Social effort discounting reveals domain-general and social-specific motivation components.

BACKGROUND: Social motivation is crucial for healthy interpersonal connections and is impaired in a subset of the general population and across many psychiatric disorders. However, compared to nonsocial (e.g., monetary) motivation, social motivation has been understudied in quantitative behavioral work, especially regarding willingness to exert social effort. We developed a novel social effort discounting task, paired with a monetary task to examine motivational specificity. We expected social task performance would relate to general motivation also show selective relationships with self-reported avoidance tendencies and with sociality. METHODS: An analyzed sample of 397 participants performed the social and nonsocial effort discounting task online, along with self-report measures of various aspects of motivation and psychiatric symptomatology. RESULTS: Social and nonsocial task motivation correlated strongly (rho=0.71 p<0.001). Both social and nonsocial task motivation related similarly to self-reported general motivation (social ß=0.16; nonsocial ß=0.13) and to self-reported approach motivation (social ß=0.14; nonsocial ß=0.11), with this common effect captured by a significant main effect across social and nonsocial conditions. Significant condition interaction effects supported a selective relationship of social task motivation with self-reported sociality and also with avoidance motivation. CONCLUSIONS: Our novel social effort discounting task revealed both domain-general and social-specific components of motivation. In combination with other measures, this approach can facilitate further investigation of common and dissociable neurobehavioral mechanisms, in order to better characterize normative and pathological variation and develop personalized interventions targeting specific contributors to social impairment.

Relationship of ventral striatum activation during effort discounting to clinical amotivation severity in schizophrenia.

Motivational deficits play a central role in disability due to negative symptoms of schizophrenia (SZ), but limited pathophysiological understanding impedes critically needed therapeutic development. We applied an fMRI Effort Discounting Task (EDT) that quantifies motivation using a neuroeconomic decision-making approach, capturing the degree to which effort requirements produce reductions in the subjective value (SV) of monetary reward. An analyzed sample of 21 individuals with SZ and 23 group-matched controls performed the EDT during fMRI. We hypothesized that ventral striatum (VS) as well as extended brain motivation circuitry would encode SV, integrating reward and effort costs. We also hypothesized that VS hypoactivation during EDT decisions would demonstrate a dimensional relationship with clinical amotivation severity, reflecting greater suppression by effort costs. As hypothesized, VS as well as a broader cortico-limbic network were activated during the EDT and this activation correlated positively with SV. In SZ, activation to task decisions was reduced selectively in VS. Greater VS reductions correlated with more severe clinical amotivation in SZ and across all participants. However, these diagnosis and amotivation effects could not be explained by the response to parametric variation in reward, effort, or model-based SV. Our findings demonstrate that VS hypofunction in schizophrenia is manifested during effort-based decisions and reflects dimensional motivation impairment. Dysfunction of VS impacting effort-based decision-making can provide a target for biomarker development to guide novel efforts to assess and treat disabling amotivation.

Association of Missense Mutation in FOLH1 With Decreased NAAG Levels and Impaired Working Memory Circuitry and Cognition.

OBJECTIVE: Altering the metabotropic glutamate receptor 3 (mGluR3) by pharmacology or genetics is associated with differences in learning and memory in animals and humans. GRM3 (the gene coding for mGluR3) is also genome-wide associated with risk for schizophrenia. The neurotransmitter N-acetyl-aspartyl-glutamate (NAAG) is the selective endogenous agonist of mGluR3, and increasing NAAG may improve cognition. Glutamate carboxypeptidase II (GCPII), coded by the gene folate hydrolase 1 (FOLH1), regulates the amount of NAAG in the synapse. The goal of this study was to determine the relationship between FOLH1, NAAG levels, measures of human cognition, and neural activity associated with cognition. METHODS: The effects of genetic variation in FOLH1 on mRNA expression in human brain and NAAG levels using 7-T magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS) were measured. NAAG levels and FOLH1 genetic variation were correlated with measures of cognition in subjects with psychosis and unaffected subjects. Additionally, FOLH1 genetic variation was correlated with neural activity during working memory, as measured by functional MRI (fMRI). RESULTS: A missense mutation in FOLH1 (rs202676 G allele) was associated with increased FOLH1 mRNA in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex of brains from unaffected subjects and schizophrenia patients. This FOLH1 variant was associated with decreased NAAG levels in unaffected subjects and patients with psychosis. NAAG levels were positively correlated with visual memory performance. Carriers of the FOLH1 variant associated with lower NAAG levels had lower IQ scores. Carriers of this FOLH1 variant had less efficient cortical activity during working memory. CONCLUSIONS: These data show that higher NAAG levels are associated with better cognition, suggesting that increasing NAAG levels through FOLH1/GCPII inhibition may improve cognition. Additionally, NAAG levels measured by MRS and cortical efficiency during working memory measured by fMRI have the potential to be neuroimaging biomarkers for future clinical trials.

Nimodipine improves cortical efficiency during working memory in healthy subjects.

The L-type calcium channel gene, CACNA1C, is a validated risk gene for schizophrenia and the target of calcium channel blockers. Carriers of the risk-associated genotype (rs1006737 A allele) have increased frontal cortical activity during working memory and higher CACNA1C mRNA expression in the prefrontal cortex. The aim of this study was to determine how the brain-penetrant calcium channel blocker, nimodipine, changes brain activity during working memory and other cognitive and emotional processes. We conducted a double-blind randomized cross-over pharmacoMRI study of a single 60 mg dose of oral nimodipine solution and matching placebo in healthy men, prospectively genotyped for rs1006737. With performance unchanged, nimodipine significantly decreased frontal cortical activity by 39.1% and parietal cortical activity by 42.8% during the N-back task (2-back > 0-back contrast; PFWE < 0.05; n = 28). Higher peripheral nimodipine concentrations were correlated with a greater decrease in activation in the frontal cortex. Carriers of the risk-associated allele, A (n = 14), had a greater decrease in frontal cortical activation during working memory compared to non-risk allele carriers. No differences in brain activation were found between nimodipine and placebo for other tasks. Future studies should be conducted to test if the decreased cortical brain activity after nimodipine is associated with improved working memory performance in patients with schizophrenia, particularly those who carry the risk-associated genotype. Furthermore, changes in cortical activity during working memory may be a useful biomarker in future trials of L-type calcium channel blockers.