Investigating the Relationship between Perceived Discrimination, Social Status, and Mental Health

A growing body of evidence suggests that experiences with discrimination have implications for mental health and that these associations may vary by social status. We use data from the Chicago Community Adult Health Study (CCAHS) to examine how two types of perceived discrimination, chronic everyday discrimination and major lifetime discrimination, are linked to mental health, and how this association varies by race/ethnicity, gender, and socioeconomic status. Results indicate that everyday discrimination is generally independently linked to greater depressive symptoms, loneliness, and hostility across all social status groups. Major discrimination is not associated with depressive symptoms or loneliness after adjusting for a host of covariates, but is associated with hostility, especially for certain groups. These findings highlight the need to examine multiple indicators of discrimination and mental health, and to pay attention to both differences and similarities in these associations by social status.     

The effects of the social environment on stress-related cardiovascular activation: Current findings, prospects, and implications

Social relationships have been shown to be health-protective and to improve cardiovascular disease prognosis. One of the mechanisms by which social relationships may alter health status is through altering patterns of neuroendocrine or hemodynamic responding to ongoing activity. For example, research with non-human primates suggests that disrupted social relationships may increase cardiovascular risk through their effects on sympathetic nervous system activation. In humans, a number of recent reports have shown that the presence of an affiliative companion can reduce cardiovascular activity during psychologically challenging tasks, results which are consistent with this proposed mechanism of effect. We review the recent human literature which has examined the effects of the social environment on stress-related cardiovascular activity. Although findings in this literature are generally consistent, recent anomalous results are reviewed which shed light on some of the context-dependent effects of social affiliation. Additional areas for further investigation are examined, including possible mechanisms for explaining these social affiliation effects, individual differences which may moderate these effects, and emerging methodological advances for examining how these effects may generalize to the natural environment.     

Early life genetic, epigenetic and environmental factors shaping emotionality in rodents

Childhood trauma is known to increase risk for emotional disorders and addiction. However, little is currently understood about the neurodevelopmental basis of these effects, or how genetic and epigenetic factors interact with the environment to shape the systems subserving emotionality. In this review, we discuss the use of rodent models of early life emotional experience to study these issues in the laboratory and present some of our pertinent findings. In rats, postnatal maternal separation can produce lasting increases in emotional behavior and stressor-reactivity, together with alterations in various brain neurotransmitter systems implicated in emotionality, including corticotropin-releasing factor, serotonin, norepinephrine, and glutamate. Genetic differences between inbred mouse strains have been exploited to further study how maternal behavior affects emotional development using techniques such as cross-fostering and generation of inter-strain hybrids. Together with our own recent data, the findings of these studies demonstrate the pervasive influence of maternal and social environments during sensitive developmental periods and reveal how genetic factors determine how these early life experiences can shape brain and behavior throughout life.     

Understanding social hierarchies: The neural and psychological foundations of status perception

Social groups across species rapidly self-organize into hierarchies, where members vary in their level of power, influence, skill, or dominance. In this review, we explore the nature of social hierarchies and the traits associated with status in both humans and nonhuman primates, and how status varies across development in humans. Our review finds that we can rapidly identify social status based on a wide range of cues. Like monkeys, we tend to use certain cues, like physical strength, to make status judgments, although layered on top of these more primitive perceptual cues are sociocultural status cues like job titles and educational attainment. One’s relative status has profound effects on attention, memory, and social interactions, as well as health and wellness. These effects can be particularly pernicious in children and adolescents. Developmental research on peer groups and social exclusion suggests teenagers may be particularly sensitive to social status information, but research focused specifically on status processing and associated brain areas is very limited. Recent evidence from neuroscience suggests that there may be an underlying neural network, including regions involved in executive, emotional, and reward processing, that is sensitive to status information. We conclude with questions for future research as well as stressing the need to expand social neuroscience research on status processing to adolescents.     

