<p>Background: In response to the Covid-19 pandemic, most countries implemented physical di... more <p>Background: In response to the Covid-19 pandemic, most countries implemented physical distancing measures. Many mental health experts warned that through increasing social isolation and anxiety, these measures could negatively affect psychosocial wellbeing. However, socially aligning with others by adhering to these measures may also be beneficial for wellbeing.Methods: We examined these two contrasting hypotheses using cross-national survey data (N= 6675) collected fortnightly from participants in 115 countries over 3 months at the beginning of the pandemic. In addition to providing demographic data, participants completed a standardised wellbeing scale, and reported how much they, and others in their social circle and country, were adhering to the distancing measures.Results: We found that being a woman, having lower educational attainment, living alone and being vulnerable to Covid-19 were risk factors for poorer wellbeing. Being young (18-25) was also associated with lower wellbeing, but longitudinal analyses showed that young participants' wellbeing improved over 3 months. In contrast to widespread views that physical distancing measures negatively affect wellbeing, results showed that following these guidelines was positively associated with wellbeing, even for people in demographic risk groups or those highly vulnerable to Covid-19.Conclusions: These findings provide an important counterpart to the idea that pandemic containment measures such as physical distancing negatively impacted wellbeing unequivocally. Despite the overall burden of the pandemic on psychosocial wellbeing, social alignment with others can still contribute to positive wellbeing. The pandemic has manifested our propensity to adapt to challenges, particularly highlighting how social alignment can forge resilience.</p>
Distributing responsibility across several individuals in social decisions helps minimize a burde... more Distributing responsibility across several individuals in social decisions helps minimize a burden of responsibility for consequences of decisions. Here we investigated the neural expression of this effect using magnetoencephalography (MEG). Participants performed a reward-based learning decision-making task in contexts where their sense of responsibility over outcomes decreased with group size. An MEG outcome processing effect was reduced as a function of decreasing responsibility at 200ms post outcome onset and centred over parietal and precentral brain regions. During social decisions, prior to outcome revelation, a motor preparation signature at 500ms after stimulus onset was attenuated. A boost in responsibility for positive outcomes in social contexts was associated with increased activity in regions related to social and reward processing. Together, these results show that sharing responsibility with others reduces agency through an influence on pre-outcome motor preparation ...
How essential is trust in science to prevent the spread of COVID-19? Previous work shows that peo... more How essential is trust in science to prevent the spread of COVID-19? Previous work shows that people who trust in science are more likely to comply with official guidelines, which suggests that higher levels of compliance could be achieved by improving trust in science. However, analysis of a global dataset (n=4341) suggests otherwise. Trust in science had a small, indirect effect on adherence to the rules. It affected adherence only insofar as it predicted people's approval of prevention measures such as social distancing. Trust in science also mediated the relationship between political ideology and approval of the measures (more conservative people trusted science less and in turn approved of the measures less). These effects varied across countries, and were especially different in the USA. Overall, these results mean that any increase in trust in science is unlikely to yield strong immediate improvements in following COVID-19 rules. Nonetheless, given its relationships with...
MEZ is supported by the Wellcome Trust grant number 204702. JS and OD are funded by the NOMIS Fou... more MEZ is supported by the Wellcome Trust grant number 204702. JS and OD are funded by the NOMIS Foundation (Grant DISE). GD received funding from CAP2025 (I-SITE Clermont, Clermont Auvergne Project)
Everyday social decisions require the combination of multiple sources of information and therefor... more Everyday social decisions require the combination of multiple sources of information and therefore build upon abundant contextual elements such as the social cues of emitters (e.g., gaze direction, emotion, gesture), the attentional focus of observers, their mood and their past experience. The work conducted during this Ph.D. (including three main studies in healthy human subjects) aimed at characterizing the cognitive and neural mechanisms of contextual influences in social settings. The first Electroencephalography (EEG) study manipulated the attentional focus of participants while they processed social signals. Using model-based behavioral and single-trial EEG analyses, the second study aimed at characterizing the mechanisms underlying the integration of multiple social cues from faces and the role of anxiety in this integration,. Finally, the third study used model-based behavioral and pupillometric analyses to investigate the mechanisms by which prior experience with individual...
