Ruolei Gu

• Doctor of Cognitive Neuroscience
• Professor (Full) at Chinese Academy of Sciences

Socially engaging robots have been increasingly applied to alleviate depressive symptoms and to improve the quality of social life among different populations. Seeing that depression negatively influences social reward processing in everyday interaction, we investigate this influence during simulated interactions with humans or robots. In this stud...

In this paper, we focus on the potential impacts of new-generation chatbots, such as ChatGPT, on individuals with psychiatric disorders. We first provide background knowledge on the relationship between psychiatric disorders and social withdrawal. Next, we discuss why individuals with psychiatric disorders may be more likely to “addict” to new-gene...

Studying heroism in controlled settings presents challenges and ethical controversies due to its association with physical risk. Leveraging virtual reality (VR) technology, we conducted a three-study series with 397 participants from China to investigate heroic actions. Participants unexpectedly witnessed a criminal event in a simulated scenario, a...

Human moral reactions to artificial intelligence (AI) agents’ behavior constitute an important aspect of modern-day human–AI relationships. Although previous studies have mainly focused on autonomy ethics, this study investigates how individuals judge AI agents’ violations of community ethics (including betrayals and subversions) compared with huma...

We examined the effects of attachment security priming on economic risky decisions and their neural underpinnings. Participants were exposed to either attachment security primes ( N = 28) or control primes ( N = 29) and then completed a gambling task while connected to an electroencephalogram system. We anticipated that attachment security priming...

Marketing research consistently demonstrates that gender stereotypes influence the effectiveness of product recommendations. When artificial intelligence (AI) agents are designed with gendered features to enhance anthropomorphism, a follow‐up question is whether these agents' recommendations are also shaped by gender stereotypes. To investigate thi...

The present research uncovers the shared genetic underpinnings of fairness norm adaptation capability, its neural correlates, and long‐term mental health outcomes. One hundred and eighty‐six twins are recruited and played as responders in the Ultimatum Game (UG) while undergoing fMRI scanning in their early adulthood (Study‐1) and are measured on d...

The present study aimed to investigate the impact of social comparison on risk‐taking behaviors and the neural underpinnings within a competitive context. Participants who thought they were playing against a stranger in a gambling task were actually playing against a programmed computer. Eighty‐eight college students were assigned to one of three c...

Emotion perception interacts with how we think and speak, including our concept of emotions. Body expression is an important way of emotion communication, but it is unknown whether and how its perception is modulated by conceptual knowledge. In this study, we employed representational similarity analysis and conducted three experiments combining se...

Classical psychological theories widely assert that empathy plays a pivotal role in facilitating prosocial behavior. In essence, individuals are more likely to engage in actions beneficial to others when they experience a strong sense of empathy toward those individuals. Such actions encompass, but are not limited to, rescuing others from suffering...

Information exchange is a key factor in the attainment of collective outcomes and the navigation of social life. In the current study, we investigated whether and how information exchange enhanced collective performance by combining behavioral and neuroimaging approaches from the perspective of multiparticipant neuroscience. To evaluate collective...

Autobiographical memory (AM) is an important psychological phenomenon that has significance for self-development and mental health. The psychological mechanisms of emotional AM retrieval and their association with individual emotional symptoms remain largely unclear in the literature. For this purpose, the current study provided cue words to elicit...

Reversal learning is a crucial aspect of behavioral flexibility that plays a significant role in environmental adaptation and development. While previous studies have established a link between anxiety and impaired reversal learning ability, the underlying mechanisms behind this association remain unclear. This study employed a probabilistic revers...

In real life, it is not unusual that we face potential threats (i.e., physical stimuli and environments that may cause harm or danger) with other individuals together, yet it remains largely unknown how threat-induced anxious feelings influence prosocial behaviors such as resource sharing. In this study, we investigated this question by combining f...

Recent studies suggest that corrupt collaboration (i.e. acquiring private benefits with joint immoral acts) represents a dilemma between the honesty and reciprocity norms. In this study, we asked pairs of participants (labeled as A and B) to individually toss a coin and report their outcomes; their collective benefit could be maximized by dishonest...

