Abstract
Social interactions have a major impact on well-being. While many individuals actively seek social situations, others avoid them, at great cost to their private and professional life. The neural mechanisms underlying individual differences in social approach or avoidance tendencies are poorly understood. Here we estimated people's subjective value of engaging in a social situation. In each trial, more or less socially anxious participants chose between an interaction with a human partner providing social feedback and a monetary amount. With increasing social anxiety, the subjective value of social engagement decreased; amygdala BOLD response during decision-making and when experiencing social feedback increased; ventral striatum BOLD response to positive social feedback decreased; and connectivity between these regions during decision-making increased. Amygdala response was negatively related to the subjective value of social engagement. These findings suggest a relation between trait social anxiety/social avoidance and activity in a subcortical network during social decision-making.
Highlights
Pursuing interpersonal relationships is a powerful human drive
In Study 1, we evaluated whether the value of engaging in a social situation varied with a widely accepted measure of trait social anxiety, the Liebowitz Social Anxiety Score, LSAS (Rytwinski et al, 2009)
This study shows that trait social anxiety is associated with reduced subjective valuation of engaging in a social situation, and amygdala and ventral striatum activation and functional connectivity differences related to social anxiety during social decision-making, both at the decision stage and when experiencing the outcome of a social situation
Summary
Social relationships contribute to the feeling that life has meaning (Baumeister and Leary, 1995) and social isolation is a major health risk factor (House et al, 1988; Cacioppo et al, 2015) with an influence on mortality risk comparable with smoking or alcohol consumption (Holt-Lunstad et al, 2010). Several social stimuli and situations can act as a reward (Krach et al, 2010), including beautiful faces (Aharon et al, 2001; O’Doherty et al, 2003), praise and attention (Izuma et al, 2008), anticipation of positive social feedback (Spreckelmeyer et al, 2009) and interactions in the game Cyberball (Kawamichi et al, 2016). Socially anxious people tend to avoid social situations in order to avoid receiving negative social feedback and experiencing feelings such as fear and shame (Clark and Wells, 1995)
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