Chester David S, Pond Richard S, DeWall C Nathan
Department of Psychology, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KYUSA 40506 and Department of Psychology, University of North Carolina, Wilmington, NC 28403, USA
Department of Psychology, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KYUSA 40506 and Department of Psychology, University of North Carolina, Wilmington, NC 28403, USA.
Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci. 2015 Apr;10(4):517-22. doi: 10.1093/scan/nsu082. Epub 2014 Jun 3.
Social rejection elicits distress through the brain's alarm system, the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC). The distress of rejection facilitates subsequent inclusion. As a result, traits that blunt this dACC response to social rejection might then threaten group membership, leading to further subsequent rejection. Alexithymia, the inability to identify and describe affective states, is associated with social impairment and reduced dACC activity under conditions of negative affect. Thus, we expected that alexithymia would relate to less dACC activation during rejection and that this blunted response would explain an association between alexithymia and greater rejection in everyday life. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging and daily diaries, we found that subclinical individual differences in the core feature of alexithymia, difficulty identifying affect, was associated with a blunted dACC response to social rejection. Deficits in affect identification were also associated with greater daily rejection and that this effect was mediated and suppressed by dACC activation to rejection. Our findings emphasize the crucial role of the dACC in response to social rejection and extend the literature on alexithymia's ability to dampen neural responses and contribute to poor social functioning. The suppressing role of the dACC suggests future directions for clinical interventions on those with affective disorders.
社会排斥通过大脑的警报系统——背侧前扣带回皮质（dACC）引发痛苦。排斥带来的痛苦有助于后续被接纳。因此，那些减弱dACC对社会排斥反应的特质可能会威胁到群体成员身份，进而导致进一步的后续排斥。述情障碍，即无法识别和描述情感状态，与社交障碍以及在负面情绪状态下dACC活动减少有关。因此，我们预计述情障碍会与排斥过程中dACC激活程度较低有关，并且这种减弱的反应可以解释述情障碍与日常生活中更多排斥之间的关联。通过功能磁共振成像和日常日记，我们发现述情障碍的核心特征（难以识别情感）的亚临床个体差异与dACC对社会排斥的反应减弱有关。情感识别缺陷也与日常更多的排斥有关，并且这种效应由dACC对排斥的激活介导并受到抑制。我们的研究结果强调了dACC在应对社会排斥中的关键作用，并扩展了关于述情障碍减弱神经反应能力及其导致社会功能不良的文献。dACC的抑制作用为情感障碍患者的临床干预指明了未来方向。
