Abstract
Humans generally prefer social over nonsocial stimuli from an early age. Reduced preference for social rewards has been observed in individuals with autism spectrum conditions (ASC). This preference has typically been noted in separate tasks that measure orienting toward and engaging with social stimuli. In this experiment, we used two eye-tracking tasks to index both of these aspects of social preference in in 77 typical adults. We used two measures, global effect and preferential looking time. The global effect task measures saccadic deviation toward a social stimulus (related to ‘orienting’), while the preferential looking task records gaze duration bias toward social stimuli (relating to ‘engaging’). Social rewards were found to elicit greater saccadic deviation and greater gaze duration bias, suggesting that they have both greater salience and higher value compared to nonsocial rewards. Trait empathy was positively correlated with the measure of relative value of social rewards, but not with their salience. This study thus elucidates the relationship of empathy with social reward processing.
Highlights
One account of conditions marked by deficits in empathy (such as Autism Spectrum Conditions (ASC) and Psychopathy) suggests that empathy deficits seen in these conditions can arise from a core deficit in social reward processing [4]
One sample t-tests against a test-value of .5 found that the proportion of gaze duration to social images was significantly higher for both unscrambled images (mean = .57; t (75) = 6.664, p < .001, Cohen’s d = .764) and scrambled images (mean = .523; t (75) = 4.362, p < .001, Cohen’s d = .5; see Fig 4B)
A paired samples t-test found that proportion of gaze duration to social images was greater for unscrambled images than scrambled images (t (75) = 4.285, p < .001, Cohen’s d = .652; see Fig 4B)
Summary
From an early stage, generally prefer attending to and interacting with conspecifics compared to objects [1,2] This preference for social stimuli has been termed “social preference” and “social motivation” in different theoretical accounts, and is vital for our engagement with the social world [3]. One account of conditions marked by deficits in empathy (such as Autism Spectrum Conditions (ASC) and Psychopathy) suggests that empathy deficits seen in these conditions can arise from a core deficit in social reward processing [4]. This suggestion is consistent with previous work showing that individuals with high trait empathy have a greater reward-related ventral striatal response to social rewards such as happy faces [5]. Variations in a key gene expressed within the human reward system
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