Background: Responsibility judgements have important consequences in human society. Previous rese... more Background: Responsibility judgements have important consequences in human society. Previous research focused on how someone's responsibility determines the outcome they deserve, for example, whether they are rewarded or punished. Here, in a pre-registered study (Stage 1 Registered Report: https://doi.org/10.12688/wellcomeopenres.16480.2), we investigate the opposite link: How outcome ownership influences responsibility attributions in a social context. Methods: In an online study, participants in a group of three perform a majority vote decision-making task between gambles that can lead to a reward or no reward. Only one group member receives the outcome and participants evaluate their and the other players' responsibility for the obtained outcome. Results: We found that outcome ownership increases responsibility attributions even when the control over an outcome is similar. Moreover, ownership had an effect on the valence bias: participants’ higher responsibility attribut...
With restrictions on opportunities for face to face (FtF) interactions, Covid-19 lockdowns test t... more With restrictions on opportunities for face to face (FtF) interactions, Covid-19 lockdowns test the promises of digitally mediated communication (DMC) to foster social contact and wellbeing. In a multinational sample (n= 6436), we investigated how different modes of contact relate to wellbeing during a global pandemic. DMC was more popular than FtF and Covid-19 death rates played a bigger role in DMC use than state stringency measures. FtF contact was positively associated and messaging negatively associated with wellbeing. FtF was especially positive for people who did not perceive any loved ones in their household as vulnerable to the disease, yet did not vary with people’s perception of their own vulnerability. The results suggest that, in the face of the pandemic, men and women of all ages relied on DMC over FtF contact. Despite tangible costs to wellbeing, during the pandemic, people endeavoured to be physically distanced but not socially isolated.
Responsibility judgements have important consequences in human society. Previous research focused... more Responsibility judgements have important consequences in human society. Previous research focused on how someone's responsibility determines the outcome they deserve, for example, whether they are rewarded or punished. Here, we investigate the opposite link: How outcome ownership influences responsibility attributions in a social context. Participants in a group of three perform a majority vote decision-making task between gambles that can lead to a reward or no reward. Only one group member receives the outcome and participants evaluate their and the other players' responsibility for the obtained outcome. Two hypotheses are tested: 1) Whether outcome ownership increases responsibility attributions even when the control over an outcome is similar. 2) Whether people's tendency to attribute higher responsibility for positive vs negative outcomes will be stronger for players who received the outcome. The findings of this study may help reveal how credit attributions can be ...
Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
It has recently been proposed that a key motivation for joining groups is the protection from the... more It has recently been proposed that a key motivation for joining groups is the protection from the negative consequences of undesirable outcomes. To test this claim, we investigated how experienced outcomes triggering loss and regret impacted people's tendency to decide alone or join a group, and how decisions differed when voluntarily made alone versus in group. Replicated across two experiments, participants ( n = 125 and n = 496) selected whether to play alone or contribute their vote to a group decision. Next, they chose between two lotteries with different probabilities of winning and losing. The higher the negative outcome, the more participants switched from deciding alone to with others. When joining a group to choose the lottery, choices were less driven by outcome and regret anticipation. Moreover, negative outcomes experienced alone, not part of a group vote, led to worse subsequent choices than positive outcomes. These results suggest that the protective shield of the...
The human brain has evolved specialised mechanisms to enable the rapid detection of threat cues, ... more The human brain has evolved specialised mechanisms to enable the rapid detection of threat cues, including emotional face expressions (e.g., fear and anger). However, contextual cues – such as gaze direction – influence the ability to recognise emotional expressions. For instance, anger paired with direct gaze, and fear paired with averted gaze are more accurately recognised compared to alternate conjunctions of these features. It is argued that this is because gaze direction conveys the relevance and locus of the threat to the observer. Here, we used continuous flash suppression (CFS) to assess whether the modulatory effect of gaze direction on emotional face processing occurs outside of conscious awareness. Previous research using CFS has demonstrated that fearful facial expressions are prioritised by the visual system and gain privileged access to awareness over other expressed emotions. We hypothesised that if the modulatory effects of gaze on emotional face processing occur als...
