Positive Psychiatry - with Rakesh Jain, MD

Complement Giving & Receiving: How Praise Rewires The Brain And Strengthens Bonds

• Rakesh Jain, MD

Share episode

A few well-chosen words can do more than lift a mood—they can change a brain. We dive into the neuroscience of compliments and show how authentic praise activates the same reward circuitry that responds to money and novelty, while empty flattery leaves those circuits cold. Drawing on recent fMRI and EEG research, we unpack why sincerity matters biologically, how the ventral striatum and vmPFC evaluate credibility, and what happens when dopamine lowers prediction error and lets new learning take root.

From the receiver’s side, we trace the path from auditory decoding to valuation, salience detection, and identity encoding. Precise, earned compliments don’t just feel good; they strengthen memory consolidation and shape self-belief in lasting ways. We also explore the roles of oxytocin, serotonin, and endogenous opioids in trust, social warmth, and stress regulation, revealing how praise functions as a microdose of safety and belonging in a threat-heavy world.

Givers aren’t left out. Naturalistic studies show that offering a sincere compliment activates reward and empathy networks in the giver, creating a vicarious boost that enhances connection and well-being. To turn science into practice, we share three rules for high-impact compliments: be precise, link to values and effort, and keep it earned and truthful. Walk away with a simple habit—one sincere compliment a day—that can transform relationships, culture, and mental health from the inside out.


www.JainUplift.com

Rakesh Jain, MD, MPH:

Well, hello and welcome to this next episode of Positive Psychiatry with Rakesh Jan. Welcome. And today we're going to talk about compliments. Yes, we're going to examine compliments as a social reward and its neurobiology, both of giving and receiving praise and compliments. So this is Rakesh Jan, and again, hello and welcome. And I'm really glad you're here. And today we're going to talk about something that may seem small, probably even trivial. Compliments. What are compliments, if not a few words, a moment of appreciation, a sentence we often rush past? And yet, modern neuroscience tells us that compliments are anything but small. They in fact shape our brains. They change our neurochemistry. They influence learning, motivation, bonding, and mental health. So today we will go on in a deep dive, deep dive into the neurobiology of giving and receiving compliments. And no, I don't intend to cover this from a pop psychology perspective, nor as feel-good slogans, but really as real neuroscience, looking at human studies, looking at functional imaging data, behavioral data. And together we will explore what happens in the brain when we receive a compliment, and what happens to the brain when we give a compliment, why sincerity matters biologically, which neurotransmitters are involved, and why compliments may be one of the most underused wellness tools in modern psychiatry. You see, compliments are positive psychiatry in action. So let's begin. And today's episode is going to feel perhaps a bit simple on the surface, but deep underneath it, a compliment really is so much more than words, it is literally changing of the human brain. So this social information that we convey through a compliment, in fact, really changes the human brain. But before we go into this deep dive, I really want to talk about why sincerity matters. This is a really critical point because the human brain is very good at detecting authenticity. And we have neuroimaging studies that compare sincere praise to mere flattery. And you know what it shows? That genuine praise produces greater activation in the nucleus accumbance. That one part of the human brain, literally designed to feel goodness, to feel pleasure. But you know what? Flattery does not activate nucleus accumbance. Why is this? Well, because sincerity increases predictive reliability. And the brain, the human brain really trusts real signals. In fact, insincere praise, false praise, triggers a weaker reward response and different cortical patterns. And even EEG studies confirm this. So unreliable, positive feedback produces this significantly weaker neural engagement. And our brain asks, is this real? Is this earned? And if the answer is no, the reward circuits in fact disengage. And this really has enormous implications for our social interactions, even therapy and leadership and parenting and relationships. So praise when it's offered, a compliment when it's offered, really should be specific. It should be earned. It should be sincere. Otherwise, the brain simply doesn't buy it. So we're going to break this conversation in a few minutes into how the brain receives a compliment, gives a compliment, what circuits are engaged, what computational changes happen in the brain, how neuromodulators shift, and why sincere praise is what we are looking for. As I said before, this is positive psychiatry in action. So let's start with a foundational idea in social neuroscience. We know that the brain uses a common valuation architecture to kind of figure out, to compute reward values across domains like food and money and novelty seeking, social approval, different inputs, but they all have overlapping neural circuitry. Well, this is why studies, so many studies, show that the human striatum responds really well to both monetary reward, but also social reward. There's a classic paper by Izuma and colleagues that involved the Nohiro Sadatu group, showed that the social reward and monetary reward circuits overlap in the human striatum, supporting this notion of, let's call it, common neural currency. So when someone compliments us, our brain is not merely understanding language. It's trying to look for a meaning to it. The brain, in fact, runs a reward computation. What it's doing is it's trying to listen, but also create a value to what it listened to. It's looking for precision. It's also doing prediction error. It's trying to make sure what it heard is correct. It then looks for social relevance to the complement, and then the identity is impacted. We start believing the compliment that's offered to us. And what it does, it updates future behavior based on that computation. So a compliment from a neurobiological perspective is very effectively a reward and reinforcement learning signal. So now we're going to shift our conversation just a tiny bit to receiving a compliment and how that affects the circuits and computations in the human brain. So let's go inside the brain of a receiver. So what happens is as follows Step one, there is sensory decoding. So what happens is, of course, our ears hear it, but the ears transmit that to the auditory part of our brain. So that's called the primary auditory cortex, the superior temporal gyrus, which is a part of our brain right above our ears that's engaged, but that's just the gateway. The question is, how does that complement that the brain heard convert into a reward system? So that's when step two comes in. Valuation and social meaning. Now the brain must decide: is this information valuable? Is it correct? Do I believe it? And if I believe it, how am I am I going to make sense out of it? Well, this engages a very different part of the human brain. So this part that we just discussed, the nucleus accumbens, which is a member of the ventral stritum, lights up. The ventral medial prefrontal cortex, that is the part of the brain that lives just above our eye socket. That gets pulled in. That part of the brain is the scanner of the human brain. It's literally the radar looking for threat, but it's also looking for pleasure. And what happens is the connectivity this part of the brain has to another network in the brain called salience network is activated. And that's when the magic begins. Because when salience network, and the word tells us all, right? Salience, it's looking for meaning. When that gets activated, the social reward paradigms in the human brain, they get all fired up. So what happens is this now gets coded into anticipated reward, received reward, and it reduces the prediction error. So then interpretations happen. A compliment that is heard by the person is transformed into a reward state. Isn't that terrific? But hold on, a third step happens then, because now dopamine gets pulled in. So let's have a quick conversation about neurotransmitters. So the stridum is just not a region, it's also a computational hub heavily shaped by dopaminergic input, dopamine, that one neurotransmitter we associated with joy. But it does so much more than that. It also helps us appreciate what we are in fact hearing is indeed a compliment. And then what it does, dopamine, is takes the message up to the ventral tegmental area. Who cares? You're wondering. Well, it matters because this is connected to the reward learning. When reward is better than expected, which