19.02.2025Social Apprehension: The Brain Is to Blame

Hoping for approval and fearing rejection by others – also known as social risk – is an emotion we are all familiar with, though some people experience it more intensely than others. But why is that? Where do these emotions originate? In fact, little is known about the neural mechanisms that process social risk.

Building on finance and economic theory, J.-C. Kim and P. Tobler, and co-authors have in a recent publication (Journal of Neuroscience) extended the concepts of risk as variance of outcomes and of subjective value of gains and losses beyond financial contexts. They examined how the brain evaluates variance in both nonsocial (e.g., food reward) and social (e.g., compliments) nonmonetary rewards. By measuring how much individuals were willing to pay for these rewards while varying variance risk, they captured individual risk attitudes.

Neuroimaging revealed that the amygdala, a small brain region that regulates emotions, encodes actual level of risk (objective risk) regardless of whether the risk is social or nonsocial. However, when it comes to individual’s perception of risk (subjective risk), connectivity between the amygdala and the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex – a region in the center of the brain – plays a key role. Stronger negative coupling between these two regions was associated with higher aversion to social risk. Thus, even though common brain circuits evaluate outcome variance in both social and non-social domains, the processing of social risk is differently influenced by the interplay between emotion-related (amygdala) and cognitive control (dorsal anterior cingulate) areas.

The data suggests that social risk, similar to financial risk, adheres to principles of finance and economic theory. The research elucidates the neural basis of non-monetary variance risk and provides a knowledge basis for disorders characterized by changed willingness to take social risks like social anxiety.