Social Valence Research Articles

The hippocampal CA2 region discriminates social threat from social safety.

The dorsal cornu ammonis 2 (dCA2) region of the hippocampus enables the discrimination of novel from familiar conspecifics. However, the neural bases for more complex social-spatial episodic memories are unknown. Here we report that the spatial and social contents of an aversive social experience require distinct hippocampal regions. While dorsal CA1 (dCA1) pyramidal neurons mediate the memory of an aversive location, dCA2 pyramidal neurons enable the discrimination of threat-associated (CS+) from safety-associated (CS-) conspecifics in both female and male mice. Silencing dCA2 during encoding or recall trials disrupted social fear discrimination memory, resulting in fear responses toward both the CS+ and CS- mice. Calcium imaging revealed that the aversive experience strengthened and stabilized dCA2 representations of both the CS+ and CS- mice, with the incorporation of an abstract representation of social valence into representations of social identity. Thus, dCA2 contributes to both social novelty detection and the adaptive discrimination of threat-associated from safety-associated individuals during an aversive social episodic experience.

The TECo Database: Ecological and Technological Concepts at the Interface Between Abstractness and Concreteness

Ecology and Technology are two keywords of the era we inhabit. Knowing how people represent these domains is essential to inform adequate interventions aimed at promoting conscious behaviors. Here we investigated this aspect by taking insights from the literature on conceptual organization. Specifically, we hypothesized Ecological and Technological concepts might have a “hybrid” nature, at the edge between Abstract and Concrete concepts. We asked a sample of Italian participants to rate 200 concepts pertaining to Ecological (e.g., deforestation), Technological (e.g., Internet), Natural (e.g., water), and Geographical/Geopolitical domains (e.g., mountain, city) on 39 semantic dimensions, some of which traditionally investigated (e.g., Context Availability), and others completely new (e.g., Political Relevance). Results indicate that Ecological and Technological concepts, despite having concrete referents, were more similar to Abstract than Concrete concepts in Concreteness~Abstractness and other semantic dimensions (e.g., Interoception, Social Valence). Interestingly, for some dimensions, they displayed a “more abstract” pattern than that of more typical Abstract concepts—e.g., later and more linguistic acquisition, higher need of others to be understood. Moreover, a Principal Component Analysis revealed three major components that explained overall the conceptual organization of our set of concepts. The first component complements the rating results, with the opposition between concreteness~abstractness, where Ecological and Technological concepts lie in the most abstract extreme. A further Hierarchical Cluster Analysis supported this distinction. Overall, our results have a twofold relevance. On a theoretical side, they contribute to enrich theories on concepts, suggesting Ecological and Technological concepts are special conceptual domains questioning the concrete-abstract dichotomy; on a more pragmatic side, they might inform societal politics on these timely themes.

A failure to discriminate social from non-social touch at the circuit level may underlie social avoidance in autism.

Social touch is critical for communication and to impart emotions and intentions. However, certain autistic individuals experience aversion to social touch, especially when it is unwanted. We used a novel social touch assay and Neuropixels probes to compare neural responses to social vs. non-social interactions in three relevant brain regions: vibrissal somatosensory cortex, tail of striatum, and basolateral amygdala. We find that wild type (WT) mice showed aversion to repeated presentations of an inanimate object but not of another mouse. Cortical neurons cared most about touch context (social vs. object) and showed a preference for social interactions, while striatal neurons changed their preference depending on whether mice could choose or not to interact. Amygdalar and striatal neurons were preferentially modulated by forced object touch, which was the most aversive. In contrast, the Fmr1 knockout (KO) model of autism found social and non-social interactions equally aversive and displayed more aversive facial expressions to social touch when it invaded their personal space. Importantly, when Fmr1 KO mice could choose to interact, neurons in all three regions did not discriminate social valence. Thus, a failure to differentially encode social from non-social stimuli at the circuit level may underlie social avoidance in autism.

