Keely Muscatell

University of California, Berkeley | UCB · Department of Psychology

Experiences within one's social environment shape neural sensitivity to threatening and rewarding social cues. However, in racialized societies like the U.S., youth from minoritized racial/ethnic backgrounds can have different experiences and perceptions within neighborhoods that share similar characteristics. The current study examined how neighbo...

Objective: To examine social connection as a protective factor against exam stress. Participants: 55 undergraduate students at two universities. Methods: Students were evaluated on an exam day for their hardest class and at baseline, a day in a week where they had no exams. Social connection, salivary cortisol, perceived stress, and cognitive contr...

Moral psychology has long debated whether moral judgment is rooted in harm vs. affect. We reconcile this debate with the Affective Harm Account (AHA) of moral judgment. The AHA understands harm as an intuitive perception (i.e., perceived harm), and divides "affect" into two: embodied visceral arousal (i.e., gut feelings) and stimulus-directed affec...

Socioeconomic inequities shape physical health and emotional well-being. As such, recent work has examined the neural mechanisms through which socioeconomic position (SEP) may influence health. However, there remain critical gaps in knowledge regarding the relationships between SEP and brain function. These gaps include a lack of research on: (1) t...

Socioeconomic inequities shape physical health and emotional well-being. As such, recent work has examined the neural mechanisms through which socioeconomic position (SEP) may influence health. However, there remain critical gaps in knowledge regarding the relationships between SEP and brain function. These gaps include a lack of research on: (1) t...

Behavior that helps, supports, or protects others-or prosocial behavior-has emerged as a health-relevant behavior that can promote the giver's well-being, yet whether prosocial behavior protects against the effects of a major, ongoing chronic stressor warrants further examination. Thus, in the context of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, we examined whet...

Self-enhancement, the tendency to view oneself positively, is a pervasive social motive widely investigated in the psychological sciences. Relatively little is known about the neurocognitive mechanisms underlying this motive, specifically in social-evaluative situations. To investigate whether positive emotion regulation circuitry, circuitry involv...

This chapter reviews the neural and physiological mechanisms that may underlie socioeconomic disparities in global mental health through a cultural neuroscience lens. First, it discusses the cultural and psychological processes (namely, interdependence and “cultural mismatch”) that may be experienced by individuals with lower socioeconomic status (...

This handbook is currently in development, with individual articles publishing online in advance of print publication. At this time, we cannot add information about unpublished articles in this handbook, however the table of contents will continue to grow as additional articles pass through the review process and are added to the site. Please note...

As humans, we face a variety of social stressors on a regular basis. Given the established role of social stress in influencing physical and psychological functioning, researchers have focused immense efforts on understanding the psychological and physiological changes induced by exposure to acute social stressors. With the advancement of functiona...

Recent evidence suggests differential patterns of social behavior following an inflammatory challenge, such that increases in inflammation may not uniformly lead to social withdrawal. Indeed, increases in inflammation have been associated with enhanced self-reported motivation to approach a specific close other, and greater neural sensitivity to po...

Background Recent pre-clinical data suggest that increases in inflammation may not uniformly lead to social withdrawal. However, no known human research has examined the association between inflammation and approach and withdrawal behavior, nor how that behavior may differ based on whether the target is a close other or stranger. Methods 31 adult...

Decades of research in animals and humans show that inflammation is an important regulator of social behavior. While much research in this area has concluded that inflammation causes a withdrawal from social interaction, closer examination of the literature reveals that the effects of inflammation on social behavior are much more nuanced. Indeed, w...

Objective: Beta-adrenergic receptor signaling, a critical mediator of sympathetic nervous system influences on physiology and behavior, has long been proposed as one contributor to subjective stress. Yet prior findings are surprisingly mixed about whether beta-blockade (e.g., propranolol) blunts subjective stress, with many studies reporting no eff...

Self-enhancement, the tendency to view oneself positively, is a pervasive social motive widely investigated in social and personality psychology. Despite research on the topic over the past several decades, relatively little is known about the neurocognitive mechanisms underlying this motive, specifically in social evaluative situations. To investi...

