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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Jun 18, 2025

Quantifying Social Motivation in Mice Using Operant Conditioning
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Social Effort Discounting Reveals Domain-General and Social-Specific Motivation Components.

Chloe M Savage1, Greer E Prettyman1, Adrianna C Jenkins2

  • 1Department of Psychiatry, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Biological Psychiatry. Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging
|July 29, 2024
PubMed
Summary

This study developed a new social effort discounting task to measure social motivation. Findings show both general and social-specific factors influence willingness to exert social effort.

Keywords:
Avoidance motivationBehavioral inhibitionCrowdsourcingDecision makingEffort discountingSocial motivation

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Area of Science:

  • Psychology
  • Neuroscience
  • Behavioral Economics

Background:

  • Social motivation is vital for relationships but understudied quantitatively.
  • Previous research has focused less on willingness to exert social effort compared to non-social motivation.
  • Impaired social motivation is observed in psychiatric disorders.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To develop and validate a novel social effort discounting task.
  • To investigate the specificity of social motivation compared to non-social motivation.
  • To examine relationships between social effort, general motivation, sociality, and avoidance tendencies.

Main Methods:

  • A sample of 397 participants completed online social and non-social effort discounting tasks.
  • Participants also completed self-report measures of motivation and psychiatric symptoms.
  • Statistical analyses examined correlations and condition interaction effects.

Main Results:

  • Social and non-social task motivation were strongly correlated (ρ = 0.71).
  • Both task types similarly related to general and approach motivation.
  • Social task motivation showed selective relationships with self-reported sociality and avoidance.

Conclusions:

  • The developed task effectively measures both domain-general and social-specific components of motivation.
  • This approach can help understand neurobehavioral mechanisms underlying social motivation.
  • Findings support personalized interventions for social impairment by targeting specific motivational contributors.