Title
Social influences on emotion and decision-making
Human behavior and experience are strongly influenced by social factors. What are the brain systems that mediate social influence effects on behavior? How do effects of social instructions differ from, and interact with, the effects of experience-based learning? I will present findings from behavioral and fMRI studies that show how pain, affect, and food craving is altered by social information, and how evaluative social feedback impacts self-perception and feelings about the self—in healthy and socially anxious individuals. Together, these different studies point at a role of frontoparietal brain areas, which may mediate how humans weight information in order to adjust behavior and affective experiences to their social context.
Biography
Dr. Leonie Koban is a neuroscientist and permanent CNRS researcher at the Paris Brain Institute. In her research, she combines behavioral measures, computational approaches, and functional brain imaging to understand the brain mechanisms of social context effects on behavior, experience, and health outcomes. Dr. Koban has earned her PhD in Neuroscience at the University of Geneva, Switzerland, and trained as a postdoc at the University of Colorado (USA), and at INSEAD in France. In 2021, she has been awarded a Starting Grant from the European Research Council.