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Brief Description:

Human imaging studies have for the first time identified brain circuitry associated with social status.

Transcript:

Balintfy: Human imaging studies have for the first time identified brain circuitry associated with social status.

Zink: It was quite striking. Very exciting.

Balintfy: Caroline Zink is a Ph.D. researcher with the National Institute of Mental Health's Genes Cognition and Psychosis Program. She explains that different brain areas are activated when a person moves up or down in a pecking order, or social hierarchy.

Zink: We've known behaviorally how important social hierarchies are when virtually everything we do; they basically define normal behavior—the way you act towards your boss is probably different than the way you act towards your best friend. But we've just never known what parts of the brain are processing this information and handling this information.

Balintfy: NIMH researchers created an artificial social-hierarchy in which volunteers played an interactive computer game for money. The players were assigned a status, that they were told was based on their skill. While their brain activity was monitored by a functional-MRI, the players intermittently saw pictures and scores of inferior and superior "players" who they thought were in other rooms. Dr. Zink says the study showed that looking at a superior individual, elicited a profound brain network of activations in areas related to attention and value, and social emotion.

Zink: And basically all the activity was always greater when looking at someone higher than you compared to lower than you. And we also showed that when we made it so the hierarchy was able to change, so throughout the game if the participant started doing very, very well they could move up in the hierarchy, and if they started performing worse they would move down in the hierarchy.

Balintfy: Although they knew the perceived players' scores would not affect their own outcomes or reward—and were instructed to ignore them—participants' brain activity and behavior were highly influenced by their position in the implied hierarchy. For more information on this and other NIMH studies, visit www.nimh.nih.gov. This is Joe Balintfy at the National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland.