Project Summary The focus of this proposal is a 3-year training plan that will allow me to build on my prior research on the cognitive neuroscience of empathy and altruism to take a neuroeconomic approach to understanding excessively selfish social preferences. Supervised by experts in neuroeconomics (Dr. Kable) and transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) (Dr. Oathes), I will examine how deficits in affective and cognitive empathy may independently contribute to selfish behavior, at both the behavioral and neural levels. Clinical disorders including psychopathy and narcissism are characterized by empathic deficits and pathological selfishness, in which social choices are abnormally self-interested. Further, affective and cognitive empathy have been found to be dissociable behaviorally and neurally. The proposed research will build on these findings in several important ways. First, behavioral modeling approaches common in neuroeconomics will be used to quantify selfish social preferences and examine how both decreased generosity and decreased advantageous inequity aversion are associated with empathic deficits. Second, advanced cognitive neuroscience methods will be used to examine how affective and cognitive empathy networks independently contribute to selfishness. This will be accomplished through both individual-level cross-task decoding via multivoxel pattern analysis and the use of TMS to disrupt neural activation to causally implicate neural regions in selfish behavior. Across three research aims, a modified dictator game (DG) will be utilized to quantify both generosity and inequity aversion. The first aim is to characterize excessive selfishness behaviorally through the use of economic paradigms and trait self-report questionnaires. It is expected that highly selfish individuals will have lower trait empathy and higher levels of psychopathic and narcissistic traits. The second aim is to characterize excessive selfishness neurally through the use of functional magnetic resonance imaging during social preference choices and empathic processing. It is hypothesized that individual variation in selfish behavior in the DG will be independently predicted by decreased expression of brain-wide multivariate patterns associated with affective and cognitive empathy, centered on anterior insula (AI) and temporoparietal junction (TPJ). The third aim is to examine the causal roles of the AI and TPJ in social preferences through the use of brain stimulation. Through the use of TMS, we can disrupt neural processing in these regions, thus allowing for causal inference about the roles of these regions in selfishness. It is expected that disrupting neural activation in the TPJ will cause an increase in selfish behavior in the DG via the disruption of cognitive empathy, while indirect disruption of the AI will cause an increase in selfish behavior via disruption of affective empathy. Better computational understanding of ho...