Social Evaluation Learning Task - Mouse

Script Author: Katja Borchert, Ph.D. (katjab@millisecond.com), Millisecond

Created: January 14, 2018

Last Modified: January 12, 2023 by K. Borchert (katjab@millisecond.com), Millisecond

Script Copyright © Millisecond Software, LLC

Background

This script implements a Social Evaluation Learning Task that allows to contrast perceived social evaluations of 'self' vs. social evaluations of 'others'.

The implemented procedure is based on:

Button, K.S., Kounali, D., Stapinski, L., Rapee, R.M, Lewis, G., & Munafò, M.R.M (2015). Fear of Negative Evaluation Biases Social Evaluation Inference: Evidence from a Probabilistic Learning Task. PLOS ONE | DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0119456

Stimuli published in: Button KS, Browning M, Munafo MR, Lewis G (2012) Social inference and social anxiety: evidence of a fear-congruent self-referential learning bias. J Behav Ther Exp Psychiatry 43: 1082–1087. doi: 10. 1016/j.jbtep.2012.05.004 PMID: 22699043

Duration

15 minutes

Description

Participants encounter 6 computer personas across 2 learning tasks during which they have to learn whether the computer personas like them (self referential task, SR) or like 'George' (other referential task, OR). At the end of the SR condition, participants have to guess if the computer persona (e.g. 'Alex') likes them based on learning what 'Alex' thinks of them. To learn what 'Alex' thinks of them, participants are given word pairs (e.g. 'witty' vs. 'dull') and are asked to choose the word that corresponds to what 'Alex' thinks of them. Feedback contingencies corresponded to 3 rules, 'like', 'neutral' and ''dislike', with P[positive word correct] = 0.8, 0.5 and 0.2, respectively. Each feedback contingency block is coupled with a different persona. In the OR condition, participants have to guess if the computer persona (e.g. 'Charlie') likes a person named 'George' using the same set-up.

this task runs with mouse/touchscreen selections

Procedure

• order of SR (self-referential) vs. OR (other-referential) conditions is counterbalanced by groupnumber
odd groupnumbers : SR->OR
even groupnumbers: OR->SR

• personas are selected randomly for each condition from a pool
of three gender-neutral (English speaking countries) names (see list.personas_SR and list.personas_OR)

SR condition: (reference: self)
- 3 blocks: like, neutral, dislike (order is randomly determined)
- each block runs 32 trials, randomly selecting word pairs from a pool of 64 word pairs (no repeats within a block)
- one word of each word pair is 'positive', the other 'negative'
- the two words are randomly assigned to one of 4 screen locations (upper left, upper right, lower right, lower left)

- LIKE-block: across every 10 trials, participants receive positive feedback if they select the positive description 8 times
(2 randomly selected times, participants get negative feedback for selecting the positive word;
the contingeny is reversed for selecting the negative description)

- NEUTRAL-block: across every 10 trials, participants receive positive feedback if they select the positive description 5 times
(5 randomly selected times, participants get negative feedback for selecting the positive word;
the contingeny is reversed for selecting the negative description)

- DISLIKE-block: across every 10 trials, participants receive positive feedback if they select the positive description 2 times
(8 randomly selected times, participants get negative feedback for selecting the positive word;
the contingeny is reversed for selecting the negative description)

- at the end of each block, participants are asked to decide whether the computer liked them or disliked them and with what
probability (e.g. '70% liked me')

OR condition (reference: a person named George)
- same set up as SR blocks

Stimuli

see Button et al (2012)
stimuli under section 'Editable Stimuli'

all elements that present text can be found under section 'Editable Stimuli', 'Editable Instructions'
or 'Editable Lists' for easy editing/translating of the task

Instructions

generated based on Button et al (2015) and an eprime script running the task
see section 'Editable Instructions'

Summary Data

File Name: socialevaluationlearningtask_mi_summary*.iqdat

Data Fields

Raw Data

File Name: socialevaluationlearningtask_mi_raw*.iqdat

Data Fields

Parameters

The procedure can be adjusted by setting the following parameters.