Real-life social contact increases affective well-being, social resilience measures

Real-life social contact led to higher affective well-being linked to social resilience measures, such as coping by seeking social support, according to results of a community-based cohort study published in JAMA Psychiatry.

“Here, we study increases in affective wellbeing in naturalistic social contexts, a concept that we call social affective benefit,” Gabriela Gan, PhD, of the department of psychiatry and psychotherapy at Heidelberg University in Germany, and colleagues wrote. “Unlike traditional inventory-based measures, which quantify differences between study participants, [social affective benefit] reflects within-person social affective reactivity by quantifying the degree to which momentary affective valence increases with momentary social contact in real-life ambulatory assessments. Despite its relevance for mental health, the fundamental human experience of [social affective benefit] is underresearched and its neural basis is unknown.”

The researchers analyzed data of 277 healthy young adults who reported their daily-life social contact and affective valence across 1 week via smartphone-based electronic diaries, with participants having answered a mean of 10.2 e-diary prompts per day. They also completed social and psychological inventories.

Gan and colleagues noted a significant association between increased affective valence within participants in both the discovery and replication sample. Regression modeling showed a significant association between higher individual daily-life social affective benefit and higher gray matter volume in a cluster mapping to the transition area of dorsal and perigenual anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). The ACC was the only brain area that demonstrated significant associations with social affective benefit. The researchers noted a correlation between individual daily-life social affective benefit, but not ACC gray matter volume, and social competence factor scores, which capture the social resilience measures’ variance. Social affective benefit and ACC gray matter volume were not correlated with other component analysis factors, such as psychological risk and other coping.

“Study limitations including our cross-sectional design limit inferences associated with the directionality of associations,” Gan and colleagues wrote. “Further experiments are needed to disentangle the causal mechanisms underlying the interplay between ACC structural integrity, mood and social contact. Specifically, mobile health experiments could clarify the relationship between social contact and affective well-being and pave the way for mobile health interventions mitigating daily-life social symptoms in vulnerable populations.”