Neurocomputational Dynamics of Cooperation (COBRA)

The purpose of this study is to understand brain function, how people make decisions when they interact with others, and how brain function and behavior relate to personality traits.

Study Overview

• Status: Not yet recruiting
• Conditions: Mental Health; Social Cognition; Personality Disorder; Interpersonal Conflict
• Intervention / Treatment: Behavioral: Social Learning Task Battery, Online Cohort; Behavioral: Social Learning Task Battery, Clinical Cohort

Detailed Description

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. Prior work by the investigators 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. The investigators 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 track behaviorally salient features of the social environment, are integrated in the posterior hub of the default network (DN) where they drive adaptive cooperation. This study proposes to test these hypotheses in two samples elevated on antagonism. At the behavioral level, participants are characterized using a battery of personality and psychopathology measures, social and reward-based decision-making tasks, and corresponding hierarchically estimated reinforcement learning (RL) models (Aim 1). In a model-based functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study, model-derived learning signals and facets of antagonism are linked to underlying neural activity during cooperative decision-making (Aim 2). Leveraging the multi-timescale design of our study, the investigators plan to relate neurocomputational signatures of callousness and exploitativeness to mentalizing abilities, multi-informant reports of momentary interpersonal behavior, and prospective stress generation. Certain elements of study design are withheld from this record to protect the scientific integrity of the study design.

• Study Type: Interventional
• Enrollment (Estimated): 1612
• Phase: Not Applicable

Contacts and Locations

• Study Contact: Name: Michelle M Berry, MPS; Phone Number: 424-380-1194; Email: berrymic@pitt.edu
• Study Contact Backup: Name: Amanda Collier, BS; Phone Number: 412-901-2938; Email: collieral@upmc.edu

Study Locations

• United States
  • Pennsylvania
    • Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States, 15213
      • University of Pittsburgh, Bellefield Towers
      • Contact: Michelle M Berry, MPS; Phone Number: 424-380-1194; Email: berrymic@pitt.edu
      • Contact: Amanda Collier, BS; Phone Number: 412-901-2938; Email: collieral@upmc.edu
      • Principal Investigator: Timothy A Allen, PhD
      • Sub-Investigator: Alexandre Dombrovski, MD

Participation Criteria

Eligibility Criteria

• Ages Eligible for Study: Adult; Older Adult
• Accepts Healthy Volunteers: Yes

Description

Online cohort inclusion criteria:

• English fluency
• US residency
• Owner of a desktop or laptop computer
• Adult aged 18-100

Online cohort exclusion criteria:

• Participants who have participated in an earlier version of the study
• Inability to consent
• Self-reported history of neurological disorder or brain damage
• Self-endorsed history of psychosis or mania

Clinical cohort inclusion criteria:

• Adult aged 20-60 years old
• English fluency
• Owner of a smartphone with celluar data

Clinical cohort exclusion criteria:

• Inability to consent
• Self-reported history of neurological disorder or brain damage
• Clinician-rated psychosis or mania in the last 6 months
• Current intoxication or withdrawal
• Estimated IQ < 70
• fMRI safety concerns
• Pregnancy
• Lack of stable psychiatric treatment (e.g., medication dosage, therapy modality) for the previous two months

Informant inclusion criteria:

• Adult aged 18+ years old
• English fluency
• Owner of a smartphone with celluar data
• Must have 4+ interactions/week with the participant for at least 6 months prior to study baseline

Informant exclusion criteria:

- Lack of a smartphone with cellular data at study baseline

Study Plan

How is the study designed?

Design Details

• Primary Purpose: Basic Science
• Allocation: Non-Randomized
• Interventional Model: Parallel Assignment
• Masking: None (Open Label)

Number of Arms

3

Arms and Interventions

Participant Group / Arm	Intervention / Treatment
Experimental: Online Cohort; The online cohort will include 718 adults ages 18-100 who will complete 1) a battery of behavioral tasks designed to assess social learning and mentalizing abilities, and 2) self-report measures assessing personality, externalizing symptoms, interpersonal functioning, and psychopathology.	Behavioral: Social Learning Task Battery, Online Cohort; In the primary study task, participants engage in a modified iterative trust game. Participant choices earn feedback in the form of monetary gains or losses. All participants are debriefed on the motivation behind study task at the end of their visit.
Experimental: Clinical Cohort; The study will enroll up to 416 clinical-cohort participants, with an anticipated final eligible sample of 239 adults ages 20-60 who will complete 1) a structured clinical interview and neuropsychological assessments, 2) self-report measures assessing personality, externalizing symptoms, interpersonal functioning, and psychopathology, 3) lab-based tasks designed to assess social learning and mentalizing abilities while monitoring physiological responding with Biopac, 4) task-based fMRI, 5) 21-day ecological momentary assessment (EMA) protocol, and 6) additional self-report questionnaires at three yearly follow-ups. The investigators expect to enroll 416 participants for the start of the protocol to yield 239 final eligible participants to complete fMRI and EMA.	Behavioral: Social Learning Task Battery, Clinical Cohort; In the primary study task, participants engage in a modified iterative trust game. The task is completed in the fMRI scanner and takes about 35 minutes. Participant choices earn feedback in the form of monetary gains or losses. All participants are debriefed on the motivation behind the task at the end of their visit.
No Intervention: Informants; Additionally, 2 informants (ages 18+) for each participant will be recruited to complete self-report measures, one of whom will also enroll in EMA.

