Relationship status and perceived support in the social regulation of neural responses to threat

Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 2017, 1574–1583 doi: 10.1093/scan/nsx091 Advance Access Publication Date: 20 July 2017 Original article Relationship status and perceived support in the social regulation of neural responses to threat James A. Coan,1 Lane Beckes,2 Marlen Z. Gonzalez,1 Erin L. Maresh,1 Casey L. Brown,3 and Karen Hasselmo4 1 University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA 22904, USA, 2Bradley University, Peoria, IL, 61625, USA, 3University of California, Berkeley, CA, 94720, USA, and 4University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, 85721, USA Correspondence should be addressed to James A. Coan, Department of Psychology, University of Virginia, 102 Gilmer Hall, P.O. Box 400400, Charlottesville, VA 22904-4400, USA. E-mail: Abstract Strong social ties correspond with better health and well being, but the neural mechanisms linking social contact to health remain speculative. This study extends work on the social regulation of brain activity by supportive handholding in 110 participants (51 female) of diverse racial and socioeconomic origins. In addition to main effects of social regulation by handholding, we assessed the moderating effects of both perceived social support and relationship status (married, cohabiting, dating or platonic friends). Results suggest that, under threat of shock, handholding by familiar relational partners attenuates both subjective distress and activity in a network associated with salience, vigilance and regulatory self-control. Moreover, greater perceived social support corresponded with less brain activity in an extended network associated with similar processes, but only during partner handholding. In contrast, we did not observe any regulatory effects of handholding by strangers, and relationship status did not moderate the regulatory effects of partner handholding. These findings suggest that contact with a familiar relational partner is likely to attenuate subjective distress and a variety of neural responses associated with the presence of threat. This effect is likely enhanced by an individual’s expectation of the availability of support from their wider social network. Key words: perceived social support; attachment; handholding; threat; relationships; health Introduction The negative impact of poor or absent social relationships is comparable to smoking, alcohol consumption, high blood pressure and a sedentary lifestyle (Holt-Lunstad et al., 2010; House et al., 1988). Risk of all-cause death is more than twice as high for those with the fewest social ties as compared with those with the most (Berkman and Syme, 1979). There are specific risks associated with social isolation, too. For example, poor social relationships are associated with higher rates of cardiovascular disease, high blood pressure, diabetes and cancer (Ertel et al., 2009; Robles and Kiecolt-Glaser, 2003; Roper and Yorgason, 2009; Uchino, 2006). For those with strong social ties, wounds even heal more quickly (Detillion et al., 2004; Kiecolt-Glaser et al., 2005). But despite the unequivocal knowledge that strong social ties correspond with better health and well being, we still do not know how. To be sure, several mechanisms have been proposed, few or none of which are mutually exclusive. At the most basic level, social relationships provide instrumental support—tangible assistance and resources such as help acquiring food and shelter (House, 1981). Relational partners also encourage healthy diets, exercise, and adherence to medical advice (Musick et al., 2004; Umberson et al., 2010; Waite, 1995). In contrast, the buffering hypothesis (Cohen and Wills, 1985) suggests the association between relationships and health emerges primarily from the Received: 24 June 2016; Revised: 27 June 2017; Accepted: 11 July 2017 C The Author (2017). Published by Oxford University Press. V This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. For commercial re-use, please contact 1574 J. A. Coan et al. emotional support that others provide—support that reduces, for example, the level of threat one perceives during stressful situations (Cohen, 2004). In truth, both instrumental support and stress buffering are likely to play key roles, and they may interact. For example, instrumental support may be more likely and even more efficacious when provided by individuals with whom one feels a close bond (cf. Thoits, 2011). Several studies suggest that supportive social contact attenuates threat responding—dampening the impact of both physical and social threats on brain activity (Coan and Sbarra, 2015). For example, we have previously reported that simply holding a person’s hand while under threat may reduce activity in areas such as the prefrontal cortex, anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), caudate, and related regions putatively associated with emotional responding, top-down self control and emotion regulation, among other processes. Moreover, these reductions are likely to be moderated by things like familiarity, relationship quality, perceived mutuality, early maternal support, early neighborhood quality and trait anxiety (Coan et al., 2013a,b; Coan et al., 2006; Johnson et al., 2013; Maresh et al., 2013). Anxious children show less ventromedial prefrontal and hypothalamic activation in response to mildly threatening words when in the presence of a parent, even in the absence of supportive touch (Conner et al., 2012). Similar effects obtain when showing pictures of loved ones (Master et al., 2009; Younger et al., 2010), or even reminders of an attachment figure (Karremans et al., 2011). Perceived social support These effects likely reflect or indeed depend to various degrees upon the perceived availability of social resources. Interestingly, many have argued that perceived support, that is, one’s estimation of how available social resources are or will be, is not strongly associated with more objective measures of how much support a person actually receives (Reis et al., 2004). Moreover, perceived support may be more related to positive health outcomes than more objectively measured support, which suggests social support is substantially manifest at the psychological level (Reis et al., 2004; Sandler and Barrera, 1984). Others have challenged the notion that the primary mechanism linking social support to health is perceived support, presenting evidence, for example, that among older men and women social isolation was more consequential for longevity than subjective feelings of loneliness (Steptoe et al., 2013). And some have argued that the association between perceived and received support is strongest when people are under stress, or at least when the type of support needed is matched effectively to the type of support provided ( (...truncated)