Does Rejection Hurt? An fMRI Study of Social Exclusion

A neuroimaging study examined the neural correlates of social exclusion and tested the hypothesis that the brain bases of social pain are similar to those of physical pain. Participants were scanned while playing a virtual ball-tossing game in which they were ultimately excluded. Paralleling results from physical pain studies, the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) was more active during exclusion than during inclusion and correlated positively with self-reported distress. Right ventral prefrontal cortex (RVPFC) was active during exclusion and correlated negatively with self-reported distress. ACC changes mediated the RVPFC-distress correlation, suggesting that RVPFC regulates the distress of social exclusion by disrupting ACC activity.

[1]  E. Barton-wright.  Biochemistry of Plants , 1950, Nature.

[2]  F. Young.  Biochemistry , 1955, The Indian Medical Gazette.

[3]  E L FOLTZ,et al.  Pain "relief" by frontal cingulumotomy. , 1962, Journal of neurosurgery.

[4]  C. Whittingham,et al.  Photosynthesis , 1941, Nature.

[5]  J. Winn,et al.  Brain , 1878, The Lancet.

[6]  P. Maclean,et al.  Species-typical behavior of hamsters deprived from birth of the neocortex. , 1981, Science.

[7]  T. Jessell.  PAIN , 1982, The Lancet.

[8]  P. Maclean,et al.  Role of midline frontolimbic cortex in production of the isolation call of squirrel monkeys , 1988, Brain Research.

[9]  S. Eykyn.  Microbiology , 1950, The Lancet.

[10]  J. Price,et al.  Limbic connections of the orbital and medial prefrontal cortex in macaque monkeys , 1995, The Journal of comparative neurology.

[11]  Jonathan D. Cohen,et al.  Improved Assessment of Significant Activation in Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI): Use of a Cluster‐Size Threshold , 1995, Magnetic resonance in medicine.

[12]  Hong Jia,et al.  Inhibitory effects of electrically evoked activation of ventrolateral orbital cortex on the tail-flick reflex are mediated by periaqueductal gray in rats , 1997, PAIN.

[13]  M. Bushnell,et al.  Pain affect encoded in human anterior cingulate but not somatosensory cortex. , 1997, Science.

[14]  Jaak Panksepp,et al.  Brain Substrates of Infant–Mother Attachment: Contributions of Opioids, Oxytocin, and Norepinephrine , 1998, Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews.

[15]  Feasibility of using fMRI to study mothers responding to infant cries , 1999 .

[16]  M. Botvinick,et al.  Parsing executive processes: strategic vs. evaluative functions of the anterior cingulate cortex. , 2000, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

[17]  J. Mazziotta,et al.  Modulating emotional responses: effects of a neocortical network on the limbic system , 2000, Neuroreport.

[18]  M. Honda,et al.  Expectation of Pain Enhances Responses to Nonpainful Somatosensory Stimulation in the Anterior Cingulate Cortex and Parietal Operculum/Posterior Insula: an Event-Related Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Study , 2000, The Journal of Neuroscience.

[19]  K. Williams,et al.  Cyberostracism: effects of being ignored over the Internet. , 2000, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[20]  M. Posner,et al.  Cognitive and emotional influences in anterior cingulate cortex , 2000, Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

[21]  Alan C. Evans,et al.  Changes in brain activity related to eating chocolate: from pleasure to aversion. , 2001, Brain : a journal of neurology.

[22]  Robin M. Kowalski,et al.  Behaving badly: Aversive behaviors in interpersonal relationships. , 2001 .

[23]  Sierd Bron,et al.  Bacillus subtilis and its closest relatives: from genes to cells , 2001 .

[24]  P. Petrovic,et al.  Placebo and Opioid Analgesia-- Imaging a Shared Neuronal Network , 2002, Science.

[25]  M. Leary,et al.  Social Support and Experimental Pain , 2003, Psychosomatic medicine.

[26]  宁北芳,et al.  疟原虫var基因转换速率变化导致抗原变异[英]／Paul H, Robert P, Christodoulou Z, et al//Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A , 2005 .