Linguistic patterning of laughter in human-socialbot interactions

Laughter is a social behavior that conveys a variety of emotional states and is also intricately intertwined with linguistic communication. As people increasingly engage with voice-activated artificially intelligent (voice-AI) systems, an open question is how laughter patterns during spoken language interactions with technology. In Experiment 1, we collected a corpus of recorded short conversations (~10 min in length) between users (n = 76) and Amazon Alexa socialbots (a voice-AI interface designed to mimic human conversational interactions) and analyzed the interactional and pragmatic contexts in which laughter occurred. Laughter was coded for placement in the interaction relative to various speech acts, as well as for phonetic patterning such as duration and voicing. Our analyses reveal that laughter is most commonly found when the content of Alexa’s speech is considered inappropriate for the discourse context. Laughter in the corpus was also largely short in length and unvoiced– characteristics which are commonly associated with negative social valence. In Experiment 2, we found that a separate group of listeners did not distinguish between positive and negative laughter from our dataset, though we find that laughs rated as more positive are also rated as more excited and authentic. Overall, we discuss our findings for models of human-computer interaction and applications for the use of laughter in socialbot conversations.

Law, suspicion and social hermeneutics at the inception of the Terror, April 1793

Abstract This article revisits the genesis of the Law of Suspects of 17 September 1793, locating it in the longer durée of community and police surveillance, and the semantic field of ‘suspicion’ from the early eighteenth century to April 1793. It argues that the hermeneutics of suspicion, deployed by both citizens and the police, as a means to ensure public safety was a practice of keeping a watch out for suspicious social types (vagabonds, demobilized soldiers, foreigners, religious minorities etc.): people out of place or without occupation. With the Revolution of 1789, the social valences of suspicion underwent a carnivalesque inversion: the idle were now aristocrats rather than the poor; the drifter was now an émigré rather than a vagabond, immigrant, or solider; the religious outsider was now the recusant priest. But as the crisis of 1793/94 deepened, fear corroded all efforts to classify the social world. The Law of Suspects was an effort to rein in popular violence by offering a new way of reading social life through speech, comportment, and behaviours, rather than fixed categories of identity. ‘The suspect’—an identity defined only by transgression—incarnated the evil-doppelgänger of ‘the citizen’, whose legal parameters were yet to be defined.

Between a Subject and an Object: Addressing the Social Valence of Robots

Between a Subject and an Object: Addressing the Social Valence of Robots

“Blue-Eyed Arabs” & the Silver Snake: Alaskan petrocultures and the Trans-Alaska pipeline system

Following fierce construction controversies in the late 1960s and the early 1970s, the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System became a familiar cultural hallmark and the most iconic pipeline in the world. This article argues that the realization of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System changed Alaska’s culture and global imaginaries of Alaska. TAPS forged overlapping and evolving petrocultures; rather than a uniform and static oil culture, the pipeline’s social valence ebbed and flowed with the passage of time and the transit of Arctic oil from Prudhoe Bay through Prince William Sound. The pipeline became a gauge not only for the State’s revenues, but also for the economic and cultural consciousness of its people. Yet there was always a subset of Alaskans who warned of the deleterious effects of the pipeline on Alaska’s environment, polity, culture and ancestral lifeways.

Writing “INFINITYLOOPS”

Transmigration refers to movements made across, between, through, or beyond spatial, spiritual, and bodily boundaries—motions to which queer and trans studies scholars have long imputed important political and social valences. This essay tracks the many transmigrations of the silkworm Bombyx mori, the source of commercial silk, through an archive of literary and critical writings by W. G. Sebald, Jacques Derrida, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Jen Bervin. The author pays special attention to the trans-migration silkworms make through their own bodies, or metamorphosis, thus opening the way to a less anthropocentric account of transmigratory processes. This essay shows how silkworms and silk cross and recross the constructed lines dividing East and West, matter and language, natural and synthetic. In doing so, silkworms enter a broader collective of trans-migrating bodies in which certain bodies are granted free movement at the expense of other, often racialized, queer, or animal bodies. The author argues that the embodied, quotidian metamorphosis of the silkworm exemplifies an alternative mode of trans-migration that refuses transcendence and instead ties us, by silken threads, to the vicissitudes of the present moment.

