Social Craving

Prediction Error

Expected Value

Details

These simulations characterize social craving as a latent state driven by social cues and expectation violations and regulated around a person-specific setpoint (Rhoads et al., 2026).

\[ \begin{aligned} cr_{t+1} &= cr_{t} - \kappa \cdot (cr_{t} - cr_{setpoint}) \\ &\quad + w_{cue} \cdot cue_{t} + w_{\delta} \cdot \delta_{t} \\ rating_{t} &= \mathcal{N}\big(cr_{t},\,\sigma\big) \end{aligned} \]

Task setup:

• 4 blocks of 16 trials (64 trials total)
• Craving ratings are sparsely sampled every 2-3 trials
• Expected value panel shows the expected value of the better option (75% chance social cue) minus the expected value for the worse option (25% chance social cue)