Your presence soothes me: a neural process model of aversive emotion regulation via social buffering
The reduction of aversive emotions by a conspecific’s presence—called social buffering—is a universal phenomenon in the mammalian world and a powerful form of human social emotion regulation. Animal and human studies on neural pathways underlying social buffering typically examined physiological reactions or regional brain activations. However, direct links between emotional and social stimuli, distinct neural processes and behavioural outcomes are still missing. Using data of 27 female participants, the current study delineated a large-scale process model of social buffering’s neural underpinnings, connecting changes in neural activity to emotional behaviour by means of voxel-wise multilevel mediation analysis. Our results confirmed that three processes underlie human social buffering: (i) social support-related reduction of activity in the orbitofrontal cortex, ventromedial and dorsolateral prefrontal cortices, anterior and mid-cingulate; (ii) downregulation of aversive emotion-induced brain activity in the superficial cortex-like amygdala and mediodorsal thalamus; and (iii) downregulation of reported aversive feelings. Results of the current study provide evidence for a distinct neural process model of aversive emotion regulation in humans by social buffering.
nsaa068.pdf
publisher
openaccess
CC BY-NC
642.37 KB
Adobe PDF
ea95862bf8a50caa14fa3d0a3f9287d0