Kohls Gregor, Peltzer Judith, Herpertz-Dahlmann Beate, Konrad Kerstin
Child Neuropsychology Section, Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany.
Dev Sci. 2009 Jul;12(4):614-25. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-7687.2009.00816.x.
An important issue in the field of clinical and developmental psychopathology is whether cognitive control processes, such as response inhibition, can be specifically enhanced by motivation. To determine whether non-social (i.e. monetary) and social (i.e. positive facial expressions) rewards are able to differentially improve response inhibition accuracy in typically developing children and adolescents, an 'incentive' go/no-go task was applied with reward contingencies for successful inhibition. In addition, the impact of children's personality traits (such as reward seeking and empathy) on monetary and social reward responsiveness was assessed in 65 boys, ages 8 to 12 years. All subjects were tested twice: At baseline, inhibitory control was assessed without reward, and then subjects were pseudorandomly assigned to one of four experimental conditions, including (1) social reward only, (2) monetary reward only, (3) mixed social and monetary reward, or (4) a retest condition without reward. Both social and non-social reward significantly improved task performance, although larger effects were observed for monetary reward. The higher the children scored on reward seeking scales, the larger was their improvement in response inhibition, but only if monetary reward was used. In addition, there was a tendency for an association between empathic skills and benefits from social reward. These data suggest that social incentives do not have an equally strong reinforcing value as compared to financial incentives. However, different personality traits seem to determine to what extent a child profits from different types of reward. Clinical implications regarding probable hyposensitivity to social reward in subjects with autism and dysregulated reward-seeking behaviour in children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) are discussed.
临床与发展性精神病理学领域的一个重要问题是，诸如反应抑制等认知控制过程是否能通过动机得到特异性增强。为了确定非社会性（即金钱）和社会性（即积极的面部表情）奖励能否不同程度地提高正常发育儿童和青少年的反应抑制准确性，我们采用了一种“激励”式的停止信号任务，并对成功抑制给予奖励。此外，我们在65名8至12岁的男孩中评估了儿童的人格特质（如寻求奖励和同理心）对金钱和社会奖励反应性的影响。所有受试者均接受两次测试：在基线时，在无奖励的情况下评估抑制控制，然后将受试者伪随机分配到四个实验条件之一，包括（1）仅社会奖励，（2）仅金钱奖励，（3）社会和金钱混合奖励，或（4）无奖励的重测条件。社会和非社会奖励均显著提高了任务表现，不过金钱奖励的效果更为明显。儿童在寻求奖励量表上的得分越高，他们在反应抑制方面的改善就越大，但前提是使用金钱奖励。此外，同理心技能与社会奖励带来的益处之间存在关联趋势。这些数据表明，与经济奖励相比，社会激励的强化价值并不相同。然而，不同的人格特质似乎决定了儿童从不同类型奖励中获益的程度。我们还讨论了这些结果对自闭症患者可能存在的社会奖励低敏感性以及注意力缺陷多动障碍（ADHD）儿童奖励寻求行为失调的临床意义。
