Abstract
In any stage of life, humans crave connection with other people. In midlife, transitions in social networks can relate to new leadership roles at work or becoming a caregiver for aging parents. Previous neuroimaging studies have pinpointed the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) to undergo structural remodelling during midlife. Social behavior, personality predisposition, and demographic profile all have intimate links to the mPFC according in largely disconnected literatures. Here, we explicitly estimated their unique associations with brain structure using a fully Bayesian framework. We weighed against each other a rich collection of 40 UK Biobank traits with their interindividual variation in social brain morphology in ~10,000 middle-aged participants. Household size and daily routines showed several of the largest effects in explaining variation in social brain regions. We also revealed male-biased effects in the dorsal mPFC and amygdala for job income, and a female-biased effect in the ventral mPFC for health satisfaction.
Highlights
In any stage of life, humans crave connection with other people
In addition to capacities implicated in social interaction, neural activity in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) has been closely linked to other key domains of everyday life, especially personality and demographics[25,28,29]
Our analyses provide an alternative perspective on the question of how the measured traits are reflected in brain structure in middle age (Table 2; 40–69 years at recruitment)
Summary
In any stage of life, humans crave connection with other people. In midlife, transitions in social networks can relate to new leadership roles at work or becoming a caregiver for aging parents. The typical midlife changes in social network configuration are likely accompanied by changes in brain architecture At this stage of life, hints from the neuroimaging literature suggest that structural alterations in frontal or prefrontal brain regions may occur as a part of normal aging[14,15]. In a previous structural brain-imaging study in 547 participants aged 19 to 86, age-related reductions in gray matter volume were observed especially in the frontal and parietal lobes, including regions of the prefrontal cortex[18]. The prefrontal cortex, among other frontal cortex regions, has been emphasized to show the strongest age effects in gray matter structure as people grow older, compared with the rest of the brain[5,14,15,17,18,19,20,21,22] (but see these references reporting no such changes:[16,23]). Individuals with higher levels of neuroticism were shown to have a lower quality of social relationships with others in general and romantic relationships in particular[32]
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