A Multidimensional View on Social and Non-Social Rewards
Lebenswissenschaftliche Fakultät
Social rewards are a broad and heterogeneous set of stimuli including for instance smiling
faces, gestures, or praise. They have been widely investigated in cognitive and social
neuroscience as well as psychology. Research often contrasts the neural processing of
social rewards with non-social ones, with the aim to demonstrate the privileged and
unique nature of social rewards or to examine shared neural processing underlying them.
However, such comparisons mostly neglect other important dimensions of rewards that
are conflated in those types of rewards: primacy, temporal proximity, duration, familiarity,
source, tangibility, naturalness, and magnitude. We identify how commonly used rewards
in both social and non-social domains may differ in respect to these dimensions and how
their interaction calls for careful consideration of alternative interpretations of observed
effects. Additionally, we propose potential solutions on how to adapt the multidimensional
view to experimental research. Altogether, these methodological considerations aim to
inform and improve future experimental designs in research utilizing rewarding stimuli,
especially in the social domain.
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