The process of outcome evaluation effectively navigates subsequent choices in humans. However, it is largely unclear how people evaluate decision outcome in a sequential scenario, as well as the neural mechanisms underlying this process. To address this research gap, the study employed a sequential decision task in which participants were required...

Previous studies examining the relationship between ingroup bias and resource scarcity have produced heterogeneous findings, possibly due to their focus on the allocation of positive resources (e.g. money). This study aims to investigate whether ingroup bias would be amplified or eliminated when perceived survival resources for counteracting negati...

Decision-making under time pressure may better reflect an individual’s response preference, but few studies have examined whether individuals choose to be more selfish or altruistic in a scenario where third-party punishment is essential for maintaining social norms. This study used a third-party punishment paradigm to investigate how time pressure...

The current literature has revealed mixed evidence on whether loss (vs. gain) context promotes or curtails human prosociality. The current study (N=96) aimed to address this issue by examining whether gain/loss context has distinct effects on different prosocial preferences combining computational modelling with Dictator Game and Message Game. Thes...

Females are considered the more empathic sex. This conventional view, however, has been challenged in the past few decades with mixed findings. These heterogeneous findings could be caused by the fact that empathy is a complex and multifaceted construct. To clarify whether sex differences exist in certain dimensions of empathy and whether they are...

Although previous studies have shown that task performance is affected by others' presence and (the consequences of) others' actions, it is unclear how task performance varies in different social situations and the role that sex plays in it. In the present study, we investigated sex differences in the evaluation processing of another person's outco...

Motivational dysfunction constitutes one of the fundamental dimensions of psychopathology cutting across traditional diagnostic boundaries. However, it is unclear whether there is a common neural circuit responsible for motivational dysfunction across neuropsychiatric conditions. To address this issue, the current study combined a meta-analysis on...

Prosocial helping behavior is a highly valued social practice across societies, but the willingness to help others varies among persons. In our opinion, that willingness should be associated with the sensitivity to helping outcome at the individual level – that is, increasing as a function of positive outcome sensitivity but decreasing as a functio...

Nostalgia arises from tender and yearnful reflection on meaningful life events or important persons from one’s past. In the last two decades, the literature has documented a variety of ways in which nostalgia benefits psychological well-being. Only a handful of studies, however, have addressed the neural basis of the emotion. In this prospective re...

To optimize our decisions, we may change our mind by utilizing social information. Here, we examined how changes of mind were modulated by Social Misalignment Sensitivity (SMS), the egocentric tendency, and decision preferences in a decision-making paradigm including both risk and social information. Combining functional magnetic resonance imaging...

Background Fear of negative evaluation (FNE), referring to negative expectation and feelings toward other people’s social evaluation, is closely associated with social anxiety that plays an important role in our social life. Exploring the neural markers of FNE may be of theoretical and practical significance to psychiatry research ( e.g ., studies...

Second-party punishment (SPP) and third-party punishment (TPP) are two basic forms of costly punishment that play an essential role in maintaining social orders. Despite scientific breakthroughs in understanding that costly punishment is driven by an integration of the wrongdoers’ intention and the outcome of their actions, so far, few studies have...

Resource scarcity challenges individuals' willingness to share limited resources with other people. Still, lots of field studies and laboratory experiments have shown that sharing behaviors do not disappear under scarcity. Rather, some individuals are willing to share their scarce resources with others in a similar way as when the resource is abund...

Neuroimaging studies have suggested that the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) is a key brain region for social feedback processing, but previous findings are largely based on correlational approaches. In this study, we use the deep transcranial magnetic stimulation (dTMS) to manipulate mPFC activity, then investigate participants' behavioral perform...

People as third-party observers, without direct self-interest, may punish norm violators to maintain social norms. However, third-party judgment and the follow-up punishment might be susceptible to the way we frame (i.e., verbally describe) a norm violation. We conducted a behavioral and a neuroimaging experiment to investigate the above phenomenon...

Background: The potential roles of affective responses to environmental stressors in individuals' physical and mental health are complex and multi-faceted. This study, then, explores Chinese citizens' emotional responses to COVID-19-related stressors and influence factors which may boost or buffer such effects. Methods: From late March to early Jun...

