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221
To survive and reproduce, organisms must
take in more energy than they expend,
a principle of behavioral ecology called
economy of action (Krebs & Davies, 1993).
Social baseline theory (SBT), a framework
based on this principle, organizes decades
of observed links between social relation-
ships, health, and well-being, in order to
understand how humans utilize each other
as resources to optimize individual energy
expenditures. This general strategy helps us
manage the costs of our very long period of
ontogenetic development and, we argue, the
many behavioral and psychological capa-
bilities of our uniquely powerful and costly
brain (Smith, 2003). Below, we review evi-
dence that social relationships serve the
energy- saving functions that we claim and
describe the reasons SBT refers to social
proximity as a “baseline” condition. For
this chapter we place special emphasis on the
role of social proximity in the regulation of
emotion. In our view, the social regulation
of emotion serves, in the aggregate and on
average, to decrease the cost of coping with
many of life’s difficulties (Cohