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. 2022 Jun 29;12(7):855.
doi: 10.3390/brainsci12070855.

A Short Functional Neuroimaging Assay Using Attachment Scenes to Recruit Neural Correlates of Social Cognition-A Replication Study

Karin Labek  1 , Lisa Dommes  2 , Julia Eva Bosch  2 , Matthias Schurz  1 , Roberto Viviani  1   2 , Anna Buchheim  1
Affiliations

A Short Functional Neuroimaging Assay Using Attachment Scenes to Recruit Neural Correlates of Social Cognition-A Replication Study

Karin Labek et al. Brain Sci. .

Abstract

Attachment theory provides a conceptual framework to understand the impact of early child-caregiver experiences, such as loss or separation, on adult functioning and psychopathology. In the current study, scenes from the Adult Attachment Projective Picture System (AAP), a validated, commonly used standardized diagnostic instrument to assess adult attachment representations, were used to develop a short fMRI assay eliciting the neural correlates of encoding of potentially hurtful and threatening social situations such as social losses, rejections or loneliness. Data from healthy participants (N = 19) showed activations in brain areas associated with social cognition and semantic knowledge during exposure to attachment-related scenes compared to control scenes. Extensive activation of the temporal poles was observed, suggesting the use of semantic knowledge for generating social concepts and scripts. This knowledge may underlie our ability to explain and predict social interactions, a specific aspect of theory of mind or mentalization. In this replication study, we verified the effectiveness of a modified fMRI assay to assess the external validity of a previously used imaging paradigm to investigate the processing of emotionally negatively valenced and painful social interactions. Our data confirm the recruitment of brain areas associated with social cognition with our very short neuroimaging assay.

Keywords: adult attachment projective picture system; attachment theory; fMRI; mentalization; replication; social cognition.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Illustration of four examples of the attachment scenes (top) (© George and West, 2012; all rights reserved). Example of a scene in the attachment version (A), the control version (B) and the scrambled scene version (C) (bottom).
Figure 2
Figure 2
The red/orange areas illustrate activations elicited by the contrast attachment scenes vs. control stimuli (A) in the angular gyrus/superior temporal gyrus on the left side and the superior temporal gyrus on the right (B) spreading into the temporal poles. Activations shown as parametric maps of t-values overlaid on a template T1-weigthed brain. For illustration purposes, statistical maps were thresholded at p = 0.005 uncorrected.
Figure 3
Figure 3
Radar chart showing most relevant topics of the Pearson correlations generated between statistical t-map of our main results and the Neurosynth term-based reverse inference activation maps database (www.neurosynth.org [16]). The decoder was used to compare the non-threshold statistical t-maps (negative values not included) with the statistical maps automatically generated by the Neurosynth database. Depicted above are the extracted topics together with the coefficient values. The results with the highest convergence (Pearson’s r) are shown. Abbreviations: AutobioMemo, autobiographical memory; DMN, default mode network; SemMemo, semantic memory; ToM, Theory of Mind.
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