ArticlePsychological medicine2021
Social reinforcement learning as a predictor of real-life experiences in individuals with high and low depressive symptomatology.
Article in Psychological medicine, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 17 papers.
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17 citing papers in PubMed, 38 citations in OpenAlex.
- The Role of Alexithymia in Social Learning and Feedback-Driven Social Inferences.Computational psychiatry (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2026Article
- Advancing scientific understanding of the drive to socially engage: from broad constructs to transdiagnostic 'building blocks'.Molecular psychiatry · 2026Review
- Deficit in attentional capture by social-value related conditioned stimuli - a new perspective to understand the social-reward learning disorders among individuals with depressive symptoms.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2026Article
- Anhedonia is associated with computational impairments in reward and effort learning in young people with depression symptoms.Psychological medicine · 2025Article
- How working memory and reinforcement learning interact when avoiding punishment and pursuing reward concurrently.Journal of experimental psychology. General · 2025Article
- Emotion Regulation Modulates Affective Responses Without Altering Memory Traces: A Study of Negative Social Feedback from Acquaintances.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Cognitive-behavioral therapy to normalize social learning for patients with major depressive disorders: study protocol for a single-arm clinical trial.BMC psychology · 2025Article
- Dissociating social reward learning and behavior in alcohol use disorder.Translational psychiatry · 2025Article
- Neural responses to social rejection reflect dissociable learning about relational value and reward.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- The challenge of learning adaptive mental behavior.Journal of psychopathology and clinical science · 2024Article
- Reinforcement learning of altruistic punishment differs between cultures and across the lifespan.PLoS computational biology · 2024Article
- Synaptic pruning during adolescence shapes adult social behavior in both males and females.Developmental psychobiology · 2024Article
- Reduced effects of social feedback on learning in Turner syndrome.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Social feedback enhances learning in Williams syndrome.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Computational Psychiatry Needs Time and Context.Annual review of psychology · 2022Review
- I, robot: depression plays different roles in human-human and human-robot interactions.Translational psychiatry · 2021Article
- Impaired social learning in patients with major depressive disorder revealed by a reinforcement learning model.International journal of clinical and health psychology : IJCHPArticle
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Authors and funding
3 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
backgroundSeveral studies have reported diminished learning from non-social outcomes in depressed individuals. However, it is not clear how depression impacts learning from social feedback. Notably, mood disorders are commonly associated with deficits in social functioning, which raises the possibility that potential impairments in social learning may negatively affect real-life social experiences in depressed subjects.
methodsNinety-two participants with high (HD; N = 40) and low (LD; N = 52) depression scores were recruited. Subjects performed a learning task, during which they received monetary outcomes or social feedback which they were told came from other people. Additionally, participants answered questions about their everyday social experiences. Computational models were fit to the data and model parameters were related to social experience measures.
resultsHD subjects reported a reduced quality and quantity of social experiences compared to LD controls, including an increase in the amount of time spent in negative social situations. Moreover, HD participants showed lower learning rates than LD subjects in the social condition of the task. Interestingly, across all participants, reduced social learning rates predicted higher amounts of time spent in negative social situations, even when depression scores were controlled for.
conclusionThese findings indicate that deficits in social learning may affect the quality of everyday social experiences. Specifically, the impaired ability to use social feedback to appropriately update future actions, which was observed in HD subjects, may lead to suboptimal interpersonal behavior in real life. This, in turn, may evoke negative feedback from others, thus bringing about more unpleasant social encounters.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.