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This page is an AI-assisted Turkish summary of the study presented at the 26th World Congress of Psychiatry. The study belongs to the presenting authors; please refer to the original source when citing it.

Neural correlates of social motivation in clinical and community samples

Neural correlates of social motivation across clinical and community populations

Individual differences in social reward processing are significantly associated with real-world social functioning in individuals with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder and socially isolated community members, but the neural patterns underlying these associations differ across groups.

This study examines alterations in social reward processing thought to underlie social dysfunction in clinical groups, including individuals with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, and in a community sample reporting high levels of social isolation, based on the hypothesis that these mechanisms may differ across groups. Twenty-six individuals with schizophrenia (SZ), 17 individuals with bipolar disorder (BD), and 36 socially isolated community comparison participants (CC) completed a probabilistic implicit social learning task, a team-based dot-counting fMRI task, and self-report measures of social motivation (social anhedonia and social avoidance); behavioral and imaging data were analyzed for within-group and between-group effects and associations with self-report measures. In the SZ group, greater ventral striatal activity in response to negative social feedback during the fMRI task was associated with poorer learning to avoid negative social outcomes in the implicit learning task (r=-0.44; p<0.05), whereas lower ventral striatal activity in response to positive feedback was associated with greater self-reported social anhedonia (r=-0.40; p<0.05). In the BD group, greater amygdala activity in response to negative social feedback was negatively correlated with learning to avoid negative nonsocial outcomes (r=-0.48; p<0.05). In the CC group, greater amygdala activity in response to negative social feedback was associated with better learning to avoid negative social outcomes (r=0.33; p<0.05) and greater self-reported social avoidance (r=0.39; p<0.05). The findings indicate that individual differences in social reward processing are significantly associated with real-world social functioning in all three groups.

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