News

Effects of DRD2/ANKK1 and COMT Val158Met polymorphisms on stabilization against and adaptation to unexpected events

National Library of Medicine - Mar ,2022

Behavioral and neural dissociation of social anxiety and loneliness.

Background: Loneliness is a public health concern with detrimental effects on physical and mental well-being. Given phenotypical overlaps between loneliness and social anxiety, cognitive behavioral interventions targeting social anxiety might be adopted to reduce loneliness. However, it is still elusive whether social anxiety and loneliness share the same underlying neurocognitive mechanisms. The current study aimed at investigating to what extent known behavioral and neural correlates of social avoidance in social anxiety are evident in loneliness. Methods: We used a pre-stratified approach involving 42 participants with high and 40 control participants with low loneliness scores. During functional magnetic resonance imaging, the participants completed a social gambling task to measure the subjective value of engaging in a social situation and responses to positive and negative social feedback. Results: Uni- and multivariate analyses of behavioral and neural data replicated known task effects across groups. However, although lonely participants were characterized by increased social anxiety, loneliness was associated with a response pattern clearly distinct from social anxiety. Specifically, Bayesian analyses revealed moderate evidence for equal subjective values of engaging in social situations and comparable amygdala responses to social decision-making and striatal responses to positive social feedback in both groups. Conversely, lonely participants showed significantly altered behavioral responsiveness to negative feedback and reduced striatal activity, whereas striatal-hippocampal connectivity was increased compared to controls. Conclusion: Our findings suggest that loneliness is associated with altered emotional reactivity to social situations rather than behavioral tendencies to withdraw from social interactions. Thus, established interventions for social anxiety should be adjusted when targeting loneliness.

New Address

We have a new address!!! The CENs moved from Nachtigallenweg 86, 53127 Bonn to Am Hofgarten 8, 53113 Bonn near the university mainbuilding in October 2021.

Universitätsklinikum Bonn soll Medizin-Software entwickeln

kma online-Aug 17, 2021

Stockpile purchasing in the emerging COVID-19 pandemic is related to obsessive-compulsiveness

 

Individual Differences in Intertemporal Choice

Intertemporal choice involves deciding between smaller, sooner and larger, later rewards. People tend to prefer smaller rewards that are available earlier to larger rewards available later, a phenomenon referred to as temporal or delay discounting. Despite its ubiquity in human and non-human animals, temporal discounting is subject to considerable individual differences. Here, we provide a critical narrative review of this literature and make suggestions for future work. We conclude that temporal discounting is associated with key socio-economic and health-related variables. Regarding personality, large-scale studies have found steeper temporal discounting to be associated with higher levels of self-reported impulsivity and extraversion; however, effect sizes are small. Temporal discounting correlates negatively with future-oriented cognitive styles and inhibitory control, again with small effect sizes. There are consistent associations between steeper temporal discounting and lower intelligence, with effect sizes exceeding those of personality or cognitive variables, although socio-demographic moderator variables may play a role. Neuroimaging evidence of brain structural and functional correlates is not yet consistent, neither with regard to areas nor directions of effects. Finally, following early candidate gene studies, recent Genome Wide Association Study (GWAS) approaches have revealed the molecular genetic architecture of temporal discounting to be more complex than initially thought. Overall, the study of individual differences in temporal discounting is a maturing field that has produced some replicable findings. Effect sizes are small-to-medium, necessitating future hypothesis-driven work that prioritizes large samples with adequate power calculations. More research is also needed regarding the neural origins of individual differences in temporal discounting as well as the mediating neural mechanisms of associations of temporal discounting with personality and cognitive variables.