Acute social isolation evokes midbrain craving responses similar to hunger
Author(s)
Tomova, Livia; Wang, Kimberly L; Thompson, Todd; Matthews, Gillian A; Takahashi, Atsushi; Tye, Kay M; Saxe, Rebecca; ... Show more Show less
DownloadAccepted version (1.887Mb)
Publisher Policy
Publisher Policy
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.
Terms of use
Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
© 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.
Date issued
2020Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences; McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT; Center for Brains, Minds, and MachinesJournal
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