University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, USA.
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, USA.
Brain Behav Immun. 2023 Aug;112:246-253. doi: 10.1016/j.bbi.2023.05.011. Epub 2023 May 30.
"Sickness behavior" is an orchestrated suite of symptoms that commonly occur in the context of inflammation, and is characterized by changes in affect, social experience, and behavior. However, recent evidence suggests that inflammation may not always produce the same set of sickness behavior (e.g., fatigue, anhedonia, and social withdrawal). Rather, inflammation may be linked with different behavior across contexts and/or across individuals, though research in this area is under-developed to-date. In the present study (n = 30), we evaluated the influence of affective context and individual differences in difficulty detecting bodily sensations (i.e., interoceptive difficulty) on social perception following an inflammatory challenge. Inflammation was induced using the influenza vaccine and inflammatory reactivity was operationalized as changes in circulating levels of interleukin-6 (IL-6) before the vaccine and approximately 24 h later. Twenty-four hours after administration of the influenza vaccine, we manipulated affective context using a well-validated affect misattribution task in which participants made trustworthiness judgments of individuals with neutral facial expressions following the rapid presentation of "prime" images that were positive or negative in affective content. Interoceptive difficulty was measured at baseline using a validated self-report measure. Results revealed significant interactions between inflammatory reactivity to the influenza vaccine and affective context on social perception. Specifically, individuals with greater inflammatory reactivity were more biased by affective context when judging the trustworthiness of neutral faces. In addition, interoceptive difficulty and affective context interacted to predict social perception such that individuals with greater interoceptive difficulty were more biased by affective context in these judgments. In sum, we provide some of the first evidence that inflammation may amplify the saliency of affective cues during social decision making. Our findings also replicate prior work linking interoceptive ability to the use of affect-as-information during social perception, but in the novel context of inflammation.
“疾病行为”是一组在炎症背景下常见的症状，其特征是情感、社会体验和行为的变化。然而，最近的证据表明，炎症并不总是产生相同的疾病行为（例如疲劳、快感缺失和社会退缩）。相反，炎症可能与不同的行为有关，无论是在不同的环境中还是在不同的个体中，尽管这一领域的研究还不够发达。在本研究中（n=30），我们评估了情感环境和个体差异对身体感觉的觉察难度（即内感受困难）对炎症挑战后社会知觉的影响。使用流感疫苗诱导炎症，将循环白细胞介素-6（IL-6）水平的变化作为炎症反应的指标，在疫苗接种前和大约 24 小时后进行测量。流感疫苗接种后 24 小时，我们使用经过充分验证的情绪归因任务来操纵情感环境，在该任务中，参与者在快速呈现具有积极或消极情感内容的“启动”图像后，对具有中性面部表情的个体进行信任判断。在基线时使用经过验证的自我报告量表测量内感受困难。结果显示，流感疫苗引起的炎症反应与情感环境对社会知觉有显著的交互作用。具体来说，炎症反应较大的个体在判断中性面孔的可信度时更容易受到情感环境的影响。此外，内感受困难和情感环境相互作用，预测社会知觉，即内感受困难较大的个体在这些判断中更容易受到情感环境的影响。总之，我们提供了一些关于炎症可能在社会决策过程中放大情感线索的显著性的首批证据。我们的研究结果还复制了先前的研究，即内感受能力与在社会知觉中使用情感作为信息有关，但在炎症的新背景下。