Seven computations of the social brain

The social environment presents the human brain with the most complex information processing demands. The computations that the brain must perform occur in parallel, combine social and nonsocial cues, produce verbal and nonverbal signals and involve multiple cognitive systems, including memory, attention, emotion and learning. This occurs dynamically and at timescales ranging from milliseconds to years. Here, we propose that during social interactions, seven core operations interact to underwrite coherent social functioning; these operations accumulate evidence efficiently—from multiple modalities—when inferring what to do next. We deconstruct the social brain and outline the key components entailed for successful human–social interaction. These include (i) social perception; (ii) social inferences, such as mentalizing; (iii) social learning; (iv) social signaling through verbal and nonverbal cues; (v) social drives (e.g. how to increase one’s status); (vi) determining the social identity of agents, including oneself and (vii) minimizing uncertainty within the current social context by integrating sensory signals and inferences. We argue that while it is important to examine these distinct aspects of social inference, to understand the true nature of the human social brain, we must also explain how the brain integrates information from the social world.     

Habitat complexity, brain, and behavior

More complex brains and behaviors have arisen repeatedly throughout both vertebrate and invertebrate evolution. The challenge is to tease apart the forces underlying such change. In this review, I show how habitat complexity influences both brain and behavior in African cichlid fishes, drawing on examples from primates and birds where appropriate. These species groups share a number of similarities. They exhibit a considerable range of brain to body weight within their group. Often highly visual, the species show a diversity of habitat types, social systems, and cognitive abilities. Phylogenies are well established. In closely-related cichlid fishes from the monophyletic Ectodine clade of Lake Tanganyika, habitat complexity is directly correlated with social variables, including species richness, diversity, and abundance. Total brain size, telencephalic and cerebellar size are positively correlated with habitat complexity. Visual acuity and spatial memory are also enhanced in cichlids living in more complex environments. I speculate that species-specific neural effects of environmental complexity could be the consequence of the corresponding social changes. However, environmental and social forces affect brains differently. Environmental forces exert a broader effect on brain structures than social ones, suggesting either allometric expansion of the brain structures in concert with brain size and/or co-evolution of these structures. To advance our understanding of the mechanism by which habitat complexity affects brain and behavior will require the use of closely-related species, quantification of complexity, hypothesis testing restricting analysis to a single variable and path analyses to explore the order of importance of such variables. We will also need new experimental paradigms exploring the cognitive and survival value of brain and brain structure changes both in the laboratory and in the wild.     

Social influences on endocrine activity in guinea pigs, with comparisons to findings in nonhuman primates.

Guinea pigs exhibit a rich and varied social organization. Studies in recent years have demonstrated that social stimuli have widespread neuroendocrine effects in guinea pigs. Here, effects on the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal, adrenal medullary/sympathetic, and hypothalamic-pituitary-gonadal systems of both adult and developing guinea pigs are reviewed. These systems respond to various social variables, or factors that affect social variables, including: separation from attachment objects, housing conditions, changes in housing, the familiarity of the environment in which social interactions occur, foraging conditions, surrogate-rearing, agonistic interactions, and the establishment of dominance rank. Similarities and differences between these findings and those in nonhuman primates are discussed. It is argued that the guinea pig is well suited for the study of socioendocrine effects throughout the life span, and can provide a valuable complement to nonhuman primate research in this area.     

Is Suicide the End Point of Ageism and Human Rights Violations?

Ageism and human rights violations may pervade each of the potential factors underlying suicidal ideation or behavior in older persons, including physical and mental health, disability, relationships, and social factors. We outline how infringements of human rights and ageism may create or exacerbate risk factors associated with suicide in older persons. Strategies to address these issues are discussed, including tackling ageism, psychosocial interventions and education. A United Nations convention on the rights of older persons would create a uniform standard of accountability across health and social systems. Future studies are needed to evaluate the effects of alleviating ageism and human rights violations on suicide.     