Contextual social valences for artificial intelligence: anticipation that matters in social work

ABSTRACT In pilot trials, Finnish caseworkers in child welfare services used an AI tool predicting severe risks faced by their clients. Based on interviews with the caseworkers involved, this article draws on those trials to discuss AI valences, or the range of expectations of AI’s value and performance, in social work and beyond. While AI travels across sites of application and sectors of society, its value is often expected to come from the production of anticipatory knowledge. The predictive AI tool used by Finnish caseworkers offers an example: it turned past data about clients into predictions about their future, with an aim of authorizing present interventions to optimize the future. In the pilot trials, however, AI met the practice of social work. In contrast to generic expectations of predictive performance, caseworkers had contextual expectations for AI, reflecting their situated knowledge about their field. For caseworkers, anticipation does not mean producing pieces of speculative knowledge about the future. Instead, for them, anticipation is a professional knowledge-making practice, based on intimate encounters with clients. Caseworkers therefore expect AI to produce contextually relevant information that can facilitate those interactions. This suggests that for AI developments to matter in social work, it is necessary to consider AI not as a tool that produces knowledge outcomes, but one that supports human experts’ knowledge-making processes. More broadly, as AI tools enter new sensitive areas of application, instead of expecting generic value and performance from them, careful attention should be paid on contextual AI valences.

Direct-to-Video (On Demand): New Industrial and Cultural Valuations of Nontheatrical Film Releases

Direct-to-Video (On Demand): New Industrial and Cultural Valuations of Nontheatrical Film Releases

Motherhood and DREADD manipulation of the nucleus accumbens weaken established pair bonds in female prairie voles

Monogamous pair bonding has evolved to enhance reproductive success and ensure offspring survival. Although the behavioral and neural mechanisms regulating the formation of pair bonds have been relatively well outlined, how these relationships are regulated and maintained across the lifetime of an individual remains relatively unexplored. One way to explore this is to study the maintenance of a social bond across a major life-history transition. The transition to motherhood is among the most poignant moments in the life history of a female, and is associated with significant neural and behavioral changes and shifting priorities. The nucleus accumbens (NAc) is known to modulate social valence and is central to mammalian pair bonding. In this study, we investigated two mechanisms driving variation in bond strength in the socially monogamous prairie vole (Microtus ochrogaster). We manipulated neural activity of the NAc at two distinct stages of life-history, before and after the birth of offspring, to assess how neural activity and social contexts modulate female pair bond strength. Our results showed DREADD (Designer Receptor Exclusively Activated by Designer Drugs) inhibition of the NAc decreases affiliative behavior towards the mating partner, whereas DREADD activation of the NAc increases affiliative behavior of strangers, thereby decreasing social selectivity. We also found a robust “birth effect” on pair bond strength, such that bonds with partners were weakened after the birth of offspring, an effect not attributable to the amount of cohabitation time with a partner. Overall, our data support the hypotheses that NAc activity modulates reward/saliency within the social brain in different ways, and that motherhood comes with a cost for the bond strength between mating partners.

Researching the Aftermath of Slavery in Mainland East Africa: Methodological, Ethical, and Practical Challenges

ABSTRACT This article examines ethical, practical, and methodological challenges in researching the aftermath of slavery in continental East Africa away from the coastal plantation belt. Interest in post-slavery there is recent and inspired by the apparent contrast with West Africa, where the issue is much more salient. The article explains this silence by highlighting politically-motivated avoidance of the issue in colonial sources and the preference of post-colonial historians for ‘useful’ pasts. Further, it questions the balance of successful integration and continuing marginalization reflected in the apparent obsolescence of slavery. It argues that tracing the trajectories of ex-slaves requires attention to all forms of social inequality and dependency, to the potential status implications for informants of speaking about slavery, and to the variety of terms and fields of meaning relevant to freedom, unfreedom and dependency. Recent research in this vein shows that slave antecedents remain a matter of aibu, shame, and that ex-slaves’ disappearance as a social category took lifelong efforts on their part. While the social valence of slave antecedents is relatively limited in mainland East Africa, slavery remains a problematic and painful heritage that demands great circumspection by researchers.

Dynamic influences on the neural encoding of social valence.

Social signals can serve as potent emotional triggers with powerful impacts on processes from cognition to valence processing. How are social signals dynamically and flexibly associated with positive or negative valence? How do our past social experiences and present social standing shape our motivation to seek or avoid social contact? We discuss a model in which social attributes, social history, social memory, social rank and social isolation can flexibly influence valence assignment to social stimuli, termed here as 'social valence'. We emphasize how the brain encodes each of these four factors and highlight the neural circuits and mechanisms that play a part in the perception of social attributes, social memory and social rank, as well as how these factors affect valence systems associated with social stimuli. We highlight the impact of social isolation, dissecting the neural and behavioural mechanisms that mediate the effects of acute versus prolonged periods of social isolation. Importantly, we discuss conceptual models that may account for the potential shift in valence of social stimuli from positive to negative as the period of isolation extends in time. Collectively, this Review identifies factors that control the formation and attribution of social valence - integrating diverse areas of research and emphasizing their unique contributions to the categorization of social stimuli as positive or negative.

