ABSTRACT

John Cacioppo has compared loneliness to hunger or thirst in that it signals that one needs to act and repair what is lacking. This paper reviews Cacioppo’s and others’ contributions to our understanding of neural mechanisms underlying social motivation in humans and in other social species. We focus particularly on the dopaminergic reward system and try to integrate evidence from animal models and human research. In rodents, objective social isolation leads to increased social motivation, mediated by the brains’ mesolimbic dopamine system. In humans, social rejection can lead to either increased or decreased social motivation, and is associated with activity in the insular cortex; while chronic loneliness is typically associated with decreased social motivation but has been associated with altered dopaminergic responses in the striatum. This mixed pattern of cross-species similarities and differences may arise from the substantially different methods used to study unmet social needs across species, and suggests the need for more direct and deliberate cross-species comparative research in this critically important domain.

摘要

John Cacioppo 将孤独比作饥饿或口渴，因为它表明人们需要采取行动并修复所缺乏的东西。本文回顾了 Cacioppo 和其他人对我们理解人类和其他社会物种社会动机的神经机制的贡献。我们特别关注多巴胺能奖励系统，并尝试整合来自动物模型和人类研究的证据。在啮齿动物中，客观的社会隔离导致社会动机增加，由大脑的中脑边缘多巴胺系统介导。在人类中，社会排斥会导致社会动机的增加或减少，并且与岛叶皮层的活动有关；虽然慢性孤独通常与社交动机降低有关，但与纹状体中多巴胺能反应的改变有关。