The University of Chicago
Department of Psychology
5848 South University Avenue
Chicago, IL, 60637
Office Phone: (773) 702-1962
Fax: (773) 702-4580
Office: 406 Kelly Hall
Labs: BPSB 422A
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John T. Cacioppo
Position
Tiffany & Margaret Blake
Distinguished Service Professor
Director, Center for Cognitive
and Social Neuroscience
Field Specialties
Social Neuroscience
Social Isolation & Connection
Evaluative Processes (e.g., Emotions, Affects, & Attitudes)
Research
As a social species, humans create emergent organizations beyond the individual - structues that range from dyads, families, and groups to cities, civilizations, and international alliances. These emergent structures evolved hand in hand with neural, hormonal, cellular, and genetic mechanisms to support them because the consequent social behaviors helped humans survive, reproduce, and care for offspring sufficiently long that they too survived to reproduce. Cacioppo's research is focused on understanding these neural, hormonal, cellular, and genetic mechanisms and their effect on the mind, behavior, and health - an approach he and Gary Berntson termed social neuroscience (Cacioppo & Berntson, 1992, 2004; Cacioppo et al., 2000, 2002; Cacioppo et al., 2007; Decety & Cacioppo, 2010). Social neuroscience represents an interdisciplinary approach devoted to understanding how biological systems implement social processes and behavior and to using biological concepts and methods to inform and refine theories of social processes and behavior. We use a variety of methods in our research, including functional magnetic resonance (fMRI), standard and high density electroencephalography and event-related brain potentials, psychophysiological assessments, and neuroendocrine and immune assays, and in collaboration with colleagues we also have begun to bring quantitative genetics to bear on our research questions.
When we first proposed a field of social neuroscience, some in the neurosciences regarded the term to be an oxymoron. However, social species do not fare well when forced to live solitary lives. Social isolation decreases lifespan of the fruit fly, Drosophilia melanogaster (Ruan & Wu, 2008); promotes the development of obesity and Type 2 diabetes in mice (Nonogaki, Nozue, & Oka, 2007); delays the positive effects of running on adult neurogenesis in rats (Stranahan, Khalil, & Gould, 2006); increases the activation of the sympatho-adrenomedullary response to an acute immobilization or cold stressor in rats (Dronjak, Gavrilovic, Filipovic, & Radojcic, 2004); decreases the expression of genes regulating glucocorticoid response in the frontal cortex of piglets (Poletto, Steibel, Siegford, & Zanella, 2006); decreases open field activity, increased basal cortisol concentrations, and decreased lymphocyte proliferation to mitogens in pigs (Kanitz, Tuchscherer, Puppe, Tuchscherer, & Stabenow, 2004); increases the 24 hr urinary catecholamines levels and evidence of oxidative stress in the aortic arch of the Watanabe Heritable Hyperlipidemic rabbit (Nation et al., 2008); increases the morning rises in cortisol in squirrel monkeys (Lyons, Ha, & Levine, 1995); and profoundly disrupts psychosexual development in rhesus monkeys (Harlow et al., 1965).