The importance of pro-social processing, and ameliorating dysfunction in schizophrenia. An FMRI study of oxytocin

Schizophrenia is often a severe and debilitating mental illness, frequently associated with impairments in social cognition that hinder individuals' abilities to relate to others and integrate effectively in society. Oxytocin has emerged as a putative therapeutic agent for treating social deficits in schizophrenia, but the mode of action remains unclear. This placebo-controlled crossover study aimed to elucidate the neural underpinnings of oxytocin administration in patients with schizophrenia. 20 patients with schizophrenia were examined using functional magnetic resonance imaging under oxytocin (40 IU) or placebo nasal spray. Participants performed a stochastically rewarded decision-making task that incorporated elements of social valence provided by different facial expressions, i.e. happy, angry and neutral. Oxytocin attenuated the normal bias in selecting the happy face accompanied by reduced activation in a network of brain regions that support mentalising, processing of facial emotion, salience, aversion, uncertainty and ambiguity in social stimuli, including amygdala, temporo-parietal junction, posterior cingulate cortex, precuneus and insula. These pro-social effects may contribute to the facilitation of social engagement and social interactions in patients with schizophrenia and warrant further investigation in future clinical trials for social cognitive impairments in schizophrenia.

He did it! Or did I just see him on Twitter? Social media influence on eyewitness identification

ABSTRACT Eyewitness identification is fallible, and suggestive post-event information is known to facilitate error; however, whether social media valence affects identification decisions is unknown. After viewing crime videos of various race perpetrators, participants saw post-event Twitter photos of the perpetrator or a foil that varied in valence. Participants attempted identification from a lineup including both individuals and rated the confidence and source (i.e., video, Twitter) of their selection. Results showed that Twitter photos of the perpetrator increased the likelihood of accurate identification and related confidence, whereas seeing the foil reduced the likelihood of a correct identification and related confidence. Remembering the perpetrator from the crime influenced correct identification, while remembering other incorrect sources (e.g., Twitter) only lead to misidentification. Twitter valence and perpetrator race did not impact outcomes. Results suggest that difficulty in identifying a perpetrator is underpinned by source monitoring confusion which is exacerbated by viewing social media that includes innocent suspects.

Is justice grounded? How expertise shapes conceptual representation of institutional concepts

Using abstract concepts is a hallmark of human cognition. While multiple kinds of abstract concepts exist, they so far have been conceived as a unitary kind in opposition to concrete ones. Here, we focus on Institutional concepts, like justice or norm, investigating their fine-grained differences with respect to other kinds of abstract and concrete concepts, and exploring whether their representation varies according to individual proficiency. Specifically, we asked experts and non-experts in the legal field to evaluate four kinds of concepts (i.e., institutional, theoretical, food, artefact) on 16 dimensions: abstractness-concreteness; imageability; contextual availability; familiarity; age of acquisition; modality of acquisition; social valence; social metacognition; arousal; valence; interoception; metacognition; perceptual modality strength; body-object interaction; mouth and hand involvement. Results showed that Institutional concepts rely more than other categories on linguistic/social and inner experiences and are primarily characterized by positive valence. In addition, a more subtle characterization of the institutional domain emerged: Pure-institutional concepts (e.g., parliament) were perceived as more similar to technical tools, while Meta-institutional concepts (e.g., validity) were characterized mainly by abstract components. Importantly, for what concerns individual proficiency, we found that the level of expertise affects conceptual representation. Only law-experts associated Institutional concepts with exteroceptive and emotional experiences, showing also a more grounded and situated representation of the two types of institutional concepts. Overall, our finding highlights the richness and flexibility of abstract concepts and suggests that they differ in the degree of embodiment and grounding. Implications of the results for current theories of conceptual representation and social institutions are discussed.