It has recently been proposed that a key motivation for joining groups is the protection from con... more It has recently been proposed that a key motivation for joining groups is the protection from consequences of negative behaviours, such as norm violations. Here we empirically test this claim by investigating whether cooperative decisions and the punishment of associated fairness-based norm violations are different in individuals vs. collectives in economic games. In the ultimatum game, participants made or received offers that they could reject at a cost to their outcome, a form of social punishment. In the dictator game with third-party punishment, participants made offers to a receiver while being observed by a punisher, or could themselves punish unfair offers. Participants made lower offers when making a collective vs individual decisions. This difference correlated with participants’ overall mean offers: those who were generally less generous were even less so in a group, suggesting that the collective structure was compatible with their intention. Participants were slower whe...
It has recently been proposed that a key motivation for joining group decisions is to be protecte... more It has recently been proposed that a key motivation for joining group decisions is to be protected from negative consequences of these decisions. To test this claim we investigated how experienced outcomes that trigger loss and regret impacted people’s tendency to make decisions alone or in a group, and how these decisions differed when voluntarily made alone vs in group. Replicated across two experiments, participants (N=125 and N=451) first selected whether to play alone or in a group with majority rule. Next, they chose between two lotteries with different probabilities and magnitudes of winning and losing. Experienced outcomes affected participants’ propensity to join a group: the higher the negative outcome, the more participants switched from deciding alone to with others. When choosing the lottery collectively (vs alone), choices were less driven by anticipation of loss and regret. Moreover, negative outcomes led to worse subsequent choices but only when outcome was experienc...
Although, the quest to understand emotional processing in individuals with Autism Spectrum Disord... more Although, the quest to understand emotional processing in individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) has led to an impressive number of studies, the picture that emerges from this research remains inconsistent. Some studies find that Typically Developing (TD) individuals outperform those with ASD in emotion recognition tasks, others find no such difference. In this paper, we move beyond focusing on potential group differences in behaviour to answer what we believe is a more pressing question: do individuals with ASD use the same mechanisms to process emotional cues? To this end, we rely on model-based analyses of participants&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;#39; accuracy during an emotion categorisation task in which displays of anger and fear are paired with direct vs. averted gaze. Behavioural data of 20 ASD and 20 TD adolescents revealed that the ASD group displayed lower overall performance. Yet, gaze direction had a similar impact on emotion categorisation in both groups, i.e. improved accuracy for salient combinations (anger-direct, fear-averted). Critically, computational modelling of participants&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;#39; behaviour reveals that the same mechanism, i.e. increased perceptual sensitivity, underlies the contextual impact of gaze in both groups. We discuss the specific experimental conditions that may favour emotion processing and the automatic integration of contextual information in ASD.
Efficient detection and reaction to negative signals in the environment is essential for survival... more Efficient detection and reaction to negative signals in the environment is essential for survival. In social situations, these signals are often ambiguous and can imply different levels of threat for the observer, thereby making their recognition susceptible to contextual cues – such as gaze direction when judging facial displays of emotion. However, the mechanisms underlying such contextual effects remain poorly understood. By computational modeling of human behavior and electrical brain activity, we demonstrate that gaze direction enhances the perceptual sensitivity to threat-signaling emotions – anger paired with direct gaze, and fear paired with averted gaze. This effect arises simultaneously in ventral face-selective and dorsal motor cortices at 200 ms following face presentation, dissociates across individuals as a function of anxiety, and does not reflect increased attention to threat-signaling emotions. These findings reveal that threat tunes neural processing in fast, selec...
<p>Background: In response to the Covid-19 pandemic, most countries implemented physical di... more <p>Background: In response to the Covid-19 pandemic, most countries implemented physical distancing measures. Many mental health experts warned that through increasing social isolation and anxiety, these measures could negatively affect psychosocial wellbeing. However, socially aligning with others by adhering to these measures may also be beneficial for wellbeing.Methods: We examined these two contrasting hypotheses using cross-national survey data (N= 6675) collected fortnightly from participants in 115 countries over 3 months at the beginning of the pandemic. In addition to providing demographic data, participants completed a standardised wellbeing scale, and reported how much they, and others in their social circle and country, were adhering to the distancing measures.Results: We found that being a woman, having lower educational attainment, living alone and being vulnerable to Covid-19 were risk factors for poorer wellbeing. Being young (18-25) was also associated with lower wellbeing, but longitudinal analyses showed that young participants' wellbeing improved over 3 months. In contrast to widespread views that physical distancing measures negatively affect wellbeing, results showed that following these guidelines was positively associated with wellbeing, even for people in demographic risk groups or those highly vulnerable to Covid-19.Conclusions: These findings provide an important counterpart to the idea that pandemic containment measures such as physical distancing negatively impacted wellbeing unequivocally. Despite the overall burden of the pandemic on psychosocial wellbeing, social alignment with others can still contribute to positive wellbeing. The pandemic has manifested our propensity to adapt to challenges, particularly highlighting how social alignment can forge resilience.</p>
Distributing responsibility across several individuals in social decisions helps minimize a burde... more Distributing responsibility across several individuals in social decisions helps minimize a burden of responsibility for consequences of decisions. Here we investigated the neural expression of this effect using magnetoencephalography (MEG). Participants performed a reward-based learning decision-making task in contexts where their sense of responsibility over outcomes decreased with group size. An MEG outcome processing effect was reduced as a function of decreasing responsibility at 200ms post outcome onset and centred over parietal and precentral brain regions. During social decisions, prior to outcome revelation, a motor preparation signature at 500ms after stimulus onset was attenuated. A boost in responsibility for positive outcomes in social contexts was associated with increased activity in regions related to social and reward processing. Together, these results show that sharing responsibility with others reduces agency through an influence on pre-outcome motor preparation ...
How essential is trust in science to prevent the spread of COVID-19? Previous work shows that peo... more How essential is trust in science to prevent the spread of COVID-19? Previous work shows that people who trust in science are more likely to comply with official guidelines, which suggests that higher levels of compliance could be achieved by improving trust in science. However, analysis of a global dataset (n=4341) suggests otherwise. Trust in science had a small, indirect effect on adherence to the rules. It affected adherence only insofar as it predicted people's approval of prevention measures such as social distancing. Trust in science also mediated the relationship between political ideology and approval of the measures (more conservative people trusted science less and in turn approved of the measures less). These effects varied across countries, and were especially different in the USA. Overall, these results mean that any increase in trust in science is unlikely to yield strong immediate improvements in following COVID-19 rules. Nonetheless, given its relationships with...
MEZ is supported by the Wellcome Trust grant number 204702. JS and OD are funded by the NOMIS Fou... more MEZ is supported by the Wellcome Trust grant number 204702. JS and OD are funded by the NOMIS Foundation (Grant DISE). GD received funding from CAP2025 (I-SITE Clermont, Clermont Auvergne Project)
Everyday social decisions require the combination of multiple sources of information and therefor... more Everyday social decisions require the combination of multiple sources of information and therefore build upon abundant contextual elements such as the social cues of emitters (e.g., gaze direction, emotion, gesture), the attentional focus of observers, their mood and their past experience. The work conducted during this Ph.D. (including three main studies in healthy human subjects) aimed at characterizing the cognitive and neural mechanisms of contextual influences in social settings. The first Electroencephalography (EEG) study manipulated the attentional focus of participants while they processed social signals. Using model-based behavioral and single-trial EEG analyses, the second study aimed at characterizing the mechanisms underlying the integration of multiple social cues from faces and the role of anxiety in this integration,. Finally, the third study used model-based behavioral and pupillometric analyses to investigate the mechanisms by which prior experience with individual...
Background: Responsibility judgements have important consequences in human society. Previous rese... more Background: Responsibility judgements have important consequences in human society. Previous research focused on how someone's responsibility determines the outcome they deserve, for example, whether they are rewarded or punished. Here, in a pre-registered study (Stage 1 Registered Report: https://doi.org/10.12688/wellcomeopenres.16480.2), we investigate the opposite link: How outcome ownership influences responsibility attributions in a social context. Methods: In an online study, participants in a group of three perform a majority vote decision-making task between gambles that can lead to a reward or no reward. Only one group member receives the outcome and participants evaluate their and the other players' responsibility for the obtained outcome. Results: We found that outcome ownership increases responsibility attributions even when the control over an outcome is similar. Moreover, ownership had an effect on the valence bias: participants’ higher responsibility attribut...
With restrictions on opportunities for face to face (FtF) interactions, Covid-19 lockdowns test t... more With restrictions on opportunities for face to face (FtF) interactions, Covid-19 lockdowns test the promises of digitally mediated communication (DMC) to foster social contact and wellbeing. In a multinational sample (n= 6436), we investigated how different modes of contact relate to wellbeing during a global pandemic. DMC was more popular than FtF and Covid-19 death rates played a bigger role in DMC use than state stringency measures. FtF contact was positively associated and messaging negatively associated with wellbeing. FtF was especially positive for people who did not perceive any loved ones in their household as vulnerable to the disease, yet did not vary with people’s perception of their own vulnerability. The results suggest that, in the face of the pandemic, men and women of all ages relied on DMC over FtF contact. Despite tangible costs to wellbeing, during the pandemic, people endeavoured to be physically distanced but not socially isolated.
Responsibility judgements have important consequences in human society. Previous research focused... more Responsibility judgements have important consequences in human society. Previous research focused on how someone's responsibility determines the outcome they deserve, for example, whether they are rewarded or punished. Here, we investigate the opposite link: How outcome ownership influences responsibility attributions in a social context. Participants in a group of three perform a majority vote decision-making task between gambles that can lead to a reward or no reward. Only one group member receives the outcome and participants evaluate their and the other players' responsibility for the obtained outcome. Two hypotheses are tested: 1) Whether outcome ownership increases responsibility attributions even when the control over an outcome is similar. 2) Whether people's tendency to attribute higher responsibility for positive vs negative outcomes will be stronger for players who received the outcome. The findings of this study may help reveal how credit attributions can be ...
Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
It has recently been proposed that a key motivation for joining groups is the protection from the... more It has recently been proposed that a key motivation for joining groups is the protection from the negative consequences of undesirable outcomes. To test this claim, we investigated how experienced outcomes triggering loss and regret impacted people's tendency to decide alone or join a group, and how decisions differed when voluntarily made alone versus in group. Replicated across two experiments, participants ( n = 125 and n = 496) selected whether to play alone or contribute their vote to a group decision. Next, they chose between two lotteries with different probabilities of winning and losing. The higher the negative outcome, the more participants switched from deciding alone to with others. When joining a group to choose the lottery, choices were less driven by outcome and regret anticipation. Moreover, negative outcomes experienced alone, not part of a group vote, led to worse subsequent choices than positive outcomes. These results suggest that the protective shield of the...
The human brain has evolved specialised mechanisms to enable the rapid detection of threat cues, ... more The human brain has evolved specialised mechanisms to enable the rapid detection of threat cues, including emotional face expressions (e.g., fear and anger). However, contextual cues – such as gaze direction – influence the ability to recognise emotional expressions. For instance, anger paired with direct gaze, and fear paired with averted gaze are more accurately recognised compared to alternate conjunctions of these features. It is argued that this is because gaze direction conveys the relevance and locus of the threat to the observer. Here, we used continuous flash suppression (CFS) to assess whether the modulatory effect of gaze direction on emotional face processing occurs outside of conscious awareness. Previous research using CFS has demonstrated that fearful facial expressions are prioritised by the visual system and gain privileged access to awareness over other expressed emotions. We hypothesised that if the modulatory effects of gaze on emotional face processing occur als...
