That’s a wrap on #SANS2025! Had a great time presenting my work on how our brains learn from rejection & how loneliness relates to patterns in our daily language

🔍 Next, we asked whether the social rejection network (dACC, vACC, AI) encoded an internal model of relational value. We found that partners who elicited more similar voxel patterns were rated more similarly by the participants ("how much do you think this person likes you?")

🧠 We also found that these processes are distinctly represented in the brain
-Updating beliefs about how others value us, through good or bad ranks, tracked activity in the “social rejection network”(dACC, vACC, AI)
-Learning from rewarding outcomes tracked activity in VS

🧩 Using a Bayesian cognitive model, we found that people tracked relational value and rewarding outcomes when choosing partners

🤝 Participants tried to match with others for a trust game and got feedback on:
1. Relational value (partner's ranking of them)
2. Reward value (successful match or not)

This allowed us to separate learning how others feel toward us from tracking positive social outcomes