No Strong Evidence That Social Network Index is Associated with Gray Matter Volume from a Data-driven Investigation

Overview

Journal Cortex

Specialties Neurology
Psychology
Social Sciences

Date 2020 Mar 1

PMID 32113045

Citations 7

Authors

Chujun Lin

Umit Keles

J Michael Tyszka

Marcos Gallo

Lynn Paul

Ralph Adolphs

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

Recent studies in adult humans have reported correlations between individual differences in people's Social Network Index (SNI) and gray matter volume (GMV) across multiple regions of the brain. However, the cortical and subcortical loci identified are inconsistent across studies. These discrepancies might arise because different regions of interest were hypothesized and tested in different studies without controlling for multiple comparisons, and/or from insufficiently large sample sizes to fully protect against statistically unreliable findings. Here we took a data-driven approach in a pre-registered study to comprehensively investigate the relationship between SNI and GMV in every cortical and subcortical region, using three predictive modeling frameworks. We also included psychological predictors such as cognitive and emotional intelligence, personality, and mood. In a sample of healthy adults (n = 92), neither multivariate frameworks (e.g., ridge regression with cross-validation) nor univariate frameworks (e.g., univariate linear regression with cross-validation) showed a significant association between SNI and any GMV or psychological feature after multiple comparison corrections (all R-squared values ≤ .1). These results emphasize the importance of large sample sizes and hypothesis-driven studies to derive statistically reliable conclusions, and suggest that future meta-analyses will be needed to more accurately estimate the true effect sizes in this field.

Citing Articles

Social network size, empathy, and white matter: A diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) study.

Veerareddy A, Fang H, Safari N, Xu P, Krueger F Cogn Affect Behav Neurosci. 2024; 25(2):471-487.

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Neural signatures of social inferences predict the number of real-life social contacts and autism severity.

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Impact of social isolation on grey matter structure and cognitive functions: A population-based longitudinal neuroimaging study.

Lammer L, Beyer F, Luppa M, Sanders C, Baber R, Engel C Elife. 2023; 12.

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Amygdala but not hippocampal damage associated with smaller social network size.

Beadle J, Heller A, Rosenbaum R, Davidson P, Tranel D, Duff M Neuropsychologia. 2022; 174:108311.

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