Humans devote 30-40% of speech output solely to informing others of their own subjective experiences. What drives this propensity for disclosure? Here, we test recent theories that individuals place high subjective value on opportunities to communicate their thoughts and feelings to others and that doing so engages neural and cognitive mechanisms associated with reward. Five studies provided support for this hypothesis. Self-disclosure was strongly associated with increased activation in brain regions that form the mesolimbic dopamine system, including the nucleus accumbens and ventral tegmental area. Moreover, individuals were willing to forgo money to disclose about the self. Two additional studies demonstrated that these effects stemmed from the independent value that individuals placed on self-referential thought and on simply sharing information with others. Together, these findings suggest that the human tendency to convey information about personal experience may arise from the intrinsic value associated with self-disclosure.self-reference | social cognition | reward | functional MRI S tudies of human conversation have documented that 30-40% of everyday speech is used to relay information to others about one's private experiences or personal relationships (1-4), and recent surveys of Internet use indicate that upwards of 80% of posts to social media sites (such as Twitter) consist simply of announcements about one's own immediate experiences (5). Although other primates do not generally attempt to communicate to others what they know-for example, by pointing out interesting things or modeling behaviors for others to imitateby 9 mo of age, human children begin trying to draw others' attention to aspects of the environment that they find important (6), and adults in all societies make consistent attempts to impart their knowledge to others (7). Recently, a number of commentators have argued that such unusually high rates of disclosure derive from a species-specific motivation to share one's beliefs and knowledge about the world (6, 7), suggesting that our species may have an intrinsic drive to disclose thoughts to others. This account suggests the following hypothesis: To the extent that humans are motivated to propagate the products of their minds, opportunities to disclose one's thoughts should be experienced as a powerful form of subjective reward. Here, across five studies, we used a combination of neuroimaging and cognitive methods to demonstrate empirical support for this possibility.Over the past two decades, researchers have characterized a system of neural regions that responds to the anticipation and receipt of reward (8-11). In both humans and animals, the mesolimbic dopamine system-which includes the nucleus accumbens (NAcc) and the ventral tegmental area (VTA)-responds robustly to primary rewards such as food (12-15); secondary rewards such as money or other tokens that can be exchanged for primary rewards (16-22); and even social rewards such as learning that others share one's opinion, experi...

Chronic postsurgical pain (CPSP), an often unanticipated result of necessary and even life-saving procedures, develops in 5–10% of patients one-year after major surgery. Substantial advances have been made in identifying patients at elevated risk of developing CPSP based on perioperative pain, opioid use, and negative affect, including depression, anxiety, pain catastrophizing, and posttraumatic stress disorder-like symptoms. The Transitional Pain Service (TPS) at Toronto General Hospital (TGH) is the first to comprehensively address the problem of CPSP at three stages: 1) preoperatively, 2) postoperatively in hospital, and 3) postoperatively in an outpatient setting for up to 6 months after surgery. Patients at high risk for CPSP are identified early and offered coordinated and comprehensive care by the multidisciplinary team consisting of pain physicians, advanced practice nurses, psychologists, and physiotherapists. Access to expert intervention through the Transitional Pain Service bypasses typically long wait times for surgical patients to be referred and seen in chronic pain clinics. This affords the opportunity to impact patients’ pain trajectories, preventing the transition from acute to chronic pain, and reducing suffering, disability, and health care costs. In this report, we describe the workings of the Transitional Pain Service at Toronto General Hospital, including the clinical algorithm used to identify patients, and clinical services offered to patients as they transition through the stages of surgical recovery. We describe the role of the psychological treatment, which draws on innovations in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy that allow for brief and effective behavioral interventions to be applied transdiagnostically and preventatively. Finally, we describe our vision for future growth.

Simulation theories of social cognition suggest that people use their own mental states to understand those of others-particularly similar others. However, perceivers cannot rely solely on self-knowledge to understand another person; they must also correct for differences between the self and others. Here we investigated serial adjustment as a mechanism for correction from self-knowledge anchors during social inferences. In 3 studies, participants judged the attitudes of a similar or dissimilar person and reported their own attitudes. For each item, we calculated the discrepancy between responses for the self and other. The adjustment process unfolds serially, so to the extent that individuals indeed anchor on self-knowledge and then adjust away, trials with a large amount of self-other discrepancy should be associated with longer response times, whereas small self-other discrepancy should correspond to shorter response times. Analyses consistently revealed this positive linear relationship between reaction time and self-other discrepancy, evidence of anchoring-and-adjustment, but only during judgments of similar targets. These results suggest that perceivers mentalize about similar others using the cognitive process of anchoring-and-adjustment.

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How do people understand the minds of others? Existing psychological theories have suggested a number of dimensions that perceivers could use to make sense of others’ internal mental states. However, it remains unclear which of these dimensions, if any, the brain spontaneously uses when we think about others. The present study used multivoxel pattern analysis (MVPA) of neuroimaging data to identify the primary organizing principles of social cognition. We derived four unique dimensions of mental state representation from existing psychological theories and used functional magnetic resonance imaging to test whether these dimensions organize the neural encoding of others’ mental states. MVPA revealed that three such dimensions could predict neural patterns within the medial prefrontal and parietal cortices, temporoparietal junction, and anterior temporal lobes during social thought: rationality, social impact, and valence. These results suggest that these dimensions serve as organizing principles for our understanding of other people.