooperation with complete strangers-cannot be completely understood unless one views the origins of human sociality at multiple levels of analysis, ranging from intra-genomic conflicts, to inter-individual competition, to inter-group competition involving kin (e.g., kin selection), close friends (e.g., reciprocal altruism), and strangers, to competition between larger tribes or bands within a society, to competition between societies or even cultures. It is difficult to disagree with the two central principles that anchor Richerson and Boyd's theoretical position. As they claim, a more complete understanding of culture is needed to explain the full range of human behavior. And certain culturally generated developments or events are likely to have shaped or altered certain selection pressures during evolutionary history. In the abstract, therefore, most social and behavioral scientists-even many ardent evolutionary psychologists-are likely to be on the same intellectual page. The real controversies about multilevel co-evolutionary approaches, of course, reside in the many critical assumptions about our evolutionary past, and in the details of the mathematical models that are claimed to support Richerson and Boyd's perspective. Regrettably, some of these vital details, such as the quantitative modeling that bolsters the 'deductive logic' of their viewpoint, are not presented in the book, even superficially. In this critique, we touch on three general sets of issues: (a) the possible origins of ultra-sociality in humans, (b) the possible origins of 'tribal instincts,'
Theories such as social baseline theory have argued that social groups serve a regulatory functio... more Theories such as social baseline theory have argued that social groups serve a regulatory function but have not explored whether this regulatory process carries costs for the group. Allostatic load, the wear and tear on regulatory systems caused by chronic or frequent stress, is marked by diminished stress system flexibility and compromised recovery. We argue that allostatic load may develop within social groups as well and provide a model for how relationship dysfunction operates. Social allostatic load may be characterized by processes such as groups becoming locked into static patterns of interaction and may ultimately lead to up-regulation or down-regulation of a group’s set point, or the optimal range of arousal or affect around which the group tends to converge. Many studies of emotional and physiological linkage within groups have reported that highly correlated states of arousal, which may reflect failure to maintain a group-level regulatory baseline, occur in the context of...
Strong social ties correspond with better health and well being, but the neural mechanisms linkin... more Strong social ties correspond with better health and well being, but the neural mechanisms linking social contact to health remain speculative. This study extends work on the social regulation of brain activity by supportive handholding in 110 participants (51 female) of diverse racial and socioeconomic origins. In addition to main effects of social regulation by handholding, we assessed the moderating effects of both perceived social support and relationship status (married, cohabiting, dating or platonic friends). Results suggest that, under threat of shock, handholding by familiar relational partners attenuates both subjective distress and activity in a network associated with salience, vigilance and regulatory self-control. Moreover, greater perceived social support corresponded with less brain activity in an extended network associated with similar processes, but only during partner handholding. In contrast, we did not observe any regulatory effects of handholding by strangers, and relationship status did not moderate the regulatory effects of partner handholding. These findings suggest that contact with a familiar relational partner is likely to attenuate subjective distress and a variety of neural responses associated with the presence of threat. This effect is likely enhanced by an individual's expectation of the availability of support from their wider social network.
Social support may normalize stress reactivity among highly anxious individuals, yet little resea... more Social support may normalize stress reactivity among highly anxious individuals, yet little research has examined anxious reactions in social contexts. We examined the role of both state and trait anxiety in the link between social support and the neural response to threat. We employed an fMRI paradigm in which participants faced the threat of electric shock under three conditions: alone, holding a stranger's hand, and holding a friend's hand. We found significant interactions between trait anxiety and threat condition in regions including the hypothalamus, putamen, precentral gyrus, and precuneus. Analyses revealed that highly trait anxious individuals were less active in each of these brain regions while alone in the scanner-a pattern that suggests the attentional disengagement associated with the perception of high intensity threats. These findings support past research suggesting that individuals high in anxiety tend to have elevated neural responses to mild or moderate threats but paradoxically lower responses to high intensity threats, suggesting a curvilinear relationship between anxiety and threat responding. We hypothesized that for highly anxious individuals, shock cues would be perceived as highly threatening while alone in the scanner, possibly due to attentional disengagement, but this perception would be mitigated if they were holding someone's hand. The disengagement seen in highly anxious people under conditions of high perceived threat may thus be alleviated by social proximity. These results suggest a role for social support in regulating emotional responses in anxious individuals, which may aid in treatment outcomes.
