Previous research has found that our social experiences, positive and negative, can influence the brain. This includes both early-life challenges (like abuse) and later-life challenges (like social isolation). But researchers have not yet determined how these experiences interact with each other, nor have they spelled out all the implications of how they shape the brain. Given that social experiences are critical factors in our well-being, and in the well-being of society as a whole, these are important outstanding questions. Our project takes steps toward answering them in a set of three analyses that we will perform over the next few years. First, we will investigate whether loneliness changes the impact that early-life adversity has on the brain. We predict that it will magnify adversity-related differences in the connectivity of the brain. Next, we will use neural networks to explore how adversity-related differences in the brain change its learning and memory ability. Finally, we will test if differences in the connectivity of the “social brain” changes the risk of getting lonely and isolated after a stroke. We expect that decreased connections will make people more vulnerable to these outcomes. Together, our project will shed light on how social experiences contribute to our day-to-day well-being by way of the brain.
