Relationships as psychological protective factors: Neural and behavioral markers

描述(由申请人提供)：人际关系对个人的身心健康至关重要；例如，社会孤立是导致死亡、心血管疾病和情绪障碍的一个强大的风险因素。这一现象的主要科学模型认为，社会关系通过缓冲压力来增强健康：在支持他人的情况下减少压力反应。尽管压力缓冲提供了相当大的解释力，但并不是所有的关系都能减少个人的压力；某些形式的支持无法减少--甚至会恶化--压力的主观和生理指标。科学家们已经开始研究人际关系和支持行为的具体特征，这些行为可能会缓和人际关系对压力和心理健康的影响，但这些努力至少在两个方面受到了限制。首先，这项工作几乎完全集中在关系层面的压力缓冲预测因素(例如，婚姻满意度)，而不是有效缓冲他人压力的个人特征。这一点尤其重要，因为关于同理心的研究表明，有洞察力地理解他人的情感状态(同理心的准确性)并倾向于替代地分享这些状态(影响分享)的人，也可能从事亲社会和适应性的人际行为。其次，现有的研究倾向于使用自然主义的自我报告措施(例如，每日日记)或控制实验室任务来检查压力缓冲，但很少结合这些技术，阻止了通过每种方法获得的知识的整合。这项拟议的工作将解决这些知识上的差距，并提出一个多层次的、综合的、概念上新颖的压力缓冲模型。这一模型假设，有同情心的个体提供高质量的支持，进而减少支持接受者的压力和负面情绪。我们将使用我们团队最近开发的混合实验室和现场范例来测试这个模型。我们将选择一对亲密的朋友，并通过移情准确度的行为标记物-我们开发的准确性任务的表现-以及我们也开发的情感分享的神经标记物-个体在观看他们的朋友获得金钱奖励时参与中脑边缘多巴胺能靶标，来检查每对亲密朋友中的一人的同理心。然后，朋友们将完成每天的日记，报告他们的压力和社会支持模式。最后，我们将从朋友对的其他成员那里收集白天唾液皮质醇的样本-一种衡量应激反应的典型神经内分泌指标-以及持续威胁和损失的报告(负价系统RDoC域的子域)。我们预测，支持提供者的共情神经和行为标记物将预测支持接受者对压力的内分泌反应减少，以及主观持续威胁和损失的减少，并且这种关系将通过高共鸣个体提供的支持质量来调节。这些数据将提供关于心理健康的社会基础的多个新见解，并为旨在广泛改善心理健康的翻译工作铺平道路。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Relationships vitally support individuals' physical and mental health; social isolation, for instance, constitutes a powerful risk factor for mortality, cardiovascular disease, and mood disorders. The predominant scientific model of this phenomenon holds that social ties bolster health through stress buffering: reduced stress reactivity in the presence of supportive others. Although stress buffering offers considerable explanatory power, not all relationships reduce individuals' stress; some forms of support fail to reduce-and can even worsen-subjective and physiological indices of stress. Scientists have begun to examine the specific features of relationships and support behaviors that may moderate the effects of relationships on stress and mental health, but these efforts have been limited in at least two ways. First, this work focuses almost exclusively on relationship-level predictors of stress buffering (e.g., marital satisfaction) as opposed to characteristics of individuals who effectively buffer others' stress. This is especially important because research on empathy suggests that individuals who insightfully understand others' affective states (empathic accuracy) and tend to vicariously share those states (affect sharing) might also engage in prosocial and adaptive interpersonal behaviors. Second, existing work has tended to examine stress buffering using naturalistic self-report measures (e.g., daily diaries) or controlle laboratory tasks, but has rarely combined these techniques, preventing an integration of knowledge garnered by each approach. The proposed work will address these gaps in knowledge and propose a multilevel, integrative, and conceptually novel model of stress buffering. This model posits that empathic individuals provide high quality support that, in turn, reduces support recipients' stress and negative affect. We will test this model using a hybrid laboratory and field paradigm our group has recently developed. We will select pairs of close friends and examine empathy in one member of each pair through a behavioral marker of empathic accuracy-performance on an accuracy task we have developed-and a neural marker of affect sharing we have also developed-individuals' engagement of mesolimbic dopaminergic targets while watching their friend receive monetary prizes. Friend pairs will then complete daily diaries reporting on their patterns of stress and social support. Finally, we will collect samples f diurnal salivary cortisol-a canonical neuroendocrine measure of stress reactivity-and reports of sustained threat and loss (subdomains of the Negative Valence Systems RDoC domain), from the other member of the friend pair. We predict that neural and behavioral markers of empathy in support providers will predict support recipients' reductions in endocrine responses to stress, as well as reductions in subjective sustained threat and loss, and that this relationship will be mediated by the quality of support high empathy individuals provide. These data will provide multiple novel insights concerning the social underpinnings of psychological well-being and pave the way for translational work aimed at improving mental health on a broad scale.