Abnormal neural responses to social exclusion in schizophrenia

Gradin, Victoria B., Waiter, Gordon, Kumar, Poornima, Stickle, Catriona, Milders, Maarten, Matthews, Keith, Reid, Ian, Hall, Jeremy ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2737-9009 and Steele, J. Douglas 2012. Abnormal neural responses to social exclusion in schizophrenia. PLoS ONE 7 (8) , e42608. 10.1371/journal.pone.0042608

Preview

PDF - Published Version Available under License Creative Commons Attribution. Download (228kB) | Preview

Abstract

Social exclusion is an influential concept in politics, mental health and social psychology. Studies on healthy subjects have implicated the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), a region involved in emotional and social information processing, in neural responses to social exclusion. Impairments in social interactions are common in schizophrenia and are associated with reduced quality of life. Core symptoms such as delusions usually have a social content. However little is known about the neural underpinnings of social abnormalities. The aim of this study was to investigate the neural substrates of social exclusion in schizophrenia. Patients with schizophrenia and healthy controls underwent fMRI while participating in a popular social exclusion paradigm. This task involves passing a 'ball' between the participant and two cartoon representations of other subjects. The extent of social exclusion (ball not being passed to the participant) was parametrically varied throughout the task. Replicating previous findings, increasing social exclusion activated the mPFC in controls. In contrast, patients with schizophrenia failed to modulate mPFC responses with increasing exclusion. Furthermore, the blunted response to exclusion correlated with increased severity of positive symptoms. These data support the hypothesis that the neural response to social exclusion differs in schizophrenia, highlighting the mPFC as a potential substrate of impaired social interactions.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	MRC Centre for Neuropsychiatric Genetics and Genomics (CNGG) Medicine Neuroscience and Mental Health Research Institute (NMHRI)
Subjects:	R Medicine > R Medicine (General)
Additional Information:	Copyright: © Gradin et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Publisher:	Public Library of Science
ISSN:	1932-6203
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	30 March 2016
Last Modified:	15 May 2023 17:13
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/79424

Citation Data

Cited 27 times in Scopus. View in Scopus. Powered By Scopus® Data

Actions (repository staff only)

Edit Item