Arousing research has investigated stressed individuals’ decision biases, but whether and how stress and individual traits interact to impact the underlying decision-making process is unknown. Here, we aim to explore the effect of acute stress on the interaction between the objective level of risk and subjective risk preference (i.e. risk-taking pr...

Both pictures and words are frequently employed as experimental stimuli to investigate the neurocognitive mechanisms of emotional processing. However, it remains unclear whether emotional picture processing and emotional word processing share neural underpinnings. To address this issue, we focus on neuroimaging studies examining the implicit proces...

Background Reversal learning reflects an individual’s capacity to adapt to a dynamic environment with changing stimulus–reward contingencies. This study focuses on the potential influence of anxiety on reversal learning skills. Methods We asked 40 participants with a high level of trait anxiety (HTA) and 40 counterparts with a low anxiety level (L...

People vary in their responses to stress. The present study aimed to investigate whether and how alpha frontal asymmetry (AFA) measured in the resting state underlies the individual differences in psychological responses to acute psychosocial stress (e.g., increases in heart rate and cortisol) induced by the Trier social stress test. Forty‐three he...

Social misalignment occurs when a person’s attitudes and opinions deviate from those of others. We investigated how individuals react to social misalignment in risky (outcome probabilities are known) or ambiguous (outcome probabilities are unknown) decision contexts. During each trial, participants played a forced-choice gamble, and they observed t...

Social comparison is a common behavior that largely determines people's experience of decision outcome. Previous research has showed that interpersonal relationship plays a pivotal role in social comparison. In the current study, we investigated whether the manipulation of context-based relationship would affect participants' comparison of self-out...

Previous studies have found that self-awareness can help people to recruit more cognitive resources, while people with more cognitive resources can better buffer the detrimental effects of negative events. However, it is not clear whether self-awareness can directly buffer the consequences of negative feedback (i.e., reducing neural sensitivity to...

Many studies have revealed that reward-associated features capture attention. Neurophysiological evidence further suggests that this reward-driven attention effect modulates visual processes by enhancing low-level visual salience. However, no behavioral study to date has directly examined whether reward-driven attention changes how people see. Comb...

People as third-party observers, without direct self-interest, may punish norm violators to maintain social norms. However, third-party judgment and the follow-up punishment might be susceptible to the way we frame (i.e., verbally describe) a norm violation. We conducted a behavioral and a neuroimaging experiment to investigate the above phenomenon...

Background: Reward dysfunction is a major dimension of depressive symptomatology, but it remains obscure if that dysfunction varies across different reward types. In this study, we focus on the abnormalities in anticipatory/consummatory processing of monetary and social reward associated with depressive symptoms. Methods: Forty participants with...

Trust forms the basis of virtually all interpersonal relationships. Although significant individual differences characterize trust, the driving neuropsychological signatures behind its heterogeneity remain obscure. Here, we applied a prediction framework in two independent samples of healthy participants to examine the relationship between trust pr...

Electroencephalography (EEG) is a powerful tool for investigating the brain bases of human psychological processes non‐invasively. Some important mental functions could be encoded by resting‐state EEG activity; that is, the intrinsic neural activity not elicited by a specific task or stimulus. The extraction of informative features from resting‐sta...

To investigate neural mechanisms of human psychology with electroencephalography (EEG), we typically instruct participants to perform certain tasks with simultaneous recording of their brain activities. The identification of task‐related EEG responses requires data analysis techniques that are normally different from methods for analyzing resting‐s...

Supplementary Information for the Article "Name Uniqueness Predicts Career Choice and Career Achievement".

Incidental emotions, which are irrelevant to the ongoing decision, plays a significant role in decision-making processes. In this study, we investigated the influence of specific incidental emotions on behavioral, psychological, and electrophysiological responses during the process of decision making. Participants finished a forced-choice gambling...

Anxious individuals tend to make pessimistic judgments in decision making under uncertainty. While this phenomenon is commonly attributed to risk aversion, loss aversion is a critical but often overlooked factor. In this study, we simultaneously examined risk aversion and loss aversion during decision making in high and low trait anxious individual...

