Savage CM, Prettyman GE, Jenkins AC, Kable JW, Didier PR, Viegas de Moraes Leme LF, Wolf DH. Social Effort Discounting Reveals Domain-General and Social-Specific Motivation Components.
BIOLOGICAL PSYCHIATRY. COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCE AND NEUROIMAGING 2024:S2451-9022(24)00208-8. [PMID:
39074557 DOI:
10.1016/j.bpsc.2024.07.020]
[Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 04/20/2024] [Revised: 06/22/2024] [Accepted: 07/17/2024] [Indexed: 07/31/2024]
Abstract
BACKGROUND
Social motivation is crucial for healthy interpersonal connections and is impaired in a subset of the general population and across many psychiatric disorders. However, compared with nonsocial (e.g., monetary) motivation, social motivation has been understudied in quantitative behavioral work, especially regarding willingness to exert social effort. We developed a novel social effort discounting task, paired with a monetary task to examine motivational specificity. We expected that social task performance would relate to general motivation and also show selective relationships with self-reported avoidance tendencies and with sociality.
METHODS
An analyzed sample of 397 participants performed the social and nonsocial effort discounting task online, along with self-report measures of various aspects of motivation and psychiatric symptomatology.
RESULTS
Social and nonsocial task motivation correlated strongly (ρ = 0.71, p < .001). Both social and nonsocial task motivation related similarly to self-reported general motivation (social, β = 0.16; nonsocial, β = 0.13) and to self-reported approach motivation (social, β = 0.14; nonsocial, β = 0.11), with this common effect captured by a significant main effect across social and nonsocial conditions. Significant condition interaction effects supported a selective relationship of social task motivation with self-reported sociality and also with avoidance motivation.
CONCLUSIONS
Our novel social effort discounting task revealed both domain-general and social-specific components of motivation. In combination with other measures, this approach can facilitate further investigation of common and dissociable neurobehavioral mechanisms to better characterize normative and pathological variation and develop personalized interventions targeting specific contributors to social impairment.
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