What is the study measuring?

Primary Outcome Measures

Outcome Measure	Measure Description	Time Frame
Participant-level Coaxing Score	Participant coaxing behavior will be measured during the primary social learning task. Coaxing will be operationalized as the difference in the participant's return rate between exchange and secrecy modes on trials in which the coplayer decides not to share. In exchange mode, the participant knows whether the coplayer chose to share or keep the monetary incentive before indicating whether they would return it. In secrecy mode, the participant must make the return decision before learning the coplayer's choice. The coaxing score is calculated as the exchange-mode return rate minus the secrecy-mode return rate. Scores range from -1 to 1, with positive values indicating greater strategic coaxing and 0 indicating no difference between modes.	During behavioral task visit at study baseline (clinical cohort) or during single online study session (online cohort)

Secondary Outcome Measures

Outcome Measure	Measure Description	Time Frame
Mean Informant-rated Momentary Manipulativeness	Manipulativeness will be assessed using the study-specific Interpersonal Dynamics EMA Battery. The informant-rated manipulativeness scale contains 3 items, each rated from 1 ("strongly disagree") to 5 ("strongly agree"). At each assessment, responses to the 3 items will be averaged to produce a momentary manipulativeness score that ranges from 1 to 5. Higher scores indicate greater informant-rated manipulativeness.	Post-baseline 21-day EMA period within year 1 of the study
Latent Mentalizing Factor	A latent mentalizing factor will be derived using CFA, with participants' scores on three social cognition tasks serving as indicators. The latent factor will be standardized to a mean of 0 and standard deviation of 1 in the study sample and therefore has no fixed theoretical minimum or maximum. Higher factor scores indicate greater mentalizing ability.	Baseline
Interpersonal Stress	Interpersonal stress will be assessed using the marital- or partner-relationship and other-relationship life domains of the Stress and Adversity Inventory for Adults. At each follow-up, the frequency scores for stressors in these two domains will be averaged to produce an interpersonal stress score. The score ranges from a minimum of 0 stressors, with no limit on reported stressor maximums. Higher scores indicate more frequent exposure to interpersonal relationship stressors.	At 12, 24, and 36 months after baseline

Collaborators and Investigators

• Sponsor: University of Pittsburgh
• Collaborators: National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH); Emory University; University of Pittsburgh Medical Center
• Investigators: Principal Investigator: Timothy A Allen, PhD, University of Pittsburgh

Study record dates

Study Major Dates

• Study Start (Estimated): September 1, 2026
• Primary Completion (Estimated): June 30, 2031
• Study Completion (Estimated): June 30, 2031

Study Registration Dates

• First Submitted: August 6, 2026
• First Submitted That Met QC Criteria: August 6, 2026
• First Posted (Actual): August 12, 2026

Study Record Updates

• Last Update Posted (Actual): August 12, 2026
• Last Update Submitted That Met QC Criteria: August 6, 2026
• Last Verified: August 1, 2026

More Information

Terms related to this study

• Keywords: Mental Health; fMRI; Neuroimaging; Longitudinal; Self-report; Ecological Momentary Assessment; Multi-informant EMA; Informant; Multi-method
• Additional Relevant MeSH Terms: Mental Disorders; Behavior; Personal Satisfaction; Personality Disorders; Psychological Well-Being
• Other Study ID Numbers: STUDY25050217; R01MH140901 (U.S. NIH Grant/Contract)

Plan for Individual participant data (IPD)

• Plan to Share Individual Participant Data (IPD)?: YES

IPD Plan Description

Individual participant data (IPD) will be shared via the National Institute of Mental Health Data Archive (NDA) in accordance with National Institutes of Health (NIH) Data Management and Sharing Policy. Data will be de-identified and made available to qualified researchers upon request after publication of primary results or completion of the study, as outlined in the NIH-approved Data Sharing Plan.

Task code will be posted on GitHub and/or OSF.

IPD Sharing Time Frame

All data will be deposited to NDA starting 12 months after the award begins and will be deposited every six months thereafter following the usual NDA data submission dates.

IPD and supporting information will be available when the award ends (anticipated 06/30/2031). NDA will make decisions about how long to preserve the data, but that data archive has not deleted any deposited data up to now.

IPD Sharing Access Criteria

Deidentified data will be findable for the research community through the NDA Collection that will be established when this application is funded. For all publications, an NDA study will be created. Each of those studies is assigned a digital object identifier (DOI). This data DOI will be referenced in the publication to allow the research community easy access to the exact data used in the publication.

To request access to the data, qualified researchers will use the standard processes at NDA, and the NDA Data Access Committee will decide which requests to grant. The standard NDA data access process allows access for one year and is renewable.

• IPD Sharing Supporting Information Type: ANALYTIC_CODE

Drug and device information, study documents

• Studies a U.S. FDA-regulated drug product: No
• Studies a U.S. FDA-regulated device product: No