Wednesday, April 2, 2025
4/2/2025
Evaluating Social Brain Health in HIV: An RDoC-based approach - Evaluating Social Brain Health in HIV: An RDoC-based Approach In our daily life, we frequently interact with others (e.g., friends, staff at grocery stores). While these interactions may appear effortless, actually they rely on a complex set of abilities, as we constantly need to recognize social cues (e.g., emotional expressions of faces or voices) from others, infer their internal mental states (e.g., intentions, emotions), and make appropriate responses. Difficulties in any of these abilities could substantially affect how one navigates social environment and harnesses social resources needed to manage a complex disease like HIV. A large body of work in social neuroscience has established that this set of abilities to process socially relevant information from oneself and others—referred to as social cognition—is crucial for efficient social functioning, is distinct from neurocognition (e.g., verbal memory), and is linked to a unique set of brain regions, including the temporo-parietal junction, amygdala, and dorsal medial prefrontal cortex. These brain areas are collectively known as social brain. The NIMH Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) project selected social cognition as one of the “fundamental aspects of human behavior” with well-established neurobiological mechanisms, and encouraged researchers to evaluate social cognition across multiple levels of assessments (e.g., neural, behavioral) to better understand mechanisms underlying poor social functioning and identify novel treatment targets. While there is urgency to examine the neurobiological processes and heterogeneity of neurocognitive impairments in people with HIV (PWH), much less attention has been given to research on social brain in PWH. This is unfortunate, as in-depth mechanistic investigation of social brain has led to successful evaluation of novel interventions using imaging-based biomarkers to improve social functioning in other populations. To address this knowledge gap, using an RDoC-based approach, this project aims to evaluate a hypothesis that social brain function is compromised in PWH, which can in turn lead to inefficient social functioning. This hypothesis was developed by synthesizing evidence across multiple lines of work, including our own. With well-validated paradigms and state-of-the-art fMRI tools, we will examine neural circuits and performance related to two core RDoC-recommended social cognitive constructs: Perceiving Social Cues (i.e., facial expression, prosody) and Understanding Others (i.e., belief, emotion). We will also examine the relationships between social cognition, neurocognition, and social functioning in PWH. By systematically evaluating this hypothesis using an RDoC-based approach, the findings of this project could offer mechanistic knowledge about HIV-associated CNS complications, insights into the heterogeneity of neurocognitive impairments in PWH, and novel treatment targets for improving brain health and quality of life of PWH, consistent with NIH Office of AIDS Research priority.
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