ArticleCerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991)2022
The Anatomy of Friendship: Neuroanatomic Homophily of the Social Brain among Classroom Friends.
Article in Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991), 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 5 papers.
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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.
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Who cites it
5 citing papers in PubMed.
- Intergenerational neuroimaging's present and future: Considering sex as a biological variable to enhance knowledge of brain development through parent-offspring similarity.Developmental cognitive neuroscience · 2025Review
- Neural similarity predicts whether strangers become friends.Nature human behaviour · 2025Article
- The influence of psychological distance and topic type on inter-brain synchronization of emotion perception during face-to-face communication: an fNIRS hyperscanning study.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2025Article
- Interactions between neural representations of the social and spatial environment.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Review
- Neurobiological correlates of the social and emotional impact of peer victimization: A review.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2022Review
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Homophily refers to the tendency to like similar others. Here, we ask if homophily extends to brain structure. Specifically: do children who like one another have more similar brain structures? We hypothesized that neuroanatomic similarity tied to friendship is most likely to pertain to brain regions that support social cognition. To test this hypothesis, we analyzed friendship network data from 1186 children in 49 classrooms. Within each classroom, we identified "friendship distance"-mutual friends, friends-of-friends, and more distantly connected or unconnected children. In total, 125 children (mean age = 7.57 years, 65 females) also had good quality neuroanatomic magnetic resonance imaging scans from which we extracted properties of the "social brain." We found that similarity of the social brain varied by friendship distance: mutual friends showed greater similarity in social brain networks compared with friends-of-friends (β = 0.65, t = 2.03, P = 0.045) and even more remotely connected peers (β = 0.77, t = 2.83, P = 0.006); friends-of-friends did not differ from more distantly connected peers (β = -0.13, t = -0.53, P = 0.6). We report that mutual friends have similar "social brain" networks, adding a neuroanatomic dimension to the adage that "birds of a feather flock together."
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