title: Neural sensitivity to social reward and punishment anticipation in social anxiety disorder.
abstract: An imbalance in the neural motivational system may underlie Social Anxiety Disorder (SAD). This study examines social reward and punishment anticipation in SAD, predicting a valence-specific effect: increased striatal activity for punishment avoidance compared to obtaining a reward. Individuals with SAD (n = 20) and age, gender, and education case-matched controls (n = 20) participated in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study. During fMRI scanning, participants performed a Social Incentive Delay (SID) task to measure the anticipation of social reward and punishment. The left putamen (part of the striatum) showed a valence-specific interaction with group after correcting for medication use and comorbidity. The control group showed a relatively stronger activation for reward vs. punishment trials, compared to the social anxiety group. However, post-hoc pairwise comparisons were not significant, indicating that the effect is driven by a relative difference. A connectivity analysis (Psychophysiological interaction) further revealed a general salience effect: SAD patients showed decreased putamen-ACC connectivity compared to controls for both reward and punishment trials. Together these results suggest that the usual motivational preference for social reward is absent in SAD. In addition, cortical control processes during social incentive anticipation may be disrupted in SAD. These results provide initial evidence for altered striatal involvement in both valence-specific and valence-nonspecific processing of social incentives, and stress the relevance of taking motivational processes into account when studying social anxiety.
authors.affiliation: Radboud University Nijmegen, Behavioral Science Institute Nijmegen, Netherlands ; Biological Science Department, Department of Psychiatry, University of Chicago Chicago, IL, USA ; Leiden Institute for Brain and Cognition Leiden, Netherlands.
authors.forename: Henk R
authors.initials: HR
authors.lastname: Cremers
authors.affiliation: Leiden Institute for Brain and Cognition Leiden, Netherlands ; Department of Radiology, Leiden University Medical Center Leiden, Netherlands ; Division of Mind and Brain Research, Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, Charité Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Germany.
authors.forename: Ilya M
authors.initials: IM
authors.lastname: Veer
authors.affiliation: Leiden Institute for Brain and Cognition Leiden, Netherlands ; Institute of Psychology, Leiden University Leiden, Netherlands ; Department of Psychiatry, Leiden University Medical Center Leiden, Netherlands.
authors.forename: Philip
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Spinhoven
authors.affiliation: Leiden Institute for Brain and Cognition Leiden, Netherlands ; Department of Radiology, Leiden University Medical Center Leiden, Netherlands ; Institute of Psychology, Leiden University Leiden, Netherlands.
authors.forename: Serge A R B
authors.initials: SA
authors.lastname: Rombouts
authors.affiliation: Radboud University Nijmegen, Behavioral Science Institute Nijmegen, Netherlands ; Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behavior Nijmegen, Netherlands.
authors.forename: Karin
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Roelofs
keywords: fMRI; punishment; reward; social anxiety disorder; social incentives