Social status modulates the neural response to unfairness

In human society, which is organized by social hierarchies, resources are usually allocated unequally and based on social status. In this study, we analyze how being endowed with different social statuses in a math competition affects the perception of fairness during asset allocation in a subsequent Ultimatum Game (UG). Behavioral data showed that when participants were in high status, they were more likely to reject unfair UG offers than in low status. This effect of social status correlated with activity in the right anterior insula (rAI) and with the functional connectivity between the rAI and a region in the anterior middle cingulate cortex, indicating that these two brain regions are crucial for integrating contextual factors and social norms during fairness perception. Additionally, there was an interaction between social status and UG offer fairness in the amygdala and thalamus, implicating the role of these regions in the modulation of social status on fairness perception. These results demonstrate the effect of social status on fairness perception and the potential neural underpinnings for this effect.     

Rules of social exchange: game theory, individual differences and psychopathology

Human social interaction is rarely guided by pure reason. Instead, in situation in which humans have the option to cooperate, to defect, or to punish non-cooperative behavior of another person, they quite uniformly tend to reciprocate "good" deeds, reject unfair proposals, and try to enforce obedience to social rules and norms in non-cooperative individuals ("free-riders"), even if the punishment incurs costs to the punisher. Abundant research using various game theoretical approaches has examined these apparently irrational human behaviors. This article reviews the evolutionary rationale of how such behavior could have been favored by selection. It explores the cognitive mechanisms required to compute possible scenarios of cooperation, defection, and the detection of cheating. Moreover, the article summarizes recent research developments into individual differences in behavior, which suggest that temperament and character as well as between- and within-sex differences in hormonal status influence behavior in social exchange. Finally, we present an overview over studies that have addressed the question of how neuropsychiatric disorders may alter performance in game theoretical paradigms, and propose how empirical approaches into this fascinating field can advance our understanding of human nature.     

Testosterone release and social context: When it occurs and why

The functions of rapid increases in testosterone seem paradoxical because they can occur in response to different social contexts, such as male–male aggressive encounters and male–female sexual encounters. This suggests that context may impact the functional consequences of changes in testosterone, whether transient or long term. Many studies, including those with California mice (Peromyscus californicus), have addressed these issues using manipulations and species comparisons, but many areas remain to be investigated. We report a study here that suggests transient increases in testosterone after social competition influence future competitive behavior, but social experience alone may also be critical in determining future behavior. In other rodents, a comparable testosterone surge occurs in response to sexual stimulation, but the function is not entirely understood. In addition to competitive and sexual behavior, testosterone impacts other systems instrumental to social behaviors, including paternal behavior and degree of monogamy. Thus, mechanisms regulated by testosterone, such as the vasopressin and aromatase systems, may also be influenced by rapid surges of testosterone in aggressive or sexual contexts. We discuss how the functions of testosterone may overlap in some contexts.     

Life stages and risk-avoidance: status- and context-sensitivity in precaution systems

Human typical life history involves specific tradeoffs, resulting in the selection of specific cognitive adaptations, among which a suite of age- and gender-specific precaution systems sensitive to variations in the physical and social environment. Precaution systems take into account the individual's status and life-stage, information about specific threats, as well as the fact that the organism can or cannot address those threats unassisted. Systematic variation in individual decision-making and behavior in risky situations provide insights into the operation of those precaution systems. The literature survey is completed by data gathered among the pastoral Turkana of Kenya showing how variations in precautions and risk avoidance correlate with age, sex, and social conditions.     