The Distress-Relief Dynamic in Attachment Bonding Human beings need other human beings for their ... more The Distress-Relief Dynamic in Attachment Bonding Human beings need other human beings for their general health and well-being (c.f., Baumeister and Leary 1995; Holt-Lunstad et al. 2010). Awareness of the importance of interpersonal bonds grew rapidly in the mid-twentieth century due to the work of psychological pioneers like John Bowlby (e.g., 1969/1982) and Harry Harlow (1958). Their work demonstrated that for infant monkeys and humans, physical touch, sensitive care, and a consistent primary relationship are fundamental to healthy development. Bowlby's (e.g., 1969/1982) attachment theory continues to have a tremendous impact on the field of psychology. His theory predicted both normative and individual differences in the functioning of a putative attachment system. For many years the field focused largely on the individual differences in attachment first documented by Mary Ainsworth and her colleagues (Ainsworth et al. 1978). Despite this focus, as the branches of attachment theory have expanded into areas such as attachment in adults (c.f., Hazan and Shaver 1987; Mikulincer and Shaver 2007), renewed efforts to understand the normative processes that form attachment bonds are receiving attention. Further, insights concerning normative processes are beginning to shed light on the formation of attachment bonds and individual differences in them. In this chapter we explore some of the normative processes that lead to social bonding and the development of attachment styles. First, we explore the distressrelief dynamic as a fundamental process in the formation of feelings of security in adults. Second, we tackle the issue of how and why attachment bonds form, how different styles emerge, and how the distress-relief dynamic contributes to these
ABSTRACT Higher social anxiety corresponded with lower self-stranger, but not self-friend, corre... more ABSTRACT Higher social anxiety corresponded with lower self-stranger, but not self-friend, correlations in threat-related BOLD activation. These results suggest that social anxiety, even at subclinical levels, may decrease one's ability to regard strangers as identified or affiliated with oneself. Social anxiety is characterized by self-focused attention during social situations, which may be exacerbated in situations involving strangers. Interestingly, research has shown that socially anxious individuals may report greater empathic concern for others. However, it is possible this is more related to increased public consciousness and self-presentational concerns than to neural self-other overlap.
Neuroimaging studies using the social-exclusion paradigm Cyberball indicate increased dorsal ante... more Neuroimaging studies using the social-exclusion paradigm Cyberball indicate increased dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC) and right insula activity as a function of exclusion. However, comparatively less work has been done on how social status factors may moderate this finding. This study used the Cyberball paradigm with 85 (45 females) socioeconomically diverse participants from a larger longitudinal sample. We tested whether neighborhood quality during adolescence would predict subsequent neural responding to social exclusion in young adulthood. Given previous behavioral studies indicating greater social vigilance and negative evaluation as a function of lower status, we expected that lower adolescent neighborhood quality would predict greater dACC activity during exclusion at young adulthood. Our findings indicate that young adults who lived in low-quality neighborhoods in adolescence showed greater dACC activity to social exclusion than those who lived in higher quality neighborhoods. Lower neighborhood quality also predicted greater prefrontal activation in the superior frontal gyrus, dorsal medial prefrontal cortex and the middle frontal gyrus, possibly indicating greater regulatory effort. Finally, this effect was not driven by subsequent ratings of distress during exclusion. In sum, adolescent neighborhood quality appears to potentiate neural responses to social exclusion in young adulthood, effects that are independent of felt distress.
Neurobiological investigations of empathy often support an embodied simulation account. Using fun... more Neurobiological investigations of empathy often support an embodied simulation account. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we monitored statistical associations between brain activations indicating self-focused threat to those indicating threats to a familiar friend or an unfamiliar stranger. Results in regions such as the anterior insula, putamen and supramarginal gyrus indicate that self-focused threat activations are robustly correlated with friend-focused threat activations but not stranger-focused threat activations. These results suggest that one of the defining features of human social bonding may be increasing levels of overlap between neural representations of self and other. This article presents a novel and important methodological approach to fMRI empathy studies, which informs how differences in brain activation can be detected in such studies and how covariate approaches can provide novel and important information regarding the brain and empathy.
