Our proposal will investigate how neuronal coordination between the medial frontal cortex (MFC) and the basolateral amygdala (BLA) is causally involved in complex social interactions. We will capitalize on our newly developed social gaze interaction paradigm in pairs of rhesus macaques to understand the neurobiological mechanisms of MFC-BLA coupling, with a goal of working toward generating a macaque model of social dysfunction. We will first determine whether and how the two regions are coordinated during various social gaze events (e.g., looking at the eyes or mutual eye contact). We will then stimulate MFC, BLA or both in order to disrupt the MFC-BLA coordination to induce social gaze deficits. Finally, we will examine whether these disruptions are generalizable to other social domains by testing the impact of perturbing MFC-BLA coordination in a complex social decision-making game. Informed by these results, we hope to investigate in the future how pharmacological (systemic or focal drug manipulations) and behavioral (social interaction manipulations) interventions could effectively restore the inducible social deficits.

Public Health Relevance

Social dysfunctions found in numerous psychiatric disorders, such as autism, psychopathy, social anxiety, and major depressive disorders, are associated with impairments in integrating social information across the frontal cortices and the amygdala. We will investigate the neural mechanisms that guide these interactions and their causal contributions during real-life social gaze interactions by recording neuronal activity and disrupting the neuronal coordination. We will then test the generalizability of these disruptions in a complex social decision- making domain.

Agency
National Institute of Health (NIH)
Institute
National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH)
Type
Research Project (R01)
Project #
5R01MH110750-05
Application #
9900591
Study Section
Special Emphasis Panel (ZMH1)
Program Officer
Simmons, Janine M
Project Start
2016-07-01
Project End
2021-03-31
Budget Start
2020-04-01
Budget End
2021-03-31
Support Year
5
Fiscal Year
2020
Total Cost
Indirect Cost
Name
Yale University
Department
Psychology
Type
Schools of Arts and Sciences
DUNS #
043207562
City
New Haven
State
CT
Country
United States
Zip Code
06520
Stanton, Colin H; Holmes, Avram J; Chang, Steve W C et al. (2018) From Stress to Anhedonia: Molecular Processes through Functional Circuits. Trends Neurosci :
Dal Monte, Olga; Fan, Siqi; Chang, Steve W C (2018) Social subjective value in the primate midbrain. Nat Neurosci 21:1298-1299
Chang, Steve W C; Dal Monte, Olga (2018) Shining Light on Social Learning Circuits. Trends Cogn Sci 22:673-675
Piva, Matthew; Chang, Steve W C (2018) An integrated framework for the role of oxytocin in multistage social decision-making. Am J Primatol 80:e22735
Chang, Steve W C (2017) An Emerging Field of Primate Social Neurophysiology: Current Developments. eNeuro 4:
Dal Monte, Olga; Piva, Matthew; Anderson, Kevin M et al. (2017) Oxytocin under opioid antagonism leads to supralinear enhancement of social attention. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 114:5247-5252
Dal Monte, Olga; Piva, Matthew; Morris, Jason A et al. (2016) Live interaction distinctively shapes social gaze dynamics in rhesus macaques. J Neurophysiol 116:1626-1643