Topic: Social pain

Social pain, the emotional pain caused by aversive experiences with one’s social group, can have deleterious effects on both mental and physical health1–3. Multiple theories have proposed that the experience of social pain can modulate physical pain5,6, but a neural mechanism has never been discovered. To address this gap, we have designed a novel paradigm, termed the FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) Task, to systematically investigate the effects of Social Exclusion. During Social Exclusion (SE), mice have all been trained to associate a cue with reward delivery, and the subject is then separated f

The priority maps framework proposes that attentional priorities are weighted in cognitive/brain maps of the external space. As extensions of saliency maps, a variety of factors known as “attentional signals” would be represented in these so-called priority maps, ranging from low-level features such as physical salience to higher-level features such as social information. According to studies investigating attentional patterns in the presence of social signals, social attentional signals (e.g. faces) would “automatically” overcome the presence of any other signal and win the competition for at