news

[June 2025]

Congratulations to Ana Defendini for winning the best poster award at the NeuroPsychoEconomics conference in Dublin!

[May 2025]

Congratulations to Francesca Marsili for winning the first prize for her poster at the GREPACO conference!

[April 2025]

A warm welcome to Dr. Anita Tusche, Associate Professor at Queens University in Canada, who is visiting the lab for two months!

[April 2025]

Congratulations to Oriane Chene for the acceptance of her paper Social influence effects on food valuation generalize based on conceptual similarity in Appetite! Across three different studies we show that social influences on food choices generalize based on inferred, abstract social norms of how much healthiness is valued. 

[March 2024]

New preprint led by Dorukhan Açıl on BioRxiv, describing several new brain signatures for mentalizing and self- and other-related thought!

[December 2024]

Leonie Koban is honored to have been awarded the "Prix Achard-Médecine 2024" by the French National Academy of Medicine.

[November 2024]

Several new preprints are coming out from the lab this semester, including on generalization of social influence effects, led by Oriane Chene, and on developing a structural brain marker of impulsivity, led by Valérie Godefroy.

[August 2024]

Leonie Koban is giving a talk at the Gordon Research Conference Neurobiology of Addiction in Maine. She will speak about the development and validation of the Neurobiological Craving Signature and how it can be used as a brain target to evaluate the effects of social context on drug and food craving.

[May 2024]

Congratulations to Marie Falkenstein for publishing part of her PhD thesis work on microbiome effects on social decision-making! Now out in PNAS Nexus.

[September 2023]

Our new article on social learning biases in social anxiety disorder is now published in Translational Psychiatry. We show that people with social anxiety disorder have a negative learning bias for social influences on self-perception and state self-esteem. These behavioral effects are paralleled by less responses of the frontoparietal network to positive compared to negative social feedback. Our findings could help to explain the maintenance of the negative self-image and the low self-esteem that are characteristic of this condition.

[March 2023]

Delay discounting describes how much we prefer smaller sooner over larger later rewards and varies remarkable between people. High delay discounting has also been linked to obesity, substance use, and different psychiatry disorders. In a paper just published in Journal of Neuroscience, we show that we can predict these individual differences in delay discounting based on brain activity, across two different and completely independent studies. The k-marker weight map and code to apply it are available for testing on other datasets on Github.

[December 2022]

Out now in Nature Neuroscience: Our new paper (with Tor Wager and Hedy Kober) describes a new fMRI-based brain signature for drug and food craving--which we call the Neurobiological Craving Signature  or NCS.  Developed on the data of three previous studies and using a machine-learning approach, the NCS predicts the intensity of craving in independent participants and significantly distinguishes drug-users from non-users based on drug cues (but not food cues). See here for the paper and Github for the weight map and code to apply it to your data!

[August 2022]

We are hiring! The SOCIALCRAVING team will move to the CRNL in Lyon this November.  We are looking for one PhD student and one postdoctoral fellow to work on social context effects on food craving and health-related decision-making (funded by an ERC Starting Grant). Please see the job ads here and contact me by email with your application and/or questions. Expected starting date is early 2023 but flexible. Additional positions may open later next year, so please get in touch if you would be interested in joining the lab at a later point in time.

[January 2022]

I am happy to share the news that I have been awarded an ERC Starting Grant to investigate the brain mechanisms of social context effects on craving and dietary decision-making. I will be hiring students and postdocs soon, so please contact me, if you are interested.

[April 2021]

Check out our new review paper on the shared brain systems for mental and bodily health in Nature Reviews Neuroscience. We propose a new perspective of how vmPFC and other default mode regions of the brain construct 'self-in-context' models that guide decision-making and body regulation. 

[March 2021]

New preprint on BioRxiv: We use machine learning on fMRI data to predict individual differences in delay discounting.

[December 2020]

I am more than happy to announce that I have accepted a position as a CNRS researcher and PI in the Control-Interoception-Attention Team at ICM, which I will start in February 2021. Interested in working me? Feel free to contact me per email.

[May 2020]

Are you looking for reliable and practical information on Covid-19 and how to live with the pandemic? Check out adioscorona.org for evidence-based answers to your questions (in French, English and many other languages)! 

[February 2020]

Can we use brain imaging together with machine-learning to detect whether a person has caused harm to someone else? Check out our new paper on the brain-based prediction of guilt in Cerebral Cortex.

[September 2019]

Our new paper is now out in Nature Communications. We show large influences of social information (others' ratings) on behavioral, physiological, and brain responses to pain. The brain systems mediating those social effects are different from those mediating conditioned expectation effects.  A brief summary can be found here (ICM website).

[November 2018]

How can negative expectations become self-fulfilling prophecies and worsen pain? Marieke's paper came out a few days ago in Nature Human Behavior.

[October 2018]

I have made it back to Europe! I am excited to have obtained a PRESTIGE/Marie-Curie fellowship and to start a new postdoc position with Hilke Plassmann at INSEAD and ICM in Paris. 

[July 2018]

Wondering what brain patterns and multivariate signatures can contribute to neuroscience and psychology? Our review paper, led by Phil Kragel, is now published in Neuron. 

[May 2018]

How pain is transformed by prosocial meaning: Check out Marina's recent paper in Psychosomatic Medicine.

[November 2017]

What's in a word? How can instructions and social information change our experience of pain and emotion? Our review article is now published in a special issue on Instructions in Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews. 

[November 2017]

From walking hand in hand with your partner to enthusiastic applause after a great concert--people spontaneously synchronize their motor behavior (e.g., gait, clapping) with others all the time. But why does this happen? In our new paper, we argue for a fresh perspective on spontaneous synchronization, by linking it to computational mechanisms and the brain's optimization principle. 

[March 2017]

Can a fake (placebo) treatment change how you feel about a romantic breakup? Yes, it can! Check out our recent study demonstrating placebo effects on romantic rejection, published in the Journal of Neuroscience.  

[December 2016]

How do expectations, beliefs, and social context promote relief and healing? National Geographic Magazine featured our research in a great article on placebo effects, faith, and healing.

[November 2016]

I will be presenting in a nano-symposiums on Emotions at SfN in San Diego.

[April 2016]

Our symposium "How Expectations and Learning Shape the Experience of Aversive Stimuli: From Behavior to Brain Mechanisms" got accepted for ESCAN in Porto (June 23-26). See here for the full program.

[February 2016]

Our paper on social influences on pain is now published in Emotion. We show how social information can change both pain reports and physiological responses to heat pain.