Acute social isolation evokes midbrain craving responses similar to hunger
- 23 November 2020
- journal article
- research article
- Published by Springer Science and Business Media LLC in Nature Neuroscience
- Vol. 23 (12), 1597-1605
- https://doi.org/10.1038/s41593-020-00742-z
Abstract
When people are forced to be isolated from each other, do they crave social interactions? To address this question, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging to measure neural responses evoked by food and social cues after participants (n = 40) experienced 10 h of mandated fasting or total social isolation. After isolation, people felt lonely and craved social interaction. Midbrain regions showed selective activation to food cues after fasting and to social cues after isolation; these responses were correlated with self-reported craving. By contrast, striatal and cortical regions differentiated between craving food and craving social interaction. Across deprivation sessions, we found that deprivation narrows and focuses the brain’s motivational responses to the deprived target. Our results support the intuitive idea that acute isolation causes social craving, similar to the way fasting causes hunger.Keywords
This publication has 99 references indexed in Scilit:
- Parcellation of the human substantia nigra based on anatomical connectivity to the striatumNeuroImage, 2013
- Perceived social isolation makes me sad: 5-year cross-lagged analyses of loneliness and depressive symptomatology in the Chicago Health, Aging, and Social Relations Study.Psychology and Aging, 2010
- Accurate and robust brain image alignment using boundary-based registrationNeuroImage, 2009
- Two types of dopamine neuron distinctly convey positive and negative motivational signalsNature, 2009
- Cortical activation in response to pure taste stimuli during the physiological states of hunger and satietyNeuroImage, 2009
- PyMVPA: a Python Toolbox for Multivariate Pattern Analysis of fMRI DataNeuroinformatics, 2009
- In the Eye of the Beholder: Individual Differences in Perceived Social Isolation Predict Regional Brain Activation to Social StimuliJournal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 2009
- The Spatial Attention Network Interacts with Limbic and Monoaminergic Systems to Modulate Motivation-Induced Attention ShiftsCerebral Cortex, 2008
- A component based noise correction method (CompCor) for BOLD and perfusion based fMRINeuroImage, 2007
- Cortical Surface-Based Analysis: I. Segmentation and Surface ReconstructionNeuroImage, 1999