is what a compliment is, think about it. A compliment is often unexpected, sudden to the person listening. And if dopamine rises, then look what happens. The person's watchfulness goes down, and the compliment is heard as a pleasurable input, as an instructive input, and it teaches the brain what it hears when that happens is, oh my gosh, I got appreciated, and that often changes what comes in step four. And step four is self-relevance and identity encoding. So a compliment can in fact change our identity. So compliments aren't just good. When they're heard by the person in the right context, they can in fact change our identity. So perhaps we can use an example. If you have a five-year-old kid who is dancing in the living room, and the parents were to say, Oh my gosh, you are such a wonderful dancer. Through all the steps that I just mentioned to you, the child starts believing. It becomes encoded in them that they have the confidence to start identifying themselves as a good dancer. Now, this doesn't just apply to four-year-old children. It applies to people who are 40 or 60 or 80 or even 100 years old. So the brain circuits, the brain circuits, self-related networks that we just talked about, that's the salience network, is really important because what it does is creates a new autobiographical self. And this matters clinically. But do you see what kicked this all off? Compliments. Now hopefully you're seeing why on this positive psychiatry podcast we're talking about compliments. Of course, in a few minutes, we're going to turn our attention to how do we actually offer compliments in a manner that is very useful to the person. But now we ought to really appreciate in this section of our conversation why praise can improve learning and consolidation of our belief systems. So as we go deeper, a compliment doesn't just alter our mood in the moment. It actually alters our memory consolidation. And that is a gift worth receiving constantly. So praise enhances our self-perception, not just as we heard it or as we remember it, but even unconsciously, subconsciously going forward. The human neurobiology literally changes when we become used to and we are the recipient of regular appropriate praises. Dopamine is not the only neurotransmitter involved here, norepinephrine is also pulled in. And that creates literally a memory tag. And that memory tag can life a lifetime. So if someone has received criticism about, let's just go with the dancing example I gave you before. If someone at four or at 40 repeatedly hears you're not a good dancer, that becomes a permanent memory tag and it becomes an identity of the person. But a compliment by definition is the conveyance of something positive about yourself. And the brain prioritizes that learning. And that is why compliments and praise can change behavior, not just over time, but change it in a manner that it is permanent. So the take-home message for us is compliments are reinforcement learning, and the brain does consolidation. Okay, now let's talk about sincerity versus flattery. And the human brain is really good at detecting the differences between them. So this is a subtle but essential point. The human brain is not naive. Even a three or four-year-old child's brain is not naive. It just doesn't accept all compliments. It actually assesses for credibility, believability, and that's why sincerity matters. So those of us who want to learn the art of offering compliments must appreciate it's better to offer no compliments than to offer a compliment that is mere flattery and not believable. We end up doing damage. We don't end up helping people. There is, in fact, a 2023 fMRI study by Fujiwara and colleagues that compared sincere praise to flattery. And this is what they found. They found differences in reward-related responses, particularly in the nucleus accumbens activity. And this is consistent with the idea that reliable positive feedback is processed as rewarding, and that unreliable positive feedback may in fact be damaging. Isn't that a profoundly important point? So, no, let's be very cautious about not offering reinforcement and compliments, even to our own children, to our own family members, or to our patients, or to our friends, or to our colleagues that we don't mean. We could actually end up doing more damage. The brain is a very high-powered predictive machine. And if it starts predicting words coming out of our mouths as not to be trusted, the damage can be very long-lasting. So it's quite important that we one more time emphasize that there is an art and a skill set in offering praise. Now, how do we do that? How do we do that? Well, we're going to cover that in some detail, but we need to remember the following three rules. We should be specific in what we are offering compliment about. It should not be based on contingency that I'll only say this because I want this. And it should be precise. So it can't just be I like you. It really has to be more like I like this about you because this is the benefit that occurs from it. This is the emotion that happens from it. Does create a strong neurobiological impact in the person receiving the impact? Now we talked a lot about, you know, hearing and receiving compliments. What we haven't done much until right now is talking about giving a compliment. What does that do? Is this a one-way street? Is the only person benefiting from this the person who's receiving the compliment? Or is even giving a compliment itself a powerful, neurobiologically effective, psychologically beneficial activity? And here's the answer. Giving a compliment, in fact, does this. It improves our pro-social brain, it gives us a reward. We feel greater empathy, and we feel connected to the person we just gave a compliment to. So now let's shift to the giver. What happens when we give a compliment? And this is where modern science and neuroscience get really exciting. This is a 2023, so pretty recent study by Extine and colleagues that used a beautiful method. This is what they did. They looked at couples sending and receiving compliments in a more naturalistic setting. And they conducted neural analyses to show what happens. And what happened is reward circuitry engaged in the exact areas that we talked about, the ventral stritidum, which is where the nuclear succumbers lives. And you would have thought, yeah, we already know that. But the truth here was both giving and receiving compliments did almost exactly the same thing. So yes, it sure feels good to receive compliments, but here is such a gem of information that I've garnered as I've started learning about this area of inquiry, is giving a compliment also does this, not just during the activity, but even after. So giving a compliment is a pro-social action. It improves our own brain, the giver's brain's reward system. And that's beautiful in so many ways. So humans show reward related activation when they donate, when they call Cooperate when they help family, when they engage in social bonding. And complimenting in many ways is literally a microdose of pro-social activity. You might want to think about giving a compliment as a vicarious reward mechanism. So even though you aren't the recipient of the compliment you just gave, you're in fact the giver of the compliment, please