Socio-affective influences on neural and behavioural correlates of agency

代理感（SoA）描述了一种主观感觉，即某一特定事件是由我们自己的自愿行为引起的。正常的人类功能，特别是在社会环境中，依赖于完整的SoA，以便分配责任和评估对给定情况的控制。然而，SoA很可能受到一系列上下文和情感变量的影响，而这些变量到目前为止还很少被理解。拟建项目的目的是调查由于三个因素导致的代理相关神经和行为的变化：社会排斥，它影响一个人在社会交往中的控制和自尊；羞耻感，这与无法控制地无法达到重要标准的感觉有关；作为一个群体的一部分，这已经被证明会导致责任的分散。理解由于社会和情感影响而导致的代理经验的可变性将提高我们对由于这些影响而导致的感知、认知和行为的重要变化的理解。在三种不同的实验操作中，我们将诱导社会排斥，羞耻感和作为群体的一部分而不是单独行动的体验。作为代理的行为度量，我们将使用有意约束效应。“故意绑定”指的是，如果受试者认为按键和随后的音调之间的间隔是由他们自己自愿按下的按键引起的，那么这个间隔就会被低估。我们预计，在社会排斥之后，以及在羞耻诱导之后，以及当参与者感知到群体行为造成的影响时，故意约束将会减少。我们将使用功能性磁共振成像来比较由于社会排斥和羞耻而导致的代理变化相关的神经网络。在实施群体和个体动作的实验中，我们将使用脑电图来研究动作效果的神经处理变化。这项工作将提高我们对代理如何受到日常社会情感情境影响的理解，并阐明这些情境影响人类行为的潜在机制。

The Sense of Agency (SoA) describes the subjective feeling that a given event was caused by our own voluntary action. Normal human functioning, especially in a social context, depends on an intact SoA in order to allocate responsibility and estimate the control one has over a given situation. However, SoA is likely influenced by a range of contextual and affective variables, which are scarcely understood to date. It is the aim of the proposed project to investigate changes in neural and behavioural correlates of agency due to three factors: social exclusion, which affects a person`s control and self-esteem in a social interaction; feeling of shame, which is associated with the perception of uncontrollable failure to meet important standards; and acting as part of a group, which has been shown to lead to the diffusion of responsibility. Understanding variability in the experience of agency due to social and affective influences will improve our understanding of important changes in perception, cognition and behaviour due to these influences. In three different experimental manipulations, we will induce social exclusion, feeling of shame and the experience of acting as part of a group rather than individually. As a behavioural measure of agency we will use the intentional binding effect. Intentional binding describes the phenomenon that the interval between a button press and a subsequent tone is underestimated if the subject perceives that the tone was elicited by their own voluntary button press. We expect that intentional binding will be reduced following social exclusion, as well as following shame induction and when participants perceive the effect to be caused by a group action. We will use functional magnetic resonance imaging to compare the neural networks related to changes in agency due to social exclusion and shame. In the experiment implementing group vs. individual action, we will use EEG to investigate changes in the neural processing of an action`s effect. This work will improve our understanding of how agency is affected by everyday socio-affective situations and elucidate potential mechanisms by which these situations influence human behaviour.