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Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience Advance Access published online on May 4, 2007
Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, doi:10.1093/scan/nsm013
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© 2007 The Author(s)
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/uk/) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Perigenual anterior cingulate morphology covaries with perceived social standing

Peter J. Gianaros1, Jeffrey A. Horenstein2, Sheldon Cohen2, Karen A. Matthews1, Sarah M. Brown1, Janine D. Flory3, Hugo D. Critchley4, Stephen B. Manuck5 and Ahmad R. Hariri1

1Departments of Psychiatry and Psychology, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, 2Department of Psychology, Carnegie Mellon University, 3Department of Psychology, Queens College/City University of New York, NY, USA, 4Brighton and Sussex Medical School, Brighton, UK, and 5Department of Psychology, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

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.

Keywords: anterior cingulate cortex; gray matter volume; socioeconomic status; subjective social status; stress

Correspondence should be addressed to Peter J. Gianaros, Department of Psychiatry, University of Pittsburgh, 3811 O’Hara Street, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA. E-mail: gianarospj{at}upmc.edu

Received March 1, 2007. Accepted March 30, 2007.


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