Mental disorders as atypical social learning processes

Many psychiatric disorders are chiefly characterised by deficits in social functioning, such as borderline personality disorder, psychopathy, social anxiety and autism spectrum disorder. Others exhibit social interaction impairments as a debilitating consequence of the disorder, such as higher distress from interpersonal relationships in depression and interpersonal aggression as a barrier to effective treatment in PTSD. While there is little disagreement on the importance of understanding social interaction impairment in many of these disorders, there remains multiple unanswered questions as to what exactly in the social cognitive process is impaired or dysfunctional compared to healthy individuals. There are likely multiple dimensions that can interact to yield the observed atypical behaviour in social interaction such as such as how sensitive is the person to specific social gestures, how good they are at inferring others intentions from their behaviour and their ability to accurately infer social uncertainty from the history of interactions.

The objective of the research project is to explore and hopefully learn to disentangle these dimensions through computationally modelling behaviour in repeated economic games with social components. Along the way, we hope to develop behavioural markers of social dysfunction in mental disorders that can be used to diagnose, monitor and better understand the determinants of social learning impairment inherent to many conditions.