Brain structure correlates of expected social threat and reward

Abstract

Prospection (mentally simulating future events) generates emotionally-charged mental images that guide social decision-making. Positive and negative social expectancies—imagining new social interactions to be rewarding versus threatening—are core components of social approach and avoidance motivation, respectively. Interindividual differences in such positive and negative future-related cognitions may be underpinned by distinct neuroanatomical substrates. Here, we asked 100 healthy adults to vividly imagine themselves in a novel self-relevant event that was ambiguous with regards to possible social acceptance or rejection. During this task we measured participants’ expectancies for social reward (anticipated feelings of social connection) or threat (anticipated feelings of rejection). On a separate day they underwent structural MRI; voxel-based morphometry was used to explore the relation between social reward and threat expectancies and regional grey matter volumes (rGMV). Increased rGMV in key default-network regions involved in prospection, socio-emotional cognition, and subjective valuation, including ventromedial prefrontal cortex, correlated with both higher social reward and lower social threat expectancies. In contrast, social threat expectancies uniquely correlated with rGMV of regions involved in social attention (posterior superior temporal sulcus, pSTS) and interoception (somatosensory cortex). These findings provide novel insight into the neurobiology of future-oriented cognitive-affective processes critical to adaptive social functioning.

Extended‐amygdala intrinsic functional connectivity networks: A population study

“…This largely cortical sensory-motor connectivity is consistent with the suggestion that the ExtA serves as an integrator of sensory information, which can then prepare the motor and endocrine systems to act according to the emotional salience and threatrelevance of the stimuli (Ahrens et al, 2018;Goode & Maren, 2017;Lebow & Chen, 2016). Our finding of iFC with frontal regions, in particular the mPFC, is consistent with non-human primate neural tracer studies and human structural imaging work demonstrating direct structural connectivity with both the amygdala and BST (Chiba, Kayahara, & Nakano, 2001;Crawford, Muhlert, MacDonald, & Lawrence, 2020;Folloni et al, 2019;Krüger, Shiozawa, Kreifelts, Scheffler, & Ethofer, 2015); a finding coherent with theories of emotion regulation (e.g., Banks, Eddy, Angstadt, Nathan, & Phan, 2007;Fox et al, 2010).…”

Psychological Dimensions Relevant to Motivation and Pleasure in Schizophrenia

“…Though little is known about how people with schizophrenia make sense of social acceptance (or rejection) experiences, studies suggest they anticipate less pleasure for future positive social interactions ( Engel et al, 2016 ; Campellone and Kring, 2018 ); although we note that people with schizophrenia still learn from positive social interactions and anticipate more pleasure for subsequent interactions with the same people ( Campellone and Kring, 2018 ). In the general population, individuals with higher social reward sensitivity exhibit a positive social memory bias ( Strachman and Gable, 2006 ), and have greater regional gray matter volume in prospection and valuation brain areas, including the ventromedial prefrontal cortex ( Crawford et al, 2020 ). Consequently, social prospection and memory abilities may play a role in social reward sensitivity and social pleasure expectancies.…”

The Elusive Phenotype of Preadolescent Suicidal Thoughts and Behaviors: Can Neuroimaging Deliver on Its Promise?

“…A conventional neurofunctional interpretation of the region does not lend itself to extant theories of suicide, as the region is mostly associated with language. There is, however, a growing body of functional and structural literature that also links the region's function to social cognition (6,7). To provide a more comprehensive overview of the region's functional role, we performed a decoding analysis using the BrainMap database implemented in Mango software (http://ric.uthscsa.edu/mango) (8).…”