As an important cognitive bias, the framing effect shows that our decision preferences are sensitive to the verbal description (i.e., frame) of options. This study focuses on the neural underpinnings of the social framing effect, which is based on decision-making regarding other people. A novel paradigm was used in which participants made a trade-o...

Social anxiety has been associated with abnormalities in cognitive processing in the literature, manifesting as various cognitive biases. To what extent these biases interrupt social interactions remains largely unclear. This study used the Social Judgment Paradigm (SJP) that could separate the expectation and experience stages of social feedback p...

Do personal names relate to career choice and career achievement? If so, how and why? We propose that uniqueness (vs. conformity), a dimension crucial for identity construction, may associate name (personal identity) with career (vocational identity). By testing a broad range of names and jobs, we identified a phenomenon—the name-job uniqueness fit...

Previous research has revealed that interpersonal relationships and social comparisons play important roles in evaluating outcomes. To our knowledge, how interpersonal relationships influence the process of outcome evaluations in a social comparison context remains largely unclear. In the current study, participants engaged in a simple gambling tas...

Attachment security describes a sense of safety and security felt by individuals and promotes mental health. The mechanism by which attachment security buffers against psychological threat remains unclear, however. Here, we explored how attachment security attenuates the response to threatening information using a signal detection theory (SDT) and...

This paper focuses on the social function of painful experience as revealed by recent studies on social decision-making. Observing others suffering from physical pain evokes empathic reactions that can lead to prosocial behavior (e.g., helping others at a cost to oneself), which might be regarded as the social value of pain derived from evolution....

Temporary self-construal (independent vs. interdependent) priming can modulate the neural response to the reward for an individual. Our previous event-related potential (ERP) studies have indicated that people experience the rewards for a friend less strongly than they experience the same amount rewards for themselves. However, an issue remaining u...

Emotions involve subjective experiences, behavioral performances, and physiological responses. Research concerning autonomic states corresponding to different emotions has prevailed for several decades. The present study was designed to investigate how specific emotions influence cardiac activities that reflect autonomic responses. Affective videos...

In this chapter, I describe the basic principles of designing an event-related potential (ERP) experiment for psychology research and the rationales behind these principles. I also explain the challenges that researchers often encounter when trying to control potential confounding factors and keeping focus on the psychological processes of interest...

Bargaining parties often disagree on what fair is, due to the reason that people are prone to believe that what favors oneself is fair, i.e., an egocentric bias. In this study, we investigated the neural signatures underlying egocentric bias in fairness decision-making, conjoining an adapted ultimatum game (UG) with event-related fMRI and functiona...

Decision making is vital to human behavior and can be divided into multiple stages including option assessment, behavioral output, and feedback evaluation. Studying how people evaluate option characteristics in the option assessment stage would provide important knowledge on human decision making. Using the event‐related potential (ERP) method, the...

At present, the mechanisms underlying changes in visual processing in individuals with tinnitus remain unclear. Therefore, we investigated whether the vision dominance of individuals with tinnitus disappears at the preresponse level through behavioral study. A total of 38 individuals with tinnitus and 31 healthy controls completed a task in which t...

Generally, successful cooperation can only be established when the interacting persons believe that they would not be betrayed; this belief can be updated by observing the other persons' actual choices. Thus, the process of belief updating plays an important role in conditional cooperation. Using the Prisoner's Dilemma Game (PDG) with event-related...

Both social and material rewards play a crucial role in daily life and function as strong incentives for various goal-directed behaviors. However, it remains unclear whether the incentive effects of social and material reward are supported by common or distinct neural circuits. Here, we have addressed this issue by quantitatively synthesizing and c...

We proposed that self-affirmation can endow people with more cognitive resource to cope with uncertainty. We tested this possibility with an event-related potential (ERP) study by examining how self-affirmation influences ambiguous feedback processing in a simple gambling task, which was used to investigate risk decision-making. We assigned 48 part...

Anxiety and anxiety disorders are associated with specific alterations to functional brain networks, including intra-networks and inter-networks. Given the heterogeneity within anxiety disorders and inconsistencies in functional network differences across studies, identifying common patterns of altered brain networks in anxiety is imperative. Here,...

