Welcome to SFB 1528 - Cognition of Interaction

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Why is it so hard to suppress laughter – especially when others are laughing?

A new study by Vanessa Mitschke, Annika Ziereis, Sriranjani Manivasagam, and Anne Schacht (University of Göttingen) explores exactly this question. The research team wanted to find out how people regulate their emotions when they find something funny – and how strongly we are influenced by someone else’s laughter. Across three experiments with a total of 121 participants, the researchers tested three strategies: reappraising the situation, distracting oneself, and consciously suppressing laughter. Using precise measurements of facial muscle activity, they found that distraction and suppression most strongly reduced the physical signs of laughter. Reappraisal, in contrast, mainly changed how funny participants rated the situations. The most striking result, however, was this: as soon as people heard someone else laugh, it became much harder to keep a straight face – and jokes suddenly seemed much funnier. The study highlights how deeply social laughter is – and that our ability to control our emotions has clear limits when others are in a good mood.

Publication in Communications Psychology

How children acquire communication skills in the digital age

SFB PI Nivedita Mani explores how children acquire language and learn new words. She explores how kids pick up words from their peers, their parents and caretakers. In addition to that, she has started to explore the interactions between children and social robots. The EU-funded eLADDA consortium, of which Nivi is part of, explores not only differences in screen exposure and digital habits throughout Europe, but also generates recommendations for educators and policy-makers. The EU has now elected eLADDA as one of the success stories of EU research funding.

Read the full story here

Competence Pays – but Only Briefly

Eight months of preparation culminated in the first Göttingen In a new study published in Animal Cognition we demonstrate that wild red-fronted lemurs (Eulemur rufifrons) socially reward competent foragers – but only as long as they can benefit from them. In the experiment conducted by SFB PhD students Elif Karacoc and Richard Vogg at the Kirindy Forest Field site in Madagascar, the animals learned to obtain rewards from feeding dispensers. Two different open techniques were available; not all animals opened the boxes themselves – others tried to scrounge from successful box openers. Individuals who successfully opened the boxes received more grooming and affiliative attention from group members. Yet, once the experiments ended, this extra social attention quickly faded, returning to baseline levels.

Read the full article in Animal Cognition

New publication: When social meaning comes first

A new study by Anna Fischer, Danilo Postin, Lina Meiners, Louisa Kulke, Pascal Vrtička, and Anne Schacht, published in Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, examines how emotional and social information jointly shape visual perception. Using EEG and eye-tracking, the researchers investigated how people view complex emotional scenes that either include humans or contain no human presence. The results show that scenes with people capture attention faster and more strongly than non-social ones such as landscapes or animals. In particular, positive scenes with people evoked the strongest early brain responses — suggesting that social relevance can reduce the typical early focus on negative information. These findings challenge the idea of a universal “negativity bias” and highlight that the human brain rapidly prioritizes social meaning when making sense of the visual world.

Read the full open-access article in Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience

5th Göttingen Networking Day

We are excited to support again the 5th Neural Networking Day, organised by SFB postdoctoral researcher Ayuno Nakahashi and featuring SFB PIs Fred Wolf; Micahel Wibral, Julia Fischer and associate PI Raymundo Baez-Mendoza. Join us for a day full of neuroscience in a causual and friendly atmosphere at the German Primate Center. We invite you to sign up to present your work in poster or as a blitz talk. We look forward to seeing you!

Meeting Website Website

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