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Acute social isolation evokes midbrain craving responses similar to hunger

Nature Neuroscience volume 23, pages 1597–1605 (2020)Cite this article

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An Author Correction to this article was published on 06 January 2022

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Abstract

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.

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Fig. 1: Overview of the experimental procedures.
Fig. 2: Behavioral results.
Fig. 3: Univariate activity in response to food fasting and social isolation.
Fig. 4: Multivoxel pattern analysis.
Fig. 5: Univariate activity in response to food fasting and social isolation within the striatum.

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Data availability

All de-identified neuroimaging data are publicly available on OpenNeuro.org at https://doi.org/10.18112/openneuro.ds003242.v1.0.0. Summary fMRI and behavioral data are publicly available on the OSF at https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/F9CRU. Stimuli for the tasks were taken from the open image-sharing website https://www.pexels.com.

Code availability

Analysis code, code to generate the figures, is publicly available on the OSF at https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/F9CRU. Code to run the tasks with example stimuli is also publicly available on the OSF at https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/CF2RT.

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Acknowledgements

This research was carried out at the Athinoula A. Martinos Imaging Center at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT. We thank K. Sottilare, M. Humphreys, J. Huettig, R. Ezzo, J. Weddington, J. Kennedy, M. Hung and I. Nichoson for help with data collection and thank D. Tamir, J. Mildner, H. Richardson, S. Liu, E. Duzel, N. Kanwisher and D. Nettle for advice and discussion. We also thank A. Gupta for his help making the fMRI dataset publicly available. Support for this project came from an SFARI Explorer Grant from the Simons Foundation (grant no. 597310 to R.S.), a MINT grant from the McGovern Institute (grant no. 1496911to R.S.), an NIH Pioneer Award (no. DP1-AT009925 to K.M.T.), a Max Kade Foundation fellowship (to L.T.), an Erwin Schroedinger Fellowship by the Austrian Science Fund (no. J4326 to L.T.) and an NIH shared instrumentation grant (no. 1S10OD021569-01). R.S. participated in the Center for Brains, Minds and Machines, funded by an NSF STC award (CCF-1231216).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Livia Tomova, Kimberly L. Wang, Todd Thompson & Rebecca Saxe

  2. Salk Institute for Biological Studies, La Jolla, CA, USA

    Gillian A. Matthews & Kay M. Tye

  3. McGovern Institute for Brain Research, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Atsushi Takahashi & Rebecca Saxe

  4. Center for Brains, Minds and Machines, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Rebecca Saxe

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Contributions

L.T. and R.S. designed the study with input from K.M.T. and G.A.M. A.T. provided support in optimizing the scanning parameters and during fMRI data collection. L.T. collected the data with support from K.L.W. L.T. analyzed the data with support from T.T. and R.S. L.T. and R.S. wrote the manuscript, and all the authors provided feedback on the final version.

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Correspondence to Livia Tomova.

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Tomova, L., Wang, K.L., Thompson, T. et al. Acute social isolation evokes midbrain craving responses similar to hunger. Nat Neurosci 23, 1597–1605 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41593-020-00742-z

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