Kawamoto Taishi, Onoda Keiichi, Nakashima Ken'ichiro, Nittono Hiroshi, Yamaguchi Shuhei, Ura Mitsuhiro
Department of Behavioral Sciences, Graduate School of Integrated Arts and Sciences, Hiroshima University Higashi-Hiroshima, Japan.
Front Evol Neurosci. 2012 Jul 27;4:11. doi: 10.3389/fnevo.2012.00011. eCollection 2012.
People are typically quite sensitive about being accepted or excluded by others. Previous studies have suggested that the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC) is a key brain region involved in the detection of social exclusion. However, this region has also been shown to be sensitive to non-social expectancy violations. We often expect other people to follow an unwritten rule in which they include us as they would expect to be included, such that social exclusion likely involves some degree of expectancy violation. The present event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study sought to separate the effects of expectancy violation from those of social exclusion, such that we employed an "overinclusion" condition in which a player was unexpectedly overincluded in the game by the other players. With this modification, we found that the dACC and right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (rVLPFC) were activated by exclusion, relative to overinclusion. In addition, we identified a negative correlation between exclusion-evoked brain activity and self-rated social pain in the rVLPFC, but not in the dACC. These findings suggest that the rVLPFC is critical for regulating social pain, whereas the dACC plays an important role in the detection of exclusion. The neurobiological basis of social exclusion is different from that of mere expectancy violation.
人们通常对被他人接纳或排斥相当敏感。先前的研究表明，背侧前扣带回皮质（dACC）是参与检测社会排斥的关键脑区。然而，该区域也已被证明对非社会预期违背敏感。我们常常期望他人遵循一条不成文的规则，即他们像期望自己被接纳那样接纳我们，这样社会排斥可能涉及某种程度的预期违背。当前这项事件相关功能磁共振成像（fMRI）研究试图将预期违背的影响与社会排斥的影响区分开来，因此我们采用了一种“过度接纳”条件，即一名玩家被其他玩家意外地过度接纳进游戏。通过这种改进，我们发现相对于过度接纳，dACC和右侧腹外侧前额叶皮质（rVLPFC）在被排斥时被激活。此外，我们发现rVLPFC中由排斥引发的脑活动与自我评定的社会痛苦之间存在负相关，但在dACC中未发现这种相关性。这些发现表明，rVLPFC对调节社会痛苦至关重要，而dACC在检测排斥方面发挥着重要作用。社会排斥的神经生物学基础与单纯的预期违背不同。
