Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University Rotterdam, Rotterdam, 3062, PA, The Netherlands.
Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging, Radboud University, 6500, HB, Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
Psychopharmacology (Berl). 2019 Jun;236(6):1807-1816. doi: 10.1007/s00213-019-5165-z. Epub 2019 Jan 31.
Trust is a key component of social interactions. In order to assess the trustworthiness of others, people rely on both information learned from previous encounters, as well as on implicit biases associated with specific facial features.
Here, we investigated the role of catecholamine (dopamine and noradrenaline) transmission on trust decisions as a function of both experienced behavior and facial features.
To increase catecholamine levels, methylphenidate (MPH, i.e., Ritalin®, 20 mg) was administered to participants (N = 24) prior to their playing a well-studied economic task, namely the Trust Game (Berg et al. 1995). We measured the amount of money invested with a variety of game partners. Across game partners, we manipulated two aspects of trust: the facial trust level (high facial trust, low facial trust, and non-social) and the likelihood of reciprocation (high, low).
Results demonstrated no main effect of MPH on investments, but rather a selective lowering of investments under MPH as compared with placebo with the game partners who were low on facial trustworthiness and were low reciprocators.
These results provide evidence that MPH administration impacts social trust decision-making, but does so in a context-specific manner.
信任是社交互动的关键组成部分。为了评估他人的可信度，人们既依赖于从以前的互动中获得的信息，也依赖于与特定面部特征相关的内隐偏见。
在这里，我们研究了儿茶酚胺（多巴胺和去甲肾上腺素）传递在信任决策中的作用，其作用取决于经历的行为和面部特征。
为了增加儿茶酚胺水平，参与者（N=24）在进行一项经过充分研究的经济任务，即信任游戏（Berg 等人，1995 年）之前，给予了哌醋甲酯（MPH，即利他林®，20mg）。我们用各种游戏伙伴来衡量投资的金额。在游戏伙伴中，我们操纵了两个方面的信任：面部信任水平（高面部信任、低面部信任和非社交）和互惠的可能性（高、低）。
结果表明，MPH 对投资没有主要影响，但与安慰剂相比，MPH 会选择性地降低与面部可信度低、互惠可能性低的游戏伙伴的投资。
这些结果提供了证据，表明 MPH 的给药会影响社会信任决策，但这种影响是特定于情境的。