Background Excessive worry is a defining feature of generalized anxiety disorder and is present in a wide range of other psychiatric conditions. Therefore, individualized predictions of worry propensity could be highly relevant in clinical practice, with respect to the assessment of worry symptom severity at the individual level. Methods We applie...

The visual processing capacity of tinnitus patients is worse than normal controls, indicating cross-modal interference. However, the mechanism underlying the tinnitus-modulated visual processing is largely unclear. In order to explore the influence of tinnitus on visual processing, this study used a signal recognition paradigm to observe whether th...

The emotional aspect of autobiographical memories (AMs) is associated with self-related processing, which plays an important role in mental health. However, the emotional consistency dimension of AMs and its neural underpinnings remain largely unexplored. Twenty-five healthy participants were involved in this study. Participants were first asked to...

Narcissists are prone to risky decision-making, but why? This study tested-via behavioral and event-related potential (ERP) measures-two accounts: Deficiencies in error monitoring and deficiencies in action updating. High and low narcissists were engaged in a monetary gambling task by choosing between a high-risk and a low-risk option while the ele...

Communal narcissists claim a saintly status, but are they fairer than non-narcissists? In Study 1, high (vs. low) communal narcissists did not make more equitable offers and were not more likely to reject unequitable offers in an ultimatum game. However, they reported being more altruistic, judging fairness as a more important moral value, and bein...

A large number of studies have demonstrated costly punishment to unfair events across human societies. However, individuals exhibit a large heterogeneity in costly punishment decisions, whereas the neuropsychological substrates underlying the heterogeneity remain poorly understood. Here, we addressed this issue by applying a multivariate machine le...

Narcissism is one of the most fundamental personality traits in which individuals in general population exhibit a large heterogeneity. Despite a surge of interest in examining behavioral characteristics of narcissism in the past decades, the neurobiological substrates underlying narcissism remain poorly understood. Here, we addressed this issue by...

Although two previous studies have demonstrated that depressed individuals showed deficits in working memory (WM) updating of both negative and positive contents, the effects were confounded by shifting dysfunctions and the detailed neural mechanism associated with the failure in N-back task is not clear. Using a 2-back task, the current study exam...

In daily life, people often make consecutive decisions before the ultimate goal is reached (i.e., sequential decision-making). However, this kind of decision-making has been largely overlooked in the literature. The current study investigated whether behavioral preference would change during sequential decisions, and the neural processes underlying...

Individual self-construal (independent vs. interdependent) could be temporarily modulated by the priming effect. Our previous studies have found that when Chinese participants gambled for mother and for self, outcome feedback evoked comparable neural responses between two conditions. However, it remains unclear if the response to rewards for mother...

There is an ongoing debate about whether and how anxiety level affects behavioral performance in risk and/or ambiguous decision-making. According to the literature, we suggest that gender difference might be a confounding factor that has contributed to heterogeneous findings in previous studies. To examine this idea, 135 students who participated i...

Event-related potential (ERP) has the potential to reveal the temporal neurophysiological dynamics of risk decision-making, but this potential has not been fully explored in previous studies. When predicting risk decision with ERPs, most studies focus on between-trial analysis that reflects feedback learning, while within-trial analysis that could...

Background Previous studies of patients with social anxiety have demonstrated abnormal early processing of facial stimuli in social contexts. In other words, patients with social anxiety disorder (SAD) tend to exhibit enhanced early facial processing when compared to healthy controls. Few studies have examined the temporal electrophysiological even...

Previous research has revealed that incidental emotions of different valence (positive/negative/neutral) produce distinct impacts on risk decision-making. This study went on to compare the effects of different emotions of which the valence are identical. We focused on anger and fear, both of which are negative emotions but differ in motivational an...

Individual differences in dimensions of impulsivity personality including disinhibition and sensation seeking modulate approach responses to reinforcing stimuli, such as drugs and money. The current study examined the effects of monetary incentive on both behavioral performance and electrophysiological activity among individuals varying in disinhib...