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Naltrexone alters responses to social and physical warmth: implications for social bonding.

ABSTRACT: Socially warm experiences, when one feels connected to others, have been linked with physical warmth. Opioids, hypothesized to support social bonding with close others and, separately, physical warmth, may underlie both experiences. In order to test this hypothesis, 80 participants were randomly assigned to the opioid antagonist, naltrexone or placebo before neural and emotional responses to social and physical warmth were collected. Social and physical warmth led to similar increases in ventral striatum (VS) and middle-insula (MI) activity. Further, feelings of social connection were positively related to neural activity to social warmth. However, naltrexone (vs placebo) disrupted these effects by (i) reducing VS and MI activity to social and physical warmth, (ii) erasing the subjective experience-brain association to social warmth and (iii) disrupting the neural overlap between social and physical warmth. Results provide additional support for the theory that social and physical warmth share neurobiological, opioid receptor-dependent mechanisms and suggest multiple routes by which social connections may be maintained.

SUBMITTER: Inagaki TK

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6545530 | biostudies-literature | 2019 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Naltrexone alters responses to social and physical warmth: implications for social bonding.

Inagaki Tristen K TK Hazlett Laura I LI Andreescu Carmen C

Social cognitive and affective neuroscience 20190501 5

Socially warm experiences, when one feels connected to others, have been linked with physical warmth. Opioids, hypothesized to support social bonding with close others and, separately, physical warmth, may underlie both experiences. In order to test this hypothesis, 80 participants were randomly assigned to the opioid antagonist, naltrexone or placebo before neural and emotional responses to social and physical warmth were collected. Social and physical warmth led to similar increases in ventral ...[more]

PMID: 30976797

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Project description:Accounts of empathy distinguish between cognitive (attribution of mental states to a social target) and emotional (sharing of emotions with a social target) empathy. To date, however, little is known about whether and how (interactions between) person perceptions, situational characteristics, and the observer-target relationship affect these constructs. The current study hence investigated (a) how the perceived warmth and competence of different social targets relate to both types of empathy, (b) whether there are differences in empathic responding to positive vs. negative scenarios, and (c) the impact of identification with the social targets. Eighty-nine participants rated cognitive and emotional empathy regarding four stereotypical target characters (student, elderly person, businessperson, alcoholic person) facing diverse positive and negative events. They also rated how warm and competent these characters appeared to them and how strongly they identified with the social targets. Results for cognitive and emotional empathy were partly overlapping, but demonstrated several significant differences, thereby demonstrating the need to investigate the two concepts separately. Notably, stereotypes of warmth predicted both cognitive and emotional empathic responses more strongly in desirable than in undesirable scenarios, which may relate to greater freedom of response to positive (rather than negative) social outcomes permitted by society. Our data show that scenario valence mattered even more for cognitive (than for emotional) empathy because it additionally moderated the effects of perceived competence and social identification. Finally, both cognitive and emotional empathy increased as a positive function of social identification, and social identification moderated effects exerted by perceived warmth and competence (yet differently for the two types of empathy investigated). Together, these findings speak to empathic responses arising from a complex interplay between perceptions (i.e., warmth and competence), scenario valence, and social identification.

Dataset Information

Naltrexone alters responses to social and physical warmth: implications for social bonding.

Publications

Naltrexone alters responses to social and physical warmth: implications for social bonding.

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