The Hippocampus and Social Impairment in Psychiatric Disorders

Social deficits, such as poor social skills (i.e., the inability to engage in appropriate and effective social interactions) and social withdrawal, are prevalent across psychiatric disorders and often co-occur with hippocampal structural and functional abnormalities. The centrality of both social and hippocampal dysfunction in psychiatric research prompts the question: Are they linked? The social cognitive map framework provides a clue: The hippocampus tracks social information in the physical environment, maps others along social dimensions, and supports social memory and decision-making. Hippocampal dysfunction might disrupt social map representation and contribute to commonly seen social behavioral symptoms. This review summarizes evidence for the role of the hippocampus in social cognitive mapping, followed by evidence that hippocampal dysfunction and social dysfunction co-occur in psychiatric disorders. We argue that the co-occurrence of hippocampal and social impairment may be related via hippocampal social cognitive mapping.