Religious, spiritual, and traditional beliefs and practices and the ethics of mental health research in less wealthy countries

This discussion article contributes to ethics reform by introducing the contribution of religious, spiritual, and traditional beliefs and practices to both subject vulnerability and patient improvement. A growing body of evidence suggests that religious, spiritual, and traditional beliefs and practices may provide positive benefits, although in some cases mixed or negative consequences to mental and physical health. These beliefs and practices add a new level of complexity to ethical deliberations, in terms of what ignoring them may mean for both distributive justice and respect for persons. International ethical guidelines need to be created that are expansive enough to cover an array of social groups and circumstances. It is proposed that these guidelines incorporate the religious, spiritual, and/or traditional principles that characterize a local population. Providing effective mental healthcare requires respecting and understanding how differences, including ones that express a population's religious, spiritual, or traditional belief systems, play into the complex deliberations and negotiations that must be undertaken if researchers are to adhere to ethical imperatives in research and treatment.     

Social network analysis for social neuroscientists

Although social neuroscience is concerned with understanding how the brain interacts with its social environment, prevailing research in the field has primarily considered the human brain in isolation, deprived of its rich social context. Emerging work in social neuroscience that leverages tools from network analysis has begun to advance knowledge of how the human brain influences and is influenced by the structures of its social environment. In this paper, we provide an overview of key theory and methods in network analysis (especially for social systems) as an introduction for social neuroscientists who are interested in relating individual cognition to the structures of an individual’s social environments. We also highlight some exciting new work as examples of how to productively use these tools to investigate questions of relevance to social neuroscientists. We include tutorials to help with practical implementations of the concepts that we discuss. We conclude by highlighting a broad range of exciting research opportunities for social neuroscientists who are interested in using network analysis to study social systems.     

An "if this, then that" formulation of decisions related to Social Role Valorization as a better way of interpreting it to people

Social Role Valorization is interpreted as a high-order empirical social science theory that informs people about the relation between the social roles that people hold and what happens to them as a result, and how to valorize (improve or defend) the social roles of people at risk of social devaluation. Because Social Role Valorization is not a "religion," people must go to higher belief systems to determine whether and why other humans should be valued or devalued, whether the social valuation of others should be promoted, and which presumably effective means to this end are morally defensible or even imperative. Whether a pursuit of social valuation in certain cases has unacceptable implications can be in the domain of either "religion" or practical trade-offs.     

Comparison of the distribution of oxytocin and vasopressin 1a receptors in rodents reveals conserved and derived patterns of nonapeptide evolution

Oxytocin (OT) and vasopressin (VP) are known modulators of social behaviour across rodents. Research has revealed the location of action of these nonapeptides through localization of their associated receptors, which include the oxytocin receptor (OTR) and the vasopressin 1a receptor (V1aR). As research into these complex systems has progressed, studies investigating how these systems modulate behaviour have remained relatively narrow in scope (ie, focused on how a single brain region shapes behaviour in only a handful of species). However, the brain regions that regulate social behaviour are part of interconnected neural networks for which coordinated activity enables behavioural variation. Thus, to better understand how nonapeptide systems have evolved under different selective pressures among rodent species, we conducted a meta‐analysis using a multivariate comparative method to examine the patterns of OTR and V1aR density expression in this taxon. Several brain regions were highly correlated based on their OTR and V1aR binding patterns across species, supporting the notion that the distribution of these receptors is highly conserved in rodents. However, our results also revealed that specific patterns of V1aR density differed from OTR density, and within‐genus variance for V1aR was low compared to between‐genus variance, suggesting that these systems have responded and evolved quite differently to selective pressures over evolutionary time. We propose that, in addition to examining single brain regions of interest, taking a broad comparative approach when studying the OT and VP systems is important for understanding how the systemic action of nonapeptides modulate social behaviour across species.     

Relationship between adverse childhood experiences and unemployment among adults from five US states

Purpose

Our study assesses the relationships between self-reported adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) (including sexual, physical, or verbal abuse, along with household dysfunction including parental separation or divorce, domestic violence, mental illness, substance abuse, or incarcerated household member) and unemployment status in five US states in 2009.

Methods

We examined these relationships using the 2009 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System survey data from 17,469 respondents (aged 18–64 years) who resided in five states, completed the ACE Questionnaire, and provided socio-demographic and social support information. We also assessed the mediation of these relationships by respondents’ educational attainment, marital status, and social support.

