Perigenual anterior cingulate morphology covaries with perceived social standing

Low socioeconomic status (SES) increases the risk for developing psychiatric and chronic medical disorders. A stress-related pathway by which low SES may affect mental and physical health is through the perception of holding a low social standing, termed low subjective social status. This proposal implicates overlapping brain regions mediating stress reactivity and socioemotional behaviors as neuroanatomical substrates that could plausibly link subjective social status to health-related outcomes. In a test of this proposal, we used a computational structural neuroimaging method (voxel-based morphometry) in a healthy community sample to examine the relationships between reports of subjective social status and regional gray matter volume. Results showed that after accounting for potential demographic confounds, subclinical depressive symptoms, dispositional forms of negative emotionality and conventional indicators of SES, self-reports of low subjective social status uniquely covaried with reduced gray matter volume in the perigenual area of the anterior cingulate cortex (pACC)—a brain region involved in experiencing emotions and regulating behavioral and physiological reactivity to psychosocial stress. The pACC may represent a neuroanatomical substrate by which perceived social standing relates to mental and physical health.

• Publication year

  2007

• Venue

  Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience

• Publication date

  2007-05-04

• Fields of study

  Medicine, Psychology

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1093/scan/nsm013PMID 18418472PMCID 2312334
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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