The Use of Neuroeconomic Games to Examine Social Decision Making in Child and Adolescent Externalizing Disorders

Abstract

Neuroeconomics is a new, interdisciplinary field in which economics, psychology, computational science, and neuroscience converge to allow for examinations of the neural basis of reward-related decision making in social and nonsocial contexts. The aims of this paper are, first, to discuss recent advances in the use of neuroeconomic games to examine social decision making in children and adolescents with externalizing behavior disorders, as an alternative to approaches based on Social Information Processing theory and Theory of Mind; and, second, to summarize the potential neuroeconomics holds for the study of social decision making in populations with externalizing (and other) disorders.