Results

About two-third of respondents reported having had at least one ACEs, while 15.1 % of men and 19.3 % of women reported having had ≥4 ACEs. Among both men and women, the unemployment rate in 2009 was significantly higher among those who reported having had any ACE than among those who reported no ACEs (p < 0.05). Educational attainment, marital status, and social support mediated the relationship between ACEs and unemployment, particularly among women.

Conclusions

ACEs appear to be associated with increased risk for unemployment among men and women. Further studies may be needed to better understand how education, marital status, and social support mediate the association between multiple ACEs and unemployment.     

“Loser” or “Popular”?: Neural response to social status words in adolescents with major depressive disorder

Concerns about social status are ubiquitous during adolescence, with information about social status often conveyed in text formats. Depressed adolescents may show alterations in the functioning of neural systems supporting processing of social status information. We examined whether depressed youth exhibited altered neural activation to social status words in temporal and prefrontal cortical regions thought to be involved in social cognitive processing, and whether this response was associated with development. Forty-nine adolescents (ages 10–18; 35 female), including 20 with major depressive disorder and 29 controls, were scanned while identifying the valence of words that connoted positive and negative social status. Results indicated that depressed youth showed reduced late activation to social status (vs neutral) words in the superior temporal cortex (STC) and medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC); whereas healthy youth did not show any significant differences between word types. Depressed youth also showed reduced late activation in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and fusiform gyrus to negative (vs positive) social status words; whereas healthy youth showed the opposite pattern. Finally, age was positively associated with MPFC activation to social status words. Findings suggest that hypoactivation in the “social cognitive brain network” might be implicated in altered interpersonal functioning in adolescent depression.     

Social regulation of adult neurogenesis: A comparative approach

The social environment sculpts the mammalian brain throughout life. Adult neurogenesis, the birth of new neurons in the mature brain, can be up- or down-regulated by various social manipulations. These include social isolation, social conflict, social status, socio-sexual interactions, and parent/offspring interactions. However, socially-mediated changes in neuron production are often species-, sex-, and/or region-specific. In order to reconcile the variability of social effects on neurogenesis, we need to consider species-specific social adaptations and other contextual variables (e.g. age, social status, reproductive status, etc.) that shift the valence of social stimuli. Using a comparative approach to understand how adult-generated neurons in turn influence social behaviors will shed light on how adult neurogenesis contributes to survival and reproduction in diverse species.     

Social status interacts with badge size and neuroendocrine physiology to influence sexual behavior in male house sparrows (Passer domesticus)

Reproduction results from a complex interplay among multiple factors including social stimuli, hormones, the brain, and an individual's physical characteristics. Male house sparrows (Passer domesticus) possess a bib of black feathers, or badge, that is associated with behaviors important for reproduction including courtship behaviors, copulation, and aggression. Such behaviors are controlled by testosterone activity within the central nervous system and are strongly influenced by social status and female behavior. To understand how multiple factors interact to coordinate reproductive activity we explored relationships among social status, badge size, gonad volume, and the volumes of brain regions involved in male courtship and dominance (HVC, robust nucleus of the archistriatum, and the medial preoptic nucleus). A trend toward a U-shaped relationship was observed between dominance status and badge size, with the most dominant and most subordinate males possessing the largest badges. Male vocal expression, copulation, and aggression were positively related to dominance status, but not badge size. In contrast, the volumes of HVC, the medial preoptic nucleus and the gonads related positively to badge size, but not dominance. Females preferentially approached large-badged males regardless of dominance status, but this interest translated into copulation for dominant rather than subordinate males, a finding possibly related to the observation that dominant males vocalized at higher rates than subordinates. Subordinate males that had large badges, attracted female interest, and possessed the neuroendocrine potential to perform courtship behaviors might have been prevented from doing so through social interactions with dominant males within the flock.