Social Salience Attribution ~ Empathy Quotient x Treatment
Creators: name: Beffara, Bertrand
name: Prata, Diana
Publisher: name: OSF Registries
Year: 2024
Subjects: subject: Behavioral Neurobiology
subject: Integrative Biology
subject: Life Sciences
subject: Social Psychology
subject: Biology
subject: Biological Psychology
subject: Quantitative Psychology
subject: Cognitive Psychology
subject: Neuroscience and Neurobiology
subject: Social and Behavioral Sciences
subject: Psychology
subject: FOS: Psychology

description: The original study involved participants receiving intranasal oxytocin (OT) and participants receiving placebo intranasal administration. Participants engaged in the social Salience Attribution task (sSAT), adapted from the Salience Attribution Task (SAT; see Roiser et al., 2009 for the original task; see Santiago et al., 2024 for its adaptation with social stimuli). Each trial started with the presentation of a fixation cross flanked (right and left) with 2 identical visual stimuli which varied across trials according to 2 orthogonal dimensions (colour: blue or red, and socialness: fruit or fearful face) hence 4 possible types of flankers in total. Unbeknownst to the participants, color actually indicated the probability of getting a monetary reward (e.g. blue = high reward probability vs. red = low reward probability; randomized across participants) after detecting the upcoming target fastly enough (see below). On the other hand, the socialness of the flanker was task-irrelevant. In the second phase of each trial, the flanker stimuli remained and the fixation cross was replaced by a square (see Santiago et al., 2024 for details about the task). Participants’ goal was to respond to the presentation of the target square as fast as possible in order to get a reward on rewarded trials. Response times (RTs) were measured on each trial. Here we will consider “aberrant salience” as the to-be-explained variable. In the SAT, it was defined as the absolute difference between the 2 levels of the task-irrelevant dimension. As part of the sSAT, based on flanker tasks involving socially negative stimuli (Parra et al., 2018; Trujillo et al., 2021) suggesting that such stimuli slow down target detection, we will define aberrant salience for each participant as mean RT[fearful faces] minus mean RT[fruits].

Confirmatory analysis: Our main hypothesis is that there is an interaction between treatment and empathy: for participants exhibiting poor empathy, aberrant salience is expected to be higher in the OT group compared to the placebo group while this difference will be weaker for participants exhibiting high empathy. Here, empathy will be assessed through the short version of the Empathy Quotient (Wakabayashi et al., 2006) score, entered as a modulatory covariate.

Parra, M. A., Sánchez, M. G., Valencia, S., &amp; Trujillo, N. (2018). Attentional bias during emotional processing : Evidence from an emotional flanker task using IAPS. Cognition and Emotion, 32(2), 275‑285. https://doi.org/10.1080/02699931.2017.1298994

Roiser, J. P., Stephan, K. E., den Ouden, H. E. M., Barnes, T. R. E., Friston, K. J., &amp; Joyce, E. M. (2009). Do patients with schizophrenia exhibit aberrant salience? Psychological Medicine, 39(2), 199‑209. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0033291708003863

Santiago, A. F., Kosilo, M., Cogoni, C., Diogo, V., Jerónimo, R., &amp; Prata, D. (2024). Oxytocin modulates neural activity during early perceptual salience attribution. Psychoneuroendocrinology, 161, 106950. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psyneuen.2023.106950

Trujillo, N., Gómez, D., Trujillo, S., López, J. D., Ibáñez, A., &amp; Parra, M. A. (2021). Attentional bias during emotional processing : Behavioral and electrophysiological evidence from an Emotional Flanker Task. PLOS ONE, 16(4), e0249407. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0249407

Wakabayashi, A., Baron-Cohen, S., Wheelwright, S., Goldenfeld, N., Delaney, J., Fine, D., Smith, R., &amp; Weil, L. (2006). Development of short forms of the Empathy Quotient (EQ-Short) and the Systemizing Quotient (SQ-Short). Personality and Individual Differences, 41(5), 929‑940. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2006.03.017