Social proximity and interaction attenuate cardiovascular arousal, facilitate the development of ... more Social proximity and interaction attenuate cardiovascular arousal, facilitate the development of nonanxious temperament, inhibit the release of stress hormones, reduce threat-related neural activation, and generally promote health and longevity. Conversely, social subordination, rejection and isolation are powerful sources of stress and compromised health. Drawing on the biological principle of economy of action, perception ⁄ action links, and the brain's propensity to act as a Bayesian predictor, Social Baseline Theory (SBT) proposes that the primary ecology to which human beings are adapted is one that is rich with other humans. Moreover, SBT suggests that the presence of other people helps individuals to conserve important and often metabolically costly somatic and neural resources through the social regulation of emotion.
Not much is known about the neural and psychological processes that promote the initial condition... more Not much is known about the neural and psychological processes that promote the initial conditions necessary for positive social bonding. This study explores one method of conditioned bonding utilizing dynamics related to the social regulation of emotion and attachment theory. This form of conditioning involves repeated presentations of negative stimuli followed by images of warm, smiling faces. L. Beckes, J. Simpson, and A. Erickson (2010) found that this conditioning procedure results in positive associations with the faces measured via a lexical decision task, suggesting they are perceived as comforting. This study found that the P1 ERP was similarly modified by this conditioning procedure and the P1 amplitude predicted lexical decision times to insecure words primed by the faces. The findings have implications for understanding how the brain detects supportive people, the flexibility and modifiability of early ERP components, and social bonding more broadly.
A semi-parametric model for estimating hemodynamic response function (HRF) from multi-subject fMR... more A semi-parametric model for estimating hemodynamic response function (HRF) from multi-subject fMRI data is introduced within the context of the General Linear Model. The new model assumes that the HRFs for a fixed brain voxel under a given stimulus share the same unknown functional form across subjects, but differ in height, time to peak, and width. A nonparametric spline-smoothing method is developed to evaluate this common functional form, based on which subject-specific characteristics of the HRFs can be estimated. This semi-parametric model explicitly characterizes the common properties shared across subjects and is flexible in describing various brain hemodynamic activities across different regions and stimuli. In addition, the temporal differentiability of the employed spline basis enables an easy-to-compute way of evaluating latency and width differences in hemodynamic activity. The proposed method is applied to data collected as part of an ongoing study of socially mediated emotion regulation. Comparison with several existing methods is conducted through simulations and real data analysis.
Estimation and inferences for the hemodynamic response functions (HRF) using multisubject fMRI da... more Estimation and inferences for the hemodynamic response functions (HRF) using multisubject fMRI data are considered. Within the context of the General Linear Model, two new nonparametric estimators for the HRF are proposed. The first is a kernel-smoothed estimator, which is used to construct hypothesis tests on the entire HRF curve, in contrast to only summaries of the curve as in most existing tests. To cope with the inherent large data variance, we introduce a second approach which imposes Tikhonov regularization on the kernel-smoothed estimator. An additional bias-correction step, which uses multisubject averaged information, is introduced to further improve efficiency and reduce the bias in estimation for individual HRFs. By utilizing the common properties of brain activity shared across subjects, this is the main improvement over the standard methods where each subject's data is usually analyzed independently. A fast algorithm is also developed to select the optimal regularization and smoothing parameters. The proposed methods are compared with several existing regularization methods through simulations. The methods are illustrated by an application to the fMRI data collected under a psychology design employing the Monetary Incentive Delay (MID) task.
Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 2012
Relationships are an ideal context within which to explore correlations in psychophysiological an... more Relationships are an ideal context within which to explore correlations in psychophysiological and brain imaging data, but correlational analyses in functional magnetic resonance imaging are often poorly understood, and fears of non-independent correlational “voodoo” may arouse concern whenever they are used. This paper illustrates how correlations have been used to measure both within-relationship and within-subject covariance in ways that illuminate important relationship processes and linkages. We will outline historical and contemporary examples of correlational approaches that have been utilized in unique and important ways in relationship research, and discuss our own research using innovative correlational approaches to explore interpersonal empathy and identification.
