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.
Highlights
Prospection generates emotionally-charged mental images that guide social decision-making
LODESTARS-social reward expectancy (SRE) scores did not correlate with age, LODESTARS-social threat expectancy (STE) scores decreased with increasing age (r = − 0.30, p = 0.003, 95% CI = − 0.49 to − 0.103)
The regional grey matter volumes (rGMV) correlates of STE we find concur with cognitive models of anxiety[91], which contend that socially anxious persons simultaneously exhibit altered processing of internal cues and external stimuli potentially indicative of negative social evaluation
Summary
Prospection (mentally simulating future events) generates emotionally-charged mental images that guide social decision-making. 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. Models of social motivation connect these basic approach/ avoidance motivational processes with social cognition, including attentional focus and beliefs about other people’s behaviour in social interactions[4,9,10] People differ in their sensitivity to social reward and threat and such inter-individual differences are relatively stable[11], such sensitivities be heightened during a dolescence[12,13]. VmPFC is considered a “hub” of reward processing, including social r eward[17,25] and interacts with core social cognition regions including dorsomedial PFC (dmPFC) to mediate the experienced and remembered reward
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