remember you are a receiver of this reward. It's a vicarious reward. It has been well documented that when you give a compliment, you don't just stimulate the receiver's internal state. But what happens is we ourselves, in our medial prefrontal cortex, in our own superior temporal sulcus, these are brain regions that are well known for giving us wellness. They are activated too. So the take-home message really is compliments are a genuine two-way street, whether you give it or you receive it. You're in for a positive experience. Okay, folks, I want to talk a little bit more about neuromodulators, and I want to focus on dopamine and oxytocin and serotonin and opioids. Yes, our own internal opioids and the stress system. So let's go full neurochemistry if you're okay with it. But this is such a cool topic. I really think we will together have a good time exploring it. So dopamine is central to the act of giving and receiving compliments. That much we know. But just be careful not to make the mistake I used to, which is to think of dopamine only as a pleasure neurotransmitter. Oh, not so. It's also a very soothing neurotransmitter that's involved in learning and motivation and salience. And you got it, also for looking for salience and predictive errors. So it complements things like reward circuitry, especially if I believe, if I genuinely believe the compliment that's given to me, then it activates my reward circuitry. But hold on, there's more. Oxytocin. Now, oxytocin is often oversimplified as a love hormone. It is, it is, but you know what else oxytocin does? It's also a social salience detector and a bonding elevator. It's a bonding modulator. It interacts with a reward circuitry. And in us humans, oxytocin can modulate trust and attachment and perceived value of social cues. So giving a compliment, especially, but interestingly, I was about to say, especially from close people, but even complete strangers, it's amplified through the oxytocin-driven system. So I can, even if I received a compliment from a complete stranger who I'll never see again, very likely to have long-term, potentially permanent changes in my salience and reward networks. So that is deeply involved. And so is serotonin. Serotonin is so much more than mood stability and impulse control. It actually is modulated quite strongly, even in systems that give me positive salience, such as compliments. And what about opioids? We have endogenous opioids. My goodness, we do. We were born with it, we use it, and this is often a missing conversation from public discussions, but let's not do that. Our endogenous opioids give us social warmth, attachment, and this feeling of being soothed and comforted and happy in our own skin. Social connections that are enhanced through complement receiving and compliment giving, they can actually recruit these receptors that we call the mu opioid receptors. They're not just involved in pain, they also reduce human distress. So, yeah, giving compliments activates that. On top of that, our stress system and the HPA access, we now have data that people who give and receive compliments authentically, they have a better functioning HPA access system. So compliments are just not psychological transactions between human beings. They're in fact rewards, and they're regulators of threat physiology. So now, why don't we spend a few minutes talking about the receiver versus the giver? And let's kind of look at it in a deeper fashion. I think it's time now for us to take all that we have learned together and convert that into something very practical. How do we, in fact, both learn and teach the art of giving and receiving compliments? And this lands us in the in the beautiful world of positive psychiatry. Because if compliments are social rewards, then we can use them, not as flattery, not as manipulation, but in many ways as high precision reinforcement signals. And there are three neurobiological rules I would propose that we ought to follow. Here we go. Rule number one let's make compliments highly precise. So what do I mean by that? So if we're designing a compliment in our minds before we deliver it, ask ourselves Am I specific? What exactly am I telling the person that I admire? Two, make it contingent. It's gotta connect to something. Three, make it real. Make it real. If you don't feel something in your heart, in your mind that the person really does something remarkably well or whatever, it's better not to actually offer it. So let's make sure that compliment is earned. And the fourth, cannot overemphasize this point, it's gotta be truthful, specific, contingent, earned, truthful. This kind of high precision thinking, this kind of high precision designing of the compliment will profoundly improve the impact of the compliment we are giving. Okay, here's rule number two. Let's link this compliment to values and effort. So we should reward the process and the meaning, and that's how we shape durable neural learning. This one, you may want to give it some thought. What exactly are we praising? Is it is it someone's ability to do something very well? Are we praising their ability to self-sacrifice? Are we talking about a trait that we very much like? Whatever it is, it should be brief, it should be highly understandable, and of course, it should be genuinely authentic. Genuinely authentic. Here's rule number three. We should literally learn, this is for the given now. We should start thinking about do I compliment people often enough? Do I hold those thoughts in my mind, or do I in fact deliver the compliment? I'll speak for myself, folks. I am just learning the art. I'm just learning the art of giving compliments. I'm pretty good about receiving compliments. I guess most of us are, but I'm not as good at giving compliments, but I'm learning. And I think that effort that I'm choosing to put into that activity is going to be beneficial, not just to me, but to others as well. But why should we do that? So let's talk about this. And the reason is because giving compliments activates reward systems, it activates empathy networks, it activates greater bonding. It's like a behavioral intervention with neurochemical consequences. And in this world that we live in that's saturated with threats, compliments can serve really as microdoses of safety and belonging and reinforcement. Colleagues, I'm not being sentimental. I'm actually relying on positive psychiatry neuroscience. That's why today I wanted to spend some time talking about both enhancing our skill set at receiving compliments. We should do it with a smile on our face and a thank you on our lips. But quite importantly, we have to learn the art of delivering compliments. Perhaps even one precise, sincere compliment delivered per day. You know, that is magic. That's like watching two human brains change. Of course, it's the other person who you delivered the compliment to, something really important happened in them. But by the same token, something important happened to us too. So thanks, my dear friends, for allowing me to have this brief opportunity to connect with you on this issue of compliment giving. I think this is one of the hidden gems of the world of positive psychiatry. And I very much look forward to connecting with you again soon.

Contributor

Rakesh Jain, MD

Host