Department of Psychology, UCLA, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1563, USA.
Neuroimage. 2012 Apr 15;60(3):1771-7. doi: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2012.01.080. Epub 2012 Jan 25.
The current research explored the neural mechanisms linking social status to perceptions of the social world. Two fMRI studies provide converging evidence that individuals lower in social status are more likely to engage neural circuitry often involved in 'mentalizing' or thinking about others' thoughts and feelings. Study 1 found that college students' perception of their social status in the university community was related to neural activity in the mentalizing network (e.g., DMPFC, MPFC, precuneus/PCC) while encoding social information, with lower social status predicting greater neural activity in this network. Study 2 demonstrated that socioeconomic status, an objective indicator of global standing, predicted adolescents' neural activity during the processing of threatening faces, with individuals lower in social status displaying greater activity in the DMPFC, previously associated with mentalizing, and the amygdala, previously associated with emotion/salience processing. These studies demonstrate that social status is fundamentally and neurocognitively linked to how people process and navigate their social worlds.
当前的研究探索了将社会地位与对社会世界的看法联系起来的神经机制。两项 fMRI 研究提供了一致的证据，表明社会地位较低的个体更有可能参与通常涉及“心理化”或思考他人思想和感受的神经回路。研究 1 发现，大学生对其在大学校园社区中社会地位的感知与心理化网络（例如 dmPFC、MPFC、楔前叶/PCC）在编码社会信息时的神经活动有关，社会地位较低预示着该网络的神经活动更大。研究 2 表明，社会经济地位是一个全球地位的客观指标，预测了青少年在处理威胁面孔时的神经活动，社会地位较低的个体在 dmPFC 中表现出更大的活动，该区域先前与心理化有关，在杏仁核中表现出更大的活动，杏仁核先前与情绪/显著性处理有关。这些研究表明，社会地位从根本上和神经认知上与人们处理和驾驭其社会世界的方式联系在一起。
