State Key Laboratory of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong; Department of Psychology, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong.
State Key Laboratory of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong; Laboratory of Neuropsychology and Human Neuroscience, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong.
Neurosci Biobehav Rev. 2022 Jul;138:104686. doi: 10.1016/j.neubiorev.2022.104686. Epub 2022 May 7.
Loneliness is strongly related to affective dysregulation. However, the neuropsychological mechanisms underpinning the loneliness-affective processing relationships remain unclear. Here, we first utilised the coordinate-based activation likelihood estimation method to confirm functional clusters related to loneliness, including the striatum, superior and medial frontal gyrus, insula, and cuneus. Meta-analytic connectivity modelling was then performed to characterise the functional connectivity of these clusters across studies using emotion tasks. Our results revealed that these clusters co-activated with the cognitive control networks. From the literature, we understand that loneliness and its neural correlates are highly related to regulating the attention biases to social rewards and social cues. Therefore, our findings provide a proof-of-concept that loneliness up-regulates the cognitive control networks to process socio-affective information. Prolonged up-regulation thus exhausts cognitive resources and hence, affective dysregulation. This study offers insight into the intricate role of cognitive and affective regulation in loneliness and social perception and provides meta-analytic evidence of the cognitive control model of loneliness and loneliness-related affective dysregulation, bringing significant clinical implications.
孤独感与情感调节失调密切相关。然而，支持孤独感与情感处理关系的神经心理学机制仍不清楚。在这里，我们首先利用基于坐标的激活似然估计方法来确认与孤独感相关的功能簇，包括纹状体、额上回和额中回、脑岛和楔前叶。然后，使用情绪任务，通过元分析连接建模来描述这些簇在研究中的功能连接。我们的结果表明，这些簇与认知控制网络共同激活。从文献中我们了解到，孤独感及其神经相关性与调节对社会奖励和社会线索的注意力偏向高度相关。因此，我们的发现提供了一个概念验证，即孤独感上调认知控制网络来处理社会情感信息。因此，长时间的上调会耗尽认知资源，从而导致情感调节失调。这项研究深入探讨了认知和情感调节在孤独感和社会感知中的复杂作用，并提供了孤独感和孤独感相关情感调节的认知控制模型的元分析证据，具有重要的临床意义。