It has recently been proposed that a key motivation for joining groups is the protection from con... more It has recently been proposed that a key motivation for joining groups is the protection from consequences of negative behaviours, such as norm violations. Here we empirically test this claim by investigating whether cooperative decisions and the punishment of associated fairness-based norm violations are different in individuals vs. collectives in economic games. In the ultimatum game, participants made or received offers that they could reject at a cost to their outcome, a form of social punishment. In the dictator game with third-party punishment, participants made offers to a receiver while being observed by a punisher, or could themselves punish unfair offers. Participants made lower offers when making a collective vs individual decisions. This difference correlated with participants’ overall mean offers: those who were generally less generous were even less so in a group, suggesting that the collective structure was compatible with their intention. Participants were slower whe...
It has recently been proposed that a key motivation for joining group decisions is to be protecte... more It has recently been proposed that a key motivation for joining group decisions is to be protected from negative consequences of these decisions. To test this claim we investigated how experienced outcomes that trigger loss and regret impacted people’s tendency to make decisions alone or in a group, and how these decisions differed when voluntarily made alone vs in group. Replicated across two experiments, participants (N=125 and N=451) first selected whether to play alone or in a group with majority rule. Next, they chose between two lotteries with different probabilities and magnitudes of winning and losing. Experienced outcomes affected participants’ propensity to join a group: the higher the negative outcome, the more participants switched from deciding alone to with others. When choosing the lottery collectively (vs alone), choices were less driven by anticipation of loss and regret. Moreover, negative outcomes led to worse subsequent choices but only when outcome was experienc...
Although, the quest to understand emotional processing in individuals with Autism Spectrum Disord... more Although, the quest to understand emotional processing in individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) has led to an impressive number of studies, the picture that emerges from this research remains inconsistent. Some studies find that Typically Developing (TD) individuals outperform those with ASD in emotion recognition tasks, others find no such difference. In this paper, we move beyond focusing on potential group differences in behaviour to answer what we believe is a more pressing question: do individuals with ASD use the same mechanisms to process emotional cues? To this end, we rely on model-based analyses of participants&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;#39; accuracy during an emotion categorisation task in which displays of anger and fear are paired with direct vs. averted gaze. Behavioural data of 20 ASD and 20 TD adolescents revealed that the ASD group displayed lower overall performance. Yet, gaze direction had a similar impact on emotion categorisation in both groups, i.e. improved accuracy for salient combinations (anger-direct, fear-averted). Critically, computational modelling of participants&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;#39; behaviour reveals that the same mechanism, i.e. increased perceptual sensitivity, underlies the contextual impact of gaze in both groups. We discuss the specific experimental conditions that may favour emotion processing and the automatic integration of contextual information in ASD.
Efficient detection and reaction to negative signals in the environment is essential for survival... more Efficient detection and reaction to negative signals in the environment is essential for survival. In social situations, these signals are often ambiguous and can imply different levels of threat for the observer, thereby making their recognition susceptible to contextual cues – such as gaze direction when judging facial displays of emotion. However, the mechanisms underlying such contextual effects remain poorly understood. By computational modeling of human behavior and electrical brain activity, we demonstrate that gaze direction enhances the perceptual sensitivity to threat-signaling emotions – anger paired with direct gaze, and fear paired with averted gaze. This effect arises simultaneously in ventral face-selective and dorsal motor cortices at 200 ms following face presentation, dissociates across individuals as a function of anxiety, and does not reflect increased attention to threat-signaling emotions. These findings reveal that threat tunes neural processing in fast, selec...
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Papers by Marwa Zein