Allen Lab
Principal Investigator: Timothy A Allen
Institution: University of Pittsburgh (Pittsburgh, PA)
Primary Subfield: Computational Biology
Recruitment Status: Inquire for rotation/fellowship opportunities
Research Focus
Problems in cooperating with others define antagonism, a transdiagnostic dimension of psychopathology expressed in personality and externalizing disorders. People high on antagonism are prone to aggressive, callous, and exploitative behaviors that damage relationships and incur substantial costs in the form of productivity loss, substance misuse, and criminality. While clinical theories link antagonism to deficits in social cognition, it is hard to deny that exploiting others requires an understanding of their mind. This apparent contradiction can be resolved by distinguishing between two facets of antagonism: callousness and exploitativeness. Our prior work and preliminary data inform the hypothesis that exploitativeness reflects an enhanced capacity to learn about the mental states and behaviors of others coupled with an increased sensitivity to personal, rather than shared, rewards. In contrast, callousness reflects a broader insensitivity to social feedback. We hypothesize that these dissociable social learning processes are instantiated in canonical circuits that expanded during anthropogenesis to support mentalizing and self-directed thought. These learning signals, which tra…
Active NIH Awards
- 1R01MH140901-01: Antagonism and neurocomputational mechanisms of cooperation (2026)
- 5K01MH123915-05: Dispositional Negativity and the Pavlovian Control of Active and Passive Defensive Behavior (2024)
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