The ability to learn from experience is critical for determining when to take risks and when to play it safe. However, we know little about how within-person state changes, such as an individual’s degree of neurophysiological arousal, may impact the ability to learn which risks are most likely to fail vs. succeed. To test this, we used a randomized...

Roughly twenty years of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies have investigated the neural correlates underlying engagement in social cognition (e.g., empathy, emotion perception) about targets spanning various social categories (e.g., race, gender). Yet findings from individual studies remain mixed. In the present quantitative funct...

Socioeconomic status (SES)-related health disparities persist for numerous chronic diseases, with lower-SES individuals exhibiting greater risk of morbidity and mortality compared to their higher-SES counterparts. One likely contributor is disparities in health messaging efforts, which are currently less effective for motivating health behavior cha...

Dysregulation of the immune system is one potential mechanism by which acute stress may contribute to downstream disease etiology and psychopathology. Here, we tested the role of beta-adrenergic signaling as a mediator of acute stress-induced changes in immune cell gene expression. In a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial, 90 healthy...

Socioeconomic status (SES), often conceptualized as income, education, or occupation, is associated with risk for disease morbidity and psychopathology. Recent research has focused on the potential biological mechanisms linking lower SES and poor outcomes; much of this work has examined the relationship between SES and markers of systemic inflammat...

Civic engagement can be empowering and might promote well-being, especially for individuals from marginalized backgrounds. This study uses a novel experimental approach to simulate civic engagement in a laboratory study and to test whether this approach engenders civic empowerment and buffers psychological and physiological reactivity to stress and...

Stress is often invoked as a potential contributor to disparities in physical health as a function of social status. Although there is good reason to believe that stress exposure and stress responses may be an important pathway linking lower social status to poor health, direct evidence is lacking. We summarize the evidence for this pathway and lim...

It has been established that inflammation leads to a variety of changes in social experience, but one area of social experience that has been overlooked is subjective social status. Furthermore, given sex differences in the relationship between inflammation and social status, males may be more sensitive to inflammation-induced changes in social sta...

Leptin and ghrelin are metabolic hormones central to energy regulation in the body. Theories of allostasis suggest that metabolism could matter for more than just food intake and weight regulation but also ultimately for psychological processes, such as affect and social cognition. Allostasis is the process by which the brain monitors ongoing physi...

Background: There are robust sex differences in the prevalence of depression. Inflammation and anhedonia may play a role in understanding these sex differences. Indeed, sex differences in inflammation-induced neural responses to reward may provide insight into the sex gaps in depression, but no study has examined this question. Methods: As such,...

Family assistance (helping the family) is associated with both positive and negative psychological and biological outcomes during adolescence. However, the association between family assistance and the hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal (HPA) axis remains unstudied. Thus, we assess how helping the family relates to adolescents’ diurnal cortisol, an ind...

Adolescence is a sensitive period for sociocultural development in which facets of social identity, including social status and race, become especially salient. Despite the heightened importance of both social status and race during this developmental period, no known work has examined how individual differences in social status influence perceptio...

Socioeconomic-based disparities in physical health outcomes are well established, with individuals from lower socioeconomic status (SES) backgrounds being more likely to experience chronic disease morbidity and early mortality compared to those from higher SES strata. While numerous studies in recent decades have focused on understanding the contex...

Although it has commonly been assumed that the immune system and the processes that govern social behavior are separate, non-communicating entities, research over the past several decades suggests otherwise. Thus, considerable evidence now shows that inflammatory processes and social behavior are actually powerful regulators of one another. This re...

Unlabelled: Adults with bipolar disorder (BD) and major depressive disorder (MDD) have higher circulating levels of proinflammatory cytokines than healthy controls. However, it is not known whether pediatric-onset patients with BD or MDD show increases in levels of inflammation or activation of nuclear factor kappa B (NF-κB), a key transcription f...

The dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC) is recruited when a person is socially rejected or negatively evaluated. However, it remains to be fully understood how this region responds to repeated exposure to personally-relevant social evaluation, in both healthy populations and those vulnerable to Major Depressive Disorder (MDD), as well as how re...

The dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC) is recruited when a person is socially rejected or negatively evaluated. However, it remains to be fully understood how this region responds to repeated exposure to personally-relevant social evaluation, in both healthy populations and those vulnerable to Major Depressive Disorder (MDD), as well as how re...

