Department of Psychology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA.
Psychological Science Research Institute, Université Catholique de Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium.
Sci Rep. 2017 Mar 21;7(1):260. doi: 10.1038/s41598-017-00310-9.
Cognitive models posit that social anxiety disorder (SAD) is maintained by biased information-processing vis-à-vis threat of social exclusion. However, uncertainty still abounds regarding the very nature of this sensitivity to social exclusion in SAD. Especially, brain alterations related to social exclusion have not been explored in SAD. Our primary purpose was thus to determine both the self-report and neural correlates of social exclusion in this population. 23 patients with SAD and 23 matched nonanxious controls played a virtual game ("Cyberball") during fMRI recording. Participants were first included by other players, then excluded, and finally re-included. At the behavioral level, patients with SAD exhibited significantly higher levels of social exclusion feelings than nonanxious controls. At the brain level, patients with SAD exhibited significantly higher activation within the left inferior frontal gyrus relative to nonanxious controls during the re-inclusion phase. Moreover, self-report of social exclusion correlates with the activity of this cluster among individuals qualifying for SAD diagnosis. Our pattern of findings lends strong support to the notion that SAD may be better portrayed by a poor ability to recover following social exclusion than during social exclusion per se. These findings value social neuroscience as an innovative procedure to gain new insight into the underlying mechanisms of SAD.
认知模型假设，社交焦虑障碍（SAD）是通过对社交排斥威胁的偏见信息处理来维持的。然而，关于 SAD 对社交排斥的这种敏感性的本质，仍然存在很大的不确定性。特别是，与社交排斥相关的大脑改变在 SAD 中尚未得到探索。因此，我们的主要目的是确定 SAD 患者的自我报告和神经相关性。23 名 SAD 患者和 23 名匹配的非焦虑对照者在 fMRI 记录期间玩了一个虚拟游戏（“Cyberball”）。参与者首先被其他玩家包括，然后被排除，最后被重新包括。在行为水平上，SAD 患者表现出比非焦虑对照组更高的社交排斥感。在大脑水平上，与非焦虑对照组相比，SAD 患者在重新纳入阶段的左侧额下回内表现出更高的激活。此外，社交排斥的自我报告与符合 SAD 诊断标准的个体中该聚类的活动相关。我们的研究结果有力地支持了这样一种观点，即 SAD 可能更好地描述为社交排斥后的恢复能力差，而不是社交排斥本身。这些发现将社会神经科学作为一种创新的程序，为深入了解 SAD 的潜在机制提供了新的见解。