For this functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study, we assessed the impact of early soci... more For this functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study, we assessed the impact of early social experiences on the social regulation of neural threat responding in a sample of 22 individuals that have been followed for over a decade. At 13 years old, a multidimensional measure of neighborhood quality was derived from parental reports. Three measures of neighborhood quality were used to estimate social capital-the level of trust, reciprocity, cooperation, and shared resources within a community. At 16 years old, an observational measure of maternal emotional support behavior was derived from a mother/child social interaction task. At 24 years old, participants were asked to visit our neuroimaging facility with an opposite-sex platonic friend. During their MRI visit, participants were subjected to the threat of electric shock while holding their friend's hand, the hand of an anonymous opposite-sex experimenter, or no hand at all. Higher adolescent maternal support corresponded with less threat-related activation during friend handholding, but not during the stranger or alone conditions, in the bilateral orbitofrontal cortex, inferior frontal gyrus and left insula. Higher neighborhood social capital corresponded with less threat-related activation during friend hand-holding in the superior frontal gyrus, supplementary motor cortex, insula, putamen and thalamus; but low childhood capital corresponded with less threat-related activation during stranger handholding in the same regions. Exploratory analyses suggest this latter result is due to increased threat responsiveness during stranger handholding among low social capital individuals, even during safety cues. Overall, early maternal support behavior and high neighborhood quality may potentiate soothing by relational partners, and low neighborhood quality may decrease the overall regulatory impact of access to social resources in adulthood.
Integrating ideas from Mikulincer and Shaver's (2003) process model of attachment and Nelson... more Integrating ideas from Mikulincer and Shaver's (2003) process model of attachment and Nelson and Panksepp's (1998) neurobiological theory of an integrated social emotion system, we predicted novel attachment-related learning effects. In two experiments, we tested for a unique form of conditioning based on the social regulation of emotion. Consistent with this theoretical integration, the results indicated that people develop more positive and less negative associations with faces of people who display genuine smiles if those faces have been implicitly paired with a distressing stimulus (e.g., a striking snake). These findings could have broad implications and should be of interest to researchers who study attachment, social and affective neuroscience, emotion, learning and memory, attitudes, and interpersonal relationships.
Reflections on the nature (and nurture) of cultures Richerson and Boyd present a strong case for ... more Reflections on the nature (and nurture) of cultures Richerson and Boyd present a strong case for viewing the origins of human social behavior beyond the confines of purely gene-centered theories and models. With considerable skill and carefully chosen examples, they articulate why the full gamut of human social behavior-particularly instances of apparent selfless and occasional self-sacrificial cooperation with complete strangers-cannot be completely understood unless one views the origins of human sociality at multiple levels of analysis, ranging from intra-genomic conflicts, to inter-individual competition, to inter-group competition involving kin (e.g., kin selection), close friends (e.g., reciprocal altruism), and strangers, to competition between larger tribes or bands within a society, to competition between societies or even cultures. It is difficult to disagree with the two central principles that anchor Richerson and Boyd's theoretical position. As they claim, a more complete understanding of culture is needed to explain the full range of human behavior. And certain culturally generated developments or events are likely to have shaped or altered certain selection pressures during evolutionary history. In the abstract, therefore, most social and behavioral scientists-even many ardent evolutionary psychologists-are likely to be on the same intellectual page. The real controversies about multilevel co-evolutionary approaches, of course, reside in the many critical assumptions about our evolutionary past, and in the details of the mathematical models that are claimed to support Richerson and Boyd's perspective. Regrettably, some of these vital details, such as the quantitative modeling that bolsters the 'deductive logic' of their viewpoint, are not presented in the book, even superficially. In this critique, we touch on three general sets of issues: (a) the possible origins of ultra-sociality in humans, (b) the possible origins of 'tribal instincts,'
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Papers by Lane Beckes