Neural substrates for anticipation and consumption of social and monetary incentives in depression

Abstract

Depression has been reliably associated with abnormalities in the neural representation of reward and loss. However, most studies have focused on monetary incentives; fewer studies have considered neural representation of social incentives. A direct comparison of non-social and social incentives within the same study would establish whether responses to the different incentives are differentially affected in depression. The functional magnetic resonance imaging study presented here investigated the neural activity of individuals with subthreshold depression (SD) and healthy controls (HCs) while they participated in an incentive delay task offering two types of reward (monetary gain vs social approval) and loss (monetary loss vs social disapproval). Compared to HCs, individuals with SD showed increased subgenual anterior cingulate cortex (sgACC) activity during anticipation of social loss, whereas the response in the putamen was decreased during consumption of social gain. Individuals with SD also exhibited diminished insula responses in consuming social loss. Furthermore, positive connectivity between the insula and ventral lateral pre-frontal cortex (VLPFC) was observed in individuals with SD while negative connectivity was found in HCs when consuming social loss. These results demonstrate neural alterations in individuals with depression, specific to the processing of social incentives, mainly characterised by dysfunction within the ‘social pain network’ (sgACC, insula and VLPFC).

Mapping social reward and punishment processing in the human brain: A voxel-based meta-analysis of neuroimaging findings using the Social Incentive Delay task

“…Fourth, the cut-off date the studies that were included in our meta-analyses were identified was about 2 years ago, which raises the question of whether our meta-analyses might be missing a considerable number of fMRI studies using the SID task published in the past 2 years. To address this concern, we conducted a new literature search on 17/04/2020 which identified only a single study meeting our inclusion/exclusion criteria (He et al, 2019). We are thus confident that our metaanalyses still represent the vast majority of the published studies in this field.…”

Pain and social decision-making: New insights from the social framing effect

“…It remains undetermined if a unified neural mechanism underlies both social and nonsocial decision-making. Many researchers believe that regardless of whether a social component is involved, different kinds of decision-making are driven by identical neural value computations and corresponding brain processes [84,[97][98][99]. For example, the ventral striatum (a key node within the dopaminergic midbrain system) is sensitive to both monetary reward and social approval [100].…”

Sex differences in neural responses to reward and the influences of individual reward and punishment sensitivity

“…The latter findings highlighted complex effects of individual reward sensitivity on cognitive performance incentivized by monetary reward. Investigators have also associated sensitivity to punishment with higher insula activity during feedback of social loss in a social incentive delay task in people with subthreshold depression [ 44 ]. On the other hand, despite its wide use in the imaging literature, no studies of the monetary incentive delay task (MIDT) have examined how neural responses to monetary wins or losses may vary with individual sensitivity to reward or to punishment.…”