Jealousy Incarnate: Quiet Ego, Competitive Desire, and the Fictional Intelligence of Long-Term Mating in a Romantic K-Drama

In this paper, we analyze a K-drama aired by the Korean TV network SBS in 2016, Jealousy Incarnate, as a case study of the application of the Tie-Up Theory to a romantic narrative as a form of simulation of human mating processes with social cognition valence. We find that this case provides us with an example of a mating process where the choice of the male partner by the female lead character does not privilege the one that should be preferable on the basis of the standard prediction of the experimental research on human mating. This discrepancy is a signal of a basic limitation of experimental research, that highlights the subjects’ preferences for abstract potential partners but is not able to fully account for the mechanisms that lead to the choice of a specific partner in a specific mating interaction. We argue that the narrative simulation viewpoint provides insights that are complementary to those of experimental research, and that a more comprehensive theoretical approach, such as the one offered by the Tie-Up Theory, may be helpful to account for both perspectives.

Neural representations of social valence bias economic interpersonal choices

Prior personal information is highly relevant during social interactions. Such knowledge aids in the prediction of others, and it affects choices even when it is unrelated to actual behaviour. In this investigation, we aimed to study the neural representation of positive and negative personal expectations, how these impact subsequent choices, and the effect of mismatches between expectations and encountered behaviour. We employed functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging in combination with a version of the Ultimatum Game (UG) where participants were provided with information about their partners' moral traits previous to receiving their fair or unfair offers. Univariate and multivariate analyses revealed the implication of the supplementary motor area (SMA) and inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) in the representation of expectations about the partners in the game. Further, these regions also represented the valence of these expectations, together with the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC). Importantly, the performance of multivariate classifiers in these clusters correlated with a behavioural choice bias to accept more offers following positive descriptions, highlighting the impact of the valence of the expectations on participants' economic decisions. Altogether, our results suggest that expectations based on social information guide future interpersonal decisions and that the neural representation of such expectations in the vmPFC is related to their influence on behaviour.

Pain perception during social interactions is modulated by self-related and moral contextual cues

Despite the growing interest on the effect of the social context on pain, whether and how different facets of interpersonal interactions modulate pain are still unclear. We tested whether personal (i.e., convenient for the self), moral (i.e., equitability of the transaction) or social (i.e., positive vs. negative feedback from others) valence of an interpersonal interaction differentially affects pain and the perceived fairness. Thirty-two healthy participants played the role of Receivers in a Dictator Game, where a player, the Dictator, determined how to divide a payoff between her/himself and the other player, the Receiver. We manipulated the payoff (pain vs. money), the personal valence (favorable vs. unfavorable offer to participants), the moral valence of the offer (from very iniquitous to equitable), and social valence of the Dictator (social acceptance vs. rejection). Moral and personal valence differentially modulated pain. Lower pain was elicited by iniquity, but also by favorable offers. Moreover, unfavorable offers in the economic game were rated as more unfair, whereas only very iniquitous offers elicited such ratings in the pain game, suggesting that participants valued when Dictators endured extra pain for their benefit. Together, we show that the valence of a social interaction at different levels can independently modulate pain and fairness perception.

Varieties of abstract concepts and their multiple dimensions

abstractThe issue of how abstract concepts are represented is widely debated. However, evidence is controversial, also because different criteria were used to select abstract concepts – for example, imageability and abstractness were equated. In addition, for many years abstract concepts have been considered as a unitary whole. Our work aims to address these two limitations. We asked participants to evaluate 425 abstract concepts on 15 dimensions: abstractness, concreteness, imageability, context availability, Body-Object-Interaction, Modality of Acquisition, Age of Acquisition, Perceptual modality strength, Metacognition, Social metacognition, Interoception, Emotionality, Social valence, Hand and Mouth activation. Results showed that conceiving concepts only in terms of concreteness/abstractness is too simplified. More abstract concepts are typically acquired later and through the linguistic modality and are characterized by high scores in social metacognition (feeling that others can help us in understanding word meaning), while concrete concepts obtain high scores in Body-Object-Interaction, imageability, and context availability. A cluster analysis indicated four kinds of abstract concepts: philosophical-spiritual (e.g., value), self-sociality (e.g., politeness), emotive/inner states (e.g., anger), and physical, spatio-temporal, and quantitative concepts (e.g., reflex). Overall, results support multiple representation views indicating that sensorimotor, inner, linguistic, and social experience have different weights in characterizing different kinds of abstract concepts.