The social brain, stress, and psychopathology

摘要

Perennial questions in the study of virtually every major disorder are what confers risk for illness and how can those risks be minimized. Even in disorders that are highly heritable such as schizophrenia, there is a long history of research on social and environmental factors,6 and the relationship between genetic risk and schizophrenia onset may be highly dependent on the social and physical environment. However, research has now shifted away from early theories about parenting styles and toward biological explanations.As demonstrated by Akdeniz and colleagues, social and biological explanations are not an either/or proposition. Akdeniz and colleagues used functional magnetic resonance imaging to probe social stress-related activity in native German individuals and immigrants by asking them to perform a math task under social-evaluative threat—observation by authority figures coupled with negative feedback about performance: Immigrants showed stronger stress responses than their German counterparts in the pregenual anterior cingulate cortex, a part of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) implicated in the generation and regulation of social threat and other emotional states. The vmPFC comprises several subregions (Figure) that regulate brainstem governors of physiological responses to threat.7'8 Thus, the brain findings suggest a link between migrant status-a demographic variable typically studied in sociological contexts-and biological responsivity to social threat.