Social stratification has important implications for health and well-being, with individuals lower in standing in a hierarchy experiencing worse outcomes than those higher up the social ladder. Separate lines of past research suggest that alterations in inflammatory processes and neural responses to threat may link lower social status with poorer o...

Inflammation, part of the body's innate immune response, can lead to "sickness behaviors," as well as alterations in social and affective experiences. Elevated levels of pro-inflammatory cytokines have been associated with increased neural sensitivity to social rejection and social threat, but also decreased neural sensitivity to rewards. However,...

Self-affirmation (reflecting on important personal values) has been shown to have a range of positive effects; however, the neural basis of self-affirmation is not known. Building on studies showing that thinking about self-preferences activates neural reward pathways, we hypothesized that self-affirmation would activate brain reward circuitry duri...

Psychosocial stress can affect inflammatory processes that have important consequences for cancer outcomes and the behavioral side effects of cancer treatment. To date, however, little is known about the upstream neural processes that may link psychosocial stressors and inflammation in cancer patients and survivors. To address this issue, 15 women...

Loneliness is a distressing state indicating that one's basic need for social connection is not being met. In an effort to satisfy the need for social connection, loneliness may increase the processing of social cues and desire to connect with others. Yet the neural substrates that contribute to the drive for increased connection in response to lon...

Psychological stress is implicated in the etiology of many common chronic diseases and mental health disorders. Recent research suggests that inflammation may be a key biological mediator linking stress and health. Nevertheless, the neurocognitive pathways underlying stress-related increases in inflammatory activity are largely unknown. The present...

Although considerable research has shown that inflammation leads to social withdrawal more generally, it is also possible that inflammation leads to social approach when it comes to close others. Whereas it may be adaptive to withdraw from strangers when sick, it may be beneficial to seek out close others for assistance, protection, or care when si...

This volume examines the “New Wave” of research in cognitive neuroscience that has developed primarily in the last decade. It is divided into four sections. The first section looks at emotion and how it relates to perception and attention, as well as the link between emotion and cognition. It also discusses genetic and developmental approaches to e...

Psychological stress is a major risk factor for the development and progression of a number of diseases, including cardiovascular disease, cancer, arthritis, and major depression. A growing body of research suggests that long-term, stress-induced activation of the sympathetic nervous system (SNS) and the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis ma...

Although social withdrawal is a prominent symptom of sickness, the mechanisms associated with this behavioral change remain unclear. In animals, the amygdala is a key neural region involved in sickness-induced social withdrawal. Consistent with this, in humans, heightened amygdala activity to negative social cues is associated with social avoidance...

Recent studies have demonstrated that young adults can voluntarily suppress information from memory when directed to. After learning novel word pairings to criterion, participants are shown individual words and instructed either to "think" about the associated word, or to put it out of mind entirely ("no-think"). When given a surprise cued recall t...

On the basis of the importance of social connection for survival, humans may have evolved a "sociometer"-a mechanism that translates perceptions of rejection or acceptance into state self-esteem. Here, we explored the neural underpinnings of the sociometer by examining whether neural regions responsive to rejection or acceptance were associated wit...

Using a rapid serial visual presentation task, the authors examined how the emotional valence of a word affected young and older adults' abilities to detect another word that closely followed it in temporal proximity. Both age groups detected neutral words better when such words followed a positive or negative arousing word rather than a neutral ar...

Neuroimaging studies have revealed a consistent overlap between brain regions involved in self-processing and those implicated in autobiographical memory. However, no study has directly tested how the degree of self-involvement with an event being remembered alters the neural circuitry engaged during memory retrieval. The present study compared hoc...

Older adults often show sustained attention toward positive information and an improved memory for positive events. Little is known about the neural changes that may underlie these effects, although recent research has suggested that older adults may show differential recruitment of prefrontal regions during the successful encoding of emotional inf...

Major life events and chronic difficulties have been found to be associated with the onset of depression. Little is known, however, about how exposure to such stressors is related to the clinical presentation of this disorder. We addressed this issue by administering an interview-based measure of life stress, the Beck Depression Inventory, and the...