Humans, born to the longest period of abject dependency of any species and dependent on conspecifics across the lifespan to survive and prosper, do not fare well, either, whether they are living solitary lives, or whether they simply perceive they live in isolation. The average person spends about 80% of waking hours in the company of others, and the time with others is preferred to the time spent alone (Emler, 1994; Kahneman, Krueger, Schkade, Schwarz, & Stone, 2004). Social isolation, in contrast, is associated not only with lower subjective well-being (Berscheid, 1985; Burt, 1986; Myers & Diener, 1995) but with broad based-morbidity and mortality (House, Landis, & Umberson, 1988). Humans are an irrepressibly meaning-making species, as well, and a large literature has developed showing that perceived social isolation (i.e., loneliness) in normal samples is a more important predictor of a variety of adverse health outcomes than is objective social isolation (e.g., (Cole et al., 2007; Hawkley, Masi, Berry, & Cacioppo, 2006; Penninx et al., 1997; Seeman, 2000; Sugisawa, Liang, & Liu, 1994). In an illustrative study, Caspi et al. (Caspi, Harrington, Moffitt, Milne, & Poulton, 2006) found that loneliness in adolescence and young adulthood predicted how many cardiovascular risk factors (e.g., body mass index, waist circumference, blood pressure, cholesterol) were elevated in young adulthood, and that the number of developmental occasions (i.e., childhood, adolescence, young adulthood) at which participants were lonely predicted the number of elevated risk factors in young adulthood. Loneliness has also been associated with the progression of Alzheimer’s Disease (Wilson et al., 2007), obesity (Lauder, Mummery, Jones, & Caperchione, 2006), increased vascular resistance (Cacioppo, Hawkley, Crawford et al., 2002), elevated blood pressure (Cacioppo, Hawkley, Crawford et al., 2002; Hawkley et al., 2006), increased hypothalamic pituitary adrenocortical activity (Adam, Hawkley, Kudielka, & Cacioppo, 2006; Steptoe, Owen, Kunz-Ebrecht, & Brydon, 2004), less salubrious sleep (Cacioppo, Hawkley, Berntson et al., 2002; Pressman et al., 2005), diminished immunity (Kiecolt-Glaser et al., 1984; Pressman et al., 2005), reduction in independent living (Russell, Cutrona, De La Mora, & Wallace, 1997; Tilvis, Pitkala, Jolkkonen, & Strandberg, 2000), alcoholism (Akerlind & Hornquist, 1992), depressive symptomatology (Cacioppo et al., 2006; Heikkinen & Kauppinen, 2004), suicidal ideation and behavior (Rudatsikira, Muula, Siziya, & Twa-Twa, 2007), and mortality in older adults (Penninx et al., 1997; Seeman, 2000). Loneliness has even been associated with gene expression -- specifically, the under-expression of genes bearing anti-inflammatory glucocorticoid response elements (GREs) and over-expression of genes bearing response elements for pro-inflammatory NF-κB/Rel transcription factors (Cole et al., 2007). The social environment, therefore, is fundamentally involved in the sculpting and activation/inhibition of basic structures and processes in the human brain and biology.
Cacioppo and colleagues continue to investigate how social isolation or perceived social isolation (loneliness) gets under the skin to affect social cognition and emotions, personality processes, brain, biology, and health (e.g., Cacioppo & Patrick, 2008; Cacioppo & Hawkley, 2009). Prospective studies have revealed that loneliness is a major risk factor for psychological disturbances and for broad-based morbidity and mortality, yet the behavioral, psychological, and biological mechanisms are not well understood. A meta-analysis of the literature on social support and physiology revealed that feelings of social isolation in adults were related to elevated blood pressure and sympathetic tonus. In follow-up studies of loneliness in young adults, Cacioppo and colleagues found that individuals who were chronically lonely were characterized by elevated mean salivary cortisol level across the course of a normal day, suggesting elevated activation of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenocorticol axis. Loneliness was unrelated to health behaviors (e.g., smoking, exercise, alcohol consumption) in this sample of young adults but loneliness was related to behavioral styles associated with cardiovascular disease (e.g., hostility, pessimism, insecure attachments and interactions with others) and inferior sleep (e.g., less efficient sleep, more micro-awakenings, feelings of sleepiness and fatigue during the day). Importantly, an experimental study in which loneliness was manipulated and longitudinal studies using cross-lag panel analyses suggests that an individual’s construal of their social relationships, and not invariant individual differences per se, are underlying these effects.
