The roles of inflammation, affect, and interoception in predicting social perception

Area of Science:

• Psychoneuroimmunology
• Social Psychology
• Affective Science

Background:

• Sickness behavior, a response to inflammation, includes fatigue and social withdrawal.
• Inflammation's impact on behavior can vary across individuals and contexts.
• Research on inflammation's nuanced behavioral effects is limited.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate how affective context and interoceptive difficulty influence social perception after an inflammatory challenge.
• To examine the interaction between inflammatory reactivity and affective context on social judgments.
• To explore the combined effects of interoceptive ability, inflammation, and affective context on social perception.

Main Methods:

• Induced inflammation using the influenza vaccine and measured interleukin-6 (IL-6) levels.
• Manipulated affective context via an affect misattribution task using positive/negative primes.
• Assessed interoceptive difficulty using a self-report measure.
• Evaluated trustworthiness judgments of neutral faces.

Main Results:

• Significant interaction between inflammatory reactivity and affective context on social perception.
• Individuals with higher inflammatory reactivity showed increased bias from affective context.
• Interoceptive difficulty and affective context interacted, with greater difficulty leading to more contextual bias.
• Inflammation amplified the impact of affective cues on social decision-making.

Conclusions:

• Inflammation can heighten the influence of affective cues in social decision-making.
• Findings support the role of interoceptive ability in using affect-as-information, particularly in the context of inflammation.
• This study provides novel insights into the interplay between inflammation, individual differences, and social perception.