Turel Ofir, He Qinghua, Brevers Damien, Bechara Antoine
Department of Information Systems and Decision Sciences, California State University, Fullerton, CA, USA.
Psychology, Decision Neuroscience, University of Southern California, Dana and David Dornsife College of Letters Arts and Sciences, Los Angeles, CA, USA.
Cogn Affect Behav Neurosci. 2018 Aug;18(4):694-704. doi: 10.3758/s13415-018-0597-1.
Addiction-like symptoms in relation to excessive and compulsive social media use are common in the general population. Because they can lead to various adverse effects, there is a growing need to understand the brain systems and processes that are involved in potential social media addiction. We focus on the morphology of the posterior subdivision of the insular cortex (i.e., the insula), because it has been shown to be instrumental to supporting the maintenance of substance addictions and problematic behaviors. Assuming that social media addiction shares neural similarities with more established ones and consistent with evidence from the neuroeconomics domain, we further examine one possible reason for this association-namely that insular morphology influences one's delay discounting and that this delay discounting contributes to exaggerated preference for immediate social media rewards and consequent addiction-like symptoms. Based on voxel-based morphometry techniques applied to MRI scans of 32 social media users, we show that the gray matter volumes of the bilateral posterior insula are negatively associated with social media addiction symptoms. We further show that this association is mediated by delay discounting. This provides initial evidence that insular morphology can be associated with potential social media addiction, in part, through its contribution to poor foresight and impulsivity as captured by delay discounting.
与过度和强迫性使用社交媒体相关的成瘾样症状在普通人群中很常见。由于它们会导致各种不良影响，因此越来越需要了解与潜在社交媒体成瘾相关的大脑系统和过程。我们关注岛叶皮质后部分（即脑岛）的形态，因为已有研究表明它对维持物质成瘾和问题行为起着重要作用。假设社交媒体成瘾与更常见的成瘾在神经方面存在相似之处，并且与神经经济学领域的证据一致，我们进一步研究这种关联的一个可能原因，即脑岛形态会影响一个人的延迟折扣，而这种延迟折扣会导致对即时社交媒体奖励的过度偏好以及随之而来的成瘾样症状。基于对32名社交媒体用户的MRI扫描应用基于体素的形态测量技术，我们发现双侧后脑岛的灰质体积与社交媒体成瘾症状呈负相关。我们进一步表明，这种关联是由延迟折扣介导的。这提供了初步证据表明，脑岛形态可能与潜在的社交媒体成瘾有关，部分原因是它通过延迟折扣所反映的缺乏远见和冲动性。
