Brain connectivity dynamics during social interaction reflect social network structure

Abstract

Social ties are crucial for humans. Disruption of ties through social exclusion has a marked effect on our thoughts and feelings; however, such effects can be tempered by broader social network resources. Here, we use fMRI data acquired from 80 male adolescents to investigate how social exclusion modulates functional connectivity within and across brain networks involved in social pain and understanding the mental states of others (i.e., mentalizing). Furthermore, using objectively logged friendship network data, we examine how individual variability in brain reactivity to social exclusion relates to the density of participants' friendship networks, an important aspect of social network structure. We find increased connectivity within a set of regions previously identified as a mentalizing system during exclusion relative to inclusion. These results are consistent across the regions of interest as well as a whole-brain analysis. Next, examining how social network characteristics are associated with task-based connectivity dynamics, we find that participants who showed greater changes in connectivity within the mentalizing system when socially excluded by peers had less dense friendship networks. This work provides insight to understand how distributed brain systems respond to social and emotional challenges and how such brain dynamics might vary based on broader social network characteristics.social exclusion | mentalizing | fMRI | functional connectivity | social networks

Linking resting‐state networks and social cognition in schizophrenia and bipolar disorder

“…Substantial work has examined regional activation and, more recently, functional connectivity, associated with social cognitive processes in healthy adults, mostly utilizing task-based fMRI. Previous fMRI studies of social cognition often focus on specific regions of interest, including dorsal and ventral aspects of medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), anterior cingulate cortex, and posterior cingulate cortex, collectively known as cortical midline structures, as well as the temporal-parietal junction, temporal pole, and anterior insula (e.g., Bolling et al, 2012;Mitchell, Banaji, & Macrae, 2005;Morawetz et al, 2016;Murray, Debbané, Fox, Bzdok, & Eickhoff, 2015;Schilbach, Eickhoff, Rotarska-Jagiela, Fink, & Vogeley, 2008;Schmälzle et al, 2017;Strombach et al, 2015;Szekely, Silton, Heller, Miller, & Mohanty, 2017;Zaki, Ochsner, Hanelin, Wager, & Mackey, 2007). Previous fMRI studies of social cognition often focus on specific regions of interest, including dorsal and ventral aspects of medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), anterior cingulate cortex, and posterior cingulate cortex, collectively known as cortical midline structures, as well as the temporal-parietal junction, temporal pole, and anterior insula (e.g., Bolling et al, 2012;Mitchell, Banaji, & Macrae, 2005;Morawetz et al, 2016;Murray, Debbané, Fox, Bzdok, & Eickhoff, 2015;Schilbach, Eickhoff, Rotarska-Jagiela, Fink, & Vogeley, 2008;Schmälzle et al, 2017;Strombach et al, 2015;Szekely, Silton, Heller, Miller, & Mohanty, 2017;Zaki, Ochsner, Hanelin, Wager, & Mackey, 2007).…”

“…For recent topical reviews, see (e.g., Eisenberger, 2013;Jankowski & Takahashi, 2014;Mahy, Moses, & Pfeifer, 2014;Rotge et al, 2015;Santos, Almeida, Oliveiros, & Castelo-Branco, 2016). Previous fMRI studies of social cognition often focus on specific regions of interest, including dorsal and ventral aspects of medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), anterior cingulate cortex, and posterior cingulate cortex, collectively known as cortical midline structures, as well as the temporal-parietal junction, temporal pole, and anterior insula (e.g., Bolling et al, 2012;Mitchell, Banaji, & Macrae, 2005;Morawetz et al, 2016;Murray, Debbané, Fox, Bzdok, & Eickhoff, 2015;Schilbach, Eickhoff, Rotarska-Jagiela, Fink, & Vogeley, 2008;Schmälzle et al, 2017;Strombach et al, 2015;Szekely, Silton, Heller, Miller, & Mohanty, 2017;Zaki, Ochsner, Hanelin, Wager, & Mackey, 2007). Together, these regions constitute a broad social cognition network, which is thought to interact with other systems, including sensorimotor and affective networks, to facilitate social understanding (Molnar-Szakacs & Uddin, 2013).…”

Functional brain network architecture supporting the learning of social networks in humans

“…Furthermore, recruitment of TPJ has been linked to individual's position in their social network 63,64 . For example, people who occupy more central positions in their social network tend to recruit TPJ more when making sense of social information 64 .…”

Applications of community detection techniques to brain graphs: Algorithmic considerations and implications for neural function

“…The graph representation also allows for the notion of relation to differ across graphs by changing the way in which edges are defined. In brain graphs, for example, edge definitions can range from direct structural connections between nodes (Yeh et al, 2016;Vettel et al, in press;Kahn et al, 2017) to higher order pairwise relations between anatomical or functional units (Betzel and Bassett, 2016;Davison et al, 2015Davison et al, , 2016Giusti et al, 2016;Schmälzle et al, 2017). Irrespective of one's choice of how to define nodes and edges, it is critical to ensure that the interpretations that are made from the graph are consistent with the spatial and temporal truths about those choices (Power et al, 2011;Butts, 2009;Wig et al, 2011).…”