A second and related line of research concerns the architecture and operating characteristics of what might be termed the neural systems that contribute to the mammalian ability to distinguish hostile from hospitable stimuli. The past decade has even seen a virtual explosion of research on the neural networks underlying human emotions and, for the most part quite separately, on the neural substrates underlying social perception, reasoning, and behavior. Less attention has been devoted to the relationship between these neural systems, however, despite the essential role evaluative processes such as emotions play in social development and discourse, however. We have conceptualized the affect system as shaped by the hammer and chisel of adaptation and natural selection. Physical limitations constrain behavioral expressions and incline behavioral predispositions toward a bipolar (good/bad; approach/withdraw) organization, but these limiting conditions lose their power at the level of underlying mechanisms. According to the model of evaluative space (Cacioppo & Berntson, 1994; Cacioppo et al., 2005, 2010), the common metric governing approach/withdrawal is generally a single dimension at response stages which itself is the consequence of multiple operations, such as the activation function for positivity (appetition) and the activation function negativity (aversion), at earlier affective processing stages. This formulation has revealed features and consequences of affective processing that were not discernible using traditional conceptualizations or measures. Current research on this topic focuses on individual differences in affective processing, and the neural substrates of affective and socioemotional processing.
In addition, two cornerstones of classic economic theory are the assumptions that individuals are rational decision makers and individuals have purely self-regarding preferences. These assumptions fly in the face of most psychological theories, where individuals are depicted as characterized by bounded rationality if not also by bounded self-interests. Our theoretical and empirical work has focused on both, and of late particularly the latter. Imagine a scenario in which someone approaches you to offer $100 that was money you had already spent. Perhaps spending this money was not even originally your choice-you had to spend the money for a tax or a fee or being overcharged. Imagine the person approaching you is a known public figure. Under these circumstances, who would not accept the return of their own money? It appears intuitive that no one would be so irrational as to reject the money. Certainly Bill Frist, the Senate Republican Majority leader in 2006, thought that taxpayers would readily accept a $100 "rebate", given the soaring price of gas. This was an offer to return $100 to taxpayers with no strings attached. The response was completely unexpected by Senator Frist: Senators received direct feedback from taxpayers rejecting the offer. Constituents were angry and insulted by the offer of $100. In some sense, the failed Senate Republican proposal has the structure of a simple game that is used in behavioral economics research, the ultimatum game. In this game, two players are apprised of the size of a pot of money. One player (the Allocator) makes an offer about how to split the pot. The other player (the Responder) decides whether to reject or accept the offer. If the offer is accepted, both players get their respective parts of the pot. If the offer is rejected, neither player gets anything. From the perspective of a rationalist economist, the best offer for the Allocator is a penny (or the smallest offer possible) regardless of the size of the pot and the Responder should accept this offer. Why give up a penny and get nothing when you can keep a penny? However, people do not usually act in this fashion. In general, most Allocators make much larger (and therefore irrational) offers than predicted and Responders reject offers that seem insulting relative to some standard of fairness. Furthermore, brain imaging studies indicate that the brain system involved in reward is activated when Responders (in a similar game) spend money to punish unfair partners. This finding has been interpreted as signifying "altruistic punishment," meaning that people are deriving personal pleasure from foregoing their rational self-interests and pursuing what is in the interest of the collective. That is, the behavioral and neuroimaging evidence suggest the operation of bounded rationality and for bounded self-interests.
Not all individuals respond similarly, of course. Understanding the relationship between psychological processes and biological variation in neural mechanisms provides an important data source for theory construction and theory testing, and understanding these individual differences is essential in the legal domain where courts must address the culpability of non-normative acts. For more than a decade, we have studies individual differences in perceived social isolation (loneliness) because of its implications for bounded self-interests and bounded rationality. Individuals who perceive themselves to be socially isolated are more negative and hostile in social interactions than their counterparts even though the former have a greater desire to connect with others. In a study using the ultimatum game, we sought to determine the extent to which individual differences in perceived isolation affect cooperation after fair versus unfair treatment. Participants played the responder role of the Ultimatum game, which entailed either accepting or rejecting offers of varying levels of fairness. A median split was performed on UCLA Loneliness scale scores to classify participants as high or low in perceived social isolation. Our results showed that participants high and low in perceived isolation accepted comparable numbers of fair offers, but those high in isolation accepted more unfair offers than those low. That is, they appeared more cooperative in response to unfair treatment or, in economic terms, more rational. Given the extant evidence that individuals high in perceived isolation expect to be betrayed and act toward others in a fashion that fulfills this expectation even when treated fairly, it is difficult to accept the interpretation that these individuals are the paragons of homo economicus without considering alternative interpretations. Rather than being more rational, individuals who feel socially isolated (and who are motivated to connect with others) may be willing to incur greater costs to connect socially; and by doing so they may create or enter into more exploitive relationships than those who already feel socially connected. The deeper question being asked in this research is for which individuals, under what conditions, through what specific psychological and neural mechanisms, and with what long term effects does an individual's self-interest succumb to the greater good, and how malleable are these mechanisms by endogenous (e.g., self-regulation) and exogenous (e.g., legal consequences) forces.
Biography
John Cacioppo is the Tiffany and Margaret Blake Distinguished Service Professor at The University of Chicago, the Director of the University of Chicago Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience, and the Director of the Arete Initiative of the Office of the Vice President for Research and National Laboratories at the University of Chicago. He served on the faculty of the University of Notre Dame (1977-1979), University of Iowa (1979-1989), and Ohio State University (1989-1999) prior to joining the faculty at the University of Chicago. He has also served as an External Professor Chair in Social Neurosciences at Free University Amsterdam in the Netherlands and is a Guest Professor at the State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning at Beijing Normal University in China. Among the awards he has received are the Scientific Impact Award from the Society for Experimental Social Psychology (2009), the Distinguished Alumnus Award from the Ohio State University Department of Psychology (2009), the Order of the Sons of Italy Award (2009), the Presidential Citation from the American Psychological Association (2008), the Theoretical Innovation Prize from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (2008), the Award for Distinguished Service on Behalf of Personality and Social Psychology from the Society of Personality and Social Psychology (2008), the Distinguished Member Award from Psi Chi (2006), an Honorary Doctor of Science Degree from Bard College (May, 2004), the Patricia R. Barchas Award from the American Psychosomatic Society (2004), the “ISI Highly Cited Researchers” in Psychiatry/Psychology (2003 - present), the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award from the American Psychological Association (2002), the Campbell Award (for Distinguished Scientific Contributions to Personality and Social Psychology) from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (2000), the Award for Distinguished Scientific Contributions to Psychophysiology from the Society for Psychophysiological Research (2000), the Distinguished Scholar Award from the Ohio State University (1996), and the Troland Research Award from the National Academy of Sciences (1989). He has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Society of Experimental Psychologists, and the Gesellschaft fur Unendliche Versucheand, and he is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Association for Psychological Science (Charter Member), the American Psychological Association (Divisions 1, 3, 6, 8, 23, & 38), the Royal Society of Arts, the American Academy of Behavioral Medicine Research, the Midwestern Psychological Association, the World Innovation Foundation, International Organization of Psychophysiology, Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Society of Experimental Psychologists, and Society of Behavioral Medicine. He has also been elected President of several scientific organizations including the Association for Psychological Science, the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, the Society for Psychophysiological Research, and the Society for Consumer Psychology, and he is either a past or present member of the Board of Directors or Advisory Council/Board of a variety of organizations including the National Advisory Council on Aging of the US Department of Health and Human Services, Association for Psychological Science,Ohio State University Research Foundation, Society for Psychophysiological Research, National Research Council Board on Behavioral, Cognitive, and Sensory Sciences, Federation of Associations in Behavioral and Brain Sciences Foundation, Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology at the University of Illinois, John Templeton Foundation (American Board), Cluster of Excellence “Languages and Emotion” at Free University Berlin (International Board), Health and Retirement Study Data Monitoring Board of the National Institute on Aging, and Society for Personality and Social Psychology. Cacioppo has served on various journal boards, as well, as is a past Editor of Psychophysiology, a former Associate Editor of Psychological Review and Perspectives on Psychological Science, and is currently an Associate Editor of Social Neuroscience. He is also a former member of the MacArthur Foundation Mind-Body Integration Network and is a current member of the MacArthur Foundation Aging Society Network and the Director of the Chicago Social Brain Network.
For copies of selected reprints, click on the tab labeled "Publications" to the right.
