Laboratory of Neuro Imaging, USC Stevens Neuroimaging and Informatics Institute, Keck School of Medicine of USC, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA.
Division of Biology and Biological Engineering, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, USA.
Brain Imaging Behav. 2021 Dec;15(6):2775-2789. doi: 10.1007/s11682-021-00467-y. Epub 2021 Apr 6.
Life satisfaction is a component of subjective well-being that reflects a global judgement of the quality of life according to an individual's own needs and expectations. As a psychological construct, it has attracted attention due to its relationship to mental health, resilience to stress, and other factors. Neuroimaging studies have identified neurobiological correlates of life satisfaction; however, they are limited to functional connectivity and gray matter morphometry. We explored features of gray matter microstructure obtained through compartmental modeling of multi-shell diffusion MRI data, and we examined cortical microstructure in frontoinsular cortex in a cohort of 807 typical young adults scanned as part of the Human Connectome Project. Our experiments identified the orientation dispersion index (ODI), and analogously fractional anisotropy (FA), of frontoinsular cortex as a robust set of anatomically-specific lateralized diffusion MRI microstructure features that are linked to life satisfaction, independent of other demographic, socioeconomic, and behavioral factors. We further validated our findings in a secondary test-retest dataset and found high reliability of our imaging metrics and reproducibility of outcomes. In our analysis of twin and non-twin siblings, we found basic microstructure in frontoinsular cortex to be strongly genetically determined. We also found a more moderate but still very significant genetic role in determining microstructure as it relates to life satisfaction in frontoinsular cortex. Our findings suggest a potential linkage between well-being and microscopic features of frontoinsular cortex, which may reflect cellular morphology and architecture and may more broadly implicate the integrity of the homeostatic processing performed by frontoinsular cortex as an important component of an individual's judgements of life satisfaction.
生活满意度是主观幸福感的一个组成部分，反映了个体自身需求和期望的生活质量的综合判断。作为一种心理结构，它因其与心理健康、抗压能力等因素的关系而受到关注。神经影像学研究已经确定了生活满意度的神经生物学相关性；然而，这些研究仅限于功能连接和灰质形态测量。我们通过多壳扩散 MRI 数据的分区建模探索了灰质微观结构的特征，并在人类连接组计划扫描的 807 名典型年轻成年人队列中检查了额岛皮质的皮质微观结构。我们的实验确定了额岛皮质的各向异性分散指数 (ODI) 和分数各向异性 (FA)，这是一组与生活满意度相关的、具有稳健的、特定于皮质的侧化扩散 MRI 微观结构特征，独立于其他人口统计学、社会经济和行为因素。我们在二次测试 - 重测数据集中进一步验证了我们的发现，发现我们的成像指标具有很高的可靠性，结果具有可重复性。在对双胞胎和非双胞胎兄弟姐妹的分析中，我们发现额岛皮质的基本微观结构具有很强的遗传性。我们还发现，在确定与额岛皮质生活满意度相关的微观结构方面，遗传因素起着更为适中但仍然非常显著的作用。我们的研究结果表明，幸福与额岛皮质的微观结构之间可能存在潜在联系，这可能反映了细胞形态和结构，并可能更广泛地暗示了额岛皮质执行的稳态处理的完整性是个体对生活满意度判断的重要组成部分。
