Acute social isolation evokes midbrain craving responses similar to hunger
Name
nihms-1715984.pdf
Description
Accepted version
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1.89 MB
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Adobe PDF
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Author(s)
Tomova, Livia
Wang, Kimberly L
Thompson, Todd
Matthews, Gillian A
Takahashi, Atsushi
Tye, Kay M
Saxe, Rebecca
Date Issued
2020
Journal
Nature Neuroscience
Publisher
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Citation
Tomova, Livia, Wang, Kimberly L, Thompson, Todd, Matthews, Gillian A, Takahashi, Atsushi et al. 2020. "Acute social isolation evokes midbrain craving responses similar to hunger." Nature Neuroscience, 23 (12).
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
© 2020, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature America, Inc. When people are forced to be isolated from each other, do they crave social interactions? To address this question, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging to measure neural responses evoked by food and social cues after participants (n = 40) experienced 10 h of mandated fasting or total social isolation. After isolation, people felt lonely and craved social interaction. Midbrain regions showed selective activation to food cues after fasting and to social cues after isolation; these responses were correlated with self-reported craving. By contrast, striatal and cortical regions differentiated between craving food and craving social interaction. Across deprivation sessions, we found that deprivation narrows and focuses the brain’s motivational responses to the deprived target. Our results support the intuitive idea that acute isolation causes social craving, similar to the way fasting causes hunger.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences
McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT
Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines
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Article is made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use.
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1038/S41593-020-00742-Z
