Pelletier-Baldelli Andrea, Bernard Jessica A, Mittal Vijay A
Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, Colorado, United States of America; Center for Neuroscience, University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, Colorado, United States of America.
Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, Colorado, United States of America; Department of Psychology, Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas, United States of America.
PLoS One. 2015 Aug 7;10(8):e0134936. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0134936. eCollection 2015.
Social processes are key to navigating the world, and investigating their underlying mechanisms and cognitive architecture can aid in understanding disease states such as schizophrenia, where social processes are highly impacted. Evidence suggests that social processes are impaired in individuals at ultra high-risk for the development of psychosis (UHR). Understanding these phenomena in UHR youth may clarify disease etiology and social processes in a period that is characterized by significantly fewer confounds than schizophrenia. Furthermore, understanding social processing deficits in this population will help explain these processes in healthy individuals. The current study examined resting state connectivity of the salience (SN) and default mode networks (DMN) in association with facial emotion recognition (FER), an integral aspect of social processes, as well as broader social functioning (SF) in UHR individuals and healthy controls. Consistent with the existing literature, UHR youth were impaired in FER and SF when compared with controls. In the UHR group, we found increased connectivity between the SN and the medial prefrontal cortex, an area of the DMN relative to controls. In UHR youth, the DMN exhibited both positive and negative correlations with the somatosensory cortex/cerebellum and precuneus, respectively, which was linked with better FER performance. For SF, results showed that sensory processing links with the SN might be important in allowing for better SF for both groups, but especially in controls where sensory processing is likely to be unimpaired. These findings clarify how social processing deficits may manifest in psychosis, and underscore the importance of SN and DMN connectivity for social processing more generally.
社会过程是在世界中导航的关键，研究其潜在机制和认知结构有助于理解诸如精神分裂症等疾病状态，在这些疾病中社会过程受到高度影响。有证据表明，处于精神病发展超高风险（UHR）的个体的社会过程受损。了解UHR青年中的这些现象可能会在一个比精神分裂症混淆因素明显更少的时期阐明疾病病因和社会过程。此外，了解该人群的社会加工缺陷将有助于解释健康个体中的这些过程。当前的研究考察了突显网络（SN）和默认模式网络（DMN）的静息态连接性，以及它们与面部情绪识别（FER）（社会过程的一个重要方面）以及UHR个体和健康对照中更广泛的社会功能（SF）之间的关系。与现有文献一致，与对照组相比，UHR青年在FER和SF方面存在缺陷。在UHR组中，我们发现相对于对照组，SN与内侧前额叶皮质（DMN的一个区域）之间的连接性增加。在UHR青年中，DMN分别与体感皮质/小脑和楔前叶表现出正相关和负相关关系，这与更好的FER表现相关。对于SF，结果表明，感觉加工与SN的联系可能对两组更好的SF都很重要，但在感觉加工可能未受损的对照组中尤为重要。这些发现阐明了社会加工缺陷在精神病中可能如何表现，并更普遍地强调了SN和DMN连接性对社会加工的重要性。
