Low relational mobility leads to greater motivation to understand enemies but not friends and acquaintances

Association between relational mobility, brain structure, and prosociality in adolescents

Trust plays a vital role in human society. Previous studies have suggested that trust comprises general trust and caution. General trust is a belief that others, in general, are trustworthy, and caution is a belief in the importance of vigilance in dealing with others. Adolescence is a critical period for establishing these psychological traits. It is a period of physical and mental development, and the social environment during this period influences adolescents' psychology, including their brain structures. In this study, we focus on relational mobility as a socio-environmental factor that influences the development of adolescents' psychology and the brain. Relational mobility refers to the degree of freedom to choose and replace social relationships and consists of two subfactors (the degree of freedom to choose and replace social relationships and the number of opportunities to meet new people). Accordingly, we analyzed each subfactor separately. Results showed that the degree of freedom to choose and replace social relationships was only negatively associated with caution and left posterior superior temporal gyrus (pSTG) volume in adolescents. Furthermore, the effect of the freedom to choose and replace social relationships on caution was significantly relevant to the left pSTG volume. In contrast, the degree of opportunities to meet new people was associated with neither general trust nor caution, whereas it was positively associated with the right supramarginal gyrus volume. This study suggests that the social environment during adolescence influences brain structures related to prosociality.

The casual effect of relational mobility on integration of social networks: An agent-based modeling approach

Despite converging evidence for the importance of relational mobility on shaping people's social experiences, previous work suggested mixed findings for its influence on the structure of sociocentric networks, which lays the basis for the development of all types of social relationships. Additionally, as it is timely and economically intractable to administer such longitudinal experiments in real-life settings, most previous work mainly relied on cross-sectional correlation analyses and provided limited causal evidence. The current research used an agent-based modeling approach to examine whether higher relational mobility (i.e., the number of opportunities to meet new people) would promote integration among social networks over time. Using parameters derived from survey data, we simulated how the integration of sociocentric social networks evolves under different levels of relational mobility. Based on the data of three network structural indicators, including modularity, global efficiency, and standard deviation of nodal betweenness, we obtained causal evidence supporting that higher relational mobility promotes greater network integration. These findings highlight the power of socioecological demands on our social experiences.

Supplementary Information

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s12144-022-03130-x.

Does your trust in strangers or close acquaintances promote better health? Societal residential mobility matters

Some studies indicated that different types of trust are qualitatively different psychological experiences, which may lead to different health outcomes. The present study examined the effect of two types of trust, i.e., generalized trust and interpersonal trust, on promoting physical health and subjective well-being in regions varying in societal residential mobility. The data from a nationally representative sample, including 10,968 participants from 28 provinces/municipalities in China, were analyzed. The results showed that the negative relationship between generalized trust and depressed mood was stronger in the regions with higher societal residential mobility whereas the positive relationship between interpersonal trust and physical health and the negative relationship between interpersonal trust and depressed mood were stronger in the regions with lower societal residential mobility. These results highlight the importance of socio-ecological characteristics in understanding the adaptive functions of different types of social capital on health outcomes. (143 words; max: 150 words).

Motivated Cognition: Effects of Reward, Emotion, and Other Motivational Factors Across a Variety of Cognitive Domains

A growing body of literature has demonstrated that motivation influences cognitive processing. The breadth of these effects is extensive and span influences of reward, emotion, and other motivational processes across all cognitive domains. As examples, this scope includes studies of emotional memory, value-based attentional capture, emotion effects on semantic processing, reward-related biases in decision making, and the role of approach/avoidance motivation on cognitive scope. Additionally, other less common forms of motivation–cognition interactions, such as self-referential and motoric processing can also be considered instances of motivated cognition. Here I outline some of the evidence indicating the generality and pervasiveness of these motivation influences on cognition, and introduce the associated ‘research nexus’ at Collabra: Psychology.