ArticleSocial cognitive and affective neuroscience2017
Relationship status and perceived support in the social regulation of neural responses to threat.
Article in Social cognitive and affective neuroscience, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 39 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
39 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 106 citations in OpenAlex.
- Social Support and Antibody Responses to Vaccination: A Meta-Analysis.Annals of behavioral medicine : a publication of the Society of Behavioral Medicine · 2020Pooled it
- A fNIRS hyperscanning study on enhancing intimacy through emotional self-disclosure from the discloser-responder perspective.BMC psychology · 2026Article
- Adolescent empathy predicts reduced neural responses to social rejection in adulthood.Development and psychopathology · 2026Article
- Physical Proximity With Social Support Regulates Vigilance to Threat: Evidence From Startle Reactivity During Emotional Stress Induction.Psychophysiology · 2026Article
- Social 'envirotyping' the ABCD study contextualizes dissociable brain organization and diverging outcomes.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2026Article
- Bluetooth-sensed social presence is associated with immediate vigor and delayed fatigue: A multi-method time series analysis.iScience · 2025Article
- Social Buffering of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder: Longitudinal Effects and Neural Mediators.Biological psychiatry. Cognitive neuroscience and neuroimaging · 2025Article
- Different ways to reach the same goal: Are the analgesic effects of different types of tactile stimuli similar?European journal of pain (London, England) · 2025Article
- Touch as emotion regulation.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Review
- How "Light" Is "Light Smoking"? On the Cognitive Power of Nicotine Dependence.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- The effects of parental presence on amygdala and mPFC activation during fear conditioning: An exploratory study.Developmental science · 2024Article
- Motivation and Pleasure Deficits Undermine the Benefits of Social Affiliation in Psychosis.Clinical psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science · 2024Article
- Connecting through touch: Attitudes toward touch in pregnancy are associated with couples' sexual and affectionate behaviors across the transition to parenthood.Journal of social and personal relationships · 2024Article
- Does attachment in adolescence predict neural responses to handholding in adulthood? A functional magnetic resonance imaging study.Journal of social and personal relationships · 2024Article
- Secure attachment priming inhibits the generalization of conditioned fear.BMC psychology · 2024Article
- Stability and variation of brain-behavior correlation patterns across measures of social support.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2024Article
- Violence Exposure and Trauma-Informed Care.Pediatric clinics of North America · 2023Review
- An investigation of simulated and real touch on feelings of loneliness.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Brain-to-brain mechanisms underlying pain empathy and social modulation of pain in the patient-clinician interaction.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Theory of brain complexity and marital behaviors: The application of complexity science and neuroscience to explain the complexities of marital behaviors.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
6 authors at 4 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
Strong social ties correspond with better health and well being, but the neural mechanisms linking social contact to health remain speculative. This study extends work on the social regulation of brain activity by supportive handholding in 110 participants (51 female) of diverse racial and socioeconomic origins. In addition to main effects of social regulation by handholding, we assessed the moderating effects of both perceived social support and relationship status (married, cohabiting, dating or platonic friends). Results suggest that, under threat of shock, handholding by familiar relational partners attenuates both subjective distress and activity in a network associated with salience, vigilance and regulatory self-control. Moreover, greater perceived social support corresponded with less brain activity in an extended network associated with similar processes, but only during partner handholding. In contrast, we did not observe any regulatory effects of handholding by strangers, and relationship status did not moderate the regulatory effects of partner handholding. These findings suggest that contact with a familiar relational partner is likely to attenuate subjective distress and a variety of neural responses associated with the presence of threat. This effect is likely enhanced by an individual's expectation of the availability of support from their wider social network.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.