Project Summary/Project Abstract
The ability to socially navigate the world has been strongly linked to health and well-being in humans and
across a wide range of human psychological disorders and depends on prosocial choices in affiliative
environments and strategic learning in competitive ones. These kinds of social decisions involve balancing
tradeoffs between maximizing rewards for oneself versus others and learning from others’ reward preferences.
Neuroimaging studies have shown that human decisions in interpersonal economic games recruit neural
structures associated with social cognition and reward valuation. While previous studies have shown that
dopamine function is paramount to decisions involving rewards for oneself, it’s role in social decisions is much
less well understood. Since disruptions to social decision making span multiple psychopathologies linked to
dopamine dysfunction (like ADHD and schizophrenia), it is critical to understand the mechanism by which
dopamine influences social decisions about rewards. To address this, the F99 phase of this proposal will
investigate the relationship between dopamine function and social decision making in humans. Specifically,
this work will combine positron emission tomography (PET), pharmacology, computational modeling, and
behavioral experiments to address how individual differences in dopamine relates to personal reward
processing and decision making as well as prosocial and strategic social decisions. Results from these studies
will provide critical information about the role of dopaminergic modulation of multiple forms of social decisions
and may eventually shed light on disruptions to prosocial behavior and social learning across
psychopathologies. Completion of the F99 phase sets a strong intellectual, technical, and professional
foundation for the postdoctoral (K00) phase of this award. During the K00 phase, training will include: learning
new methods to study dynamic social interactions, understanding how dopamine and other neuromodulators
support social decisions, and testing whether differences in affiliative or competitive decisions contribute to
observed differences in psychopathology. These goals will support the development of knowledge, expertise,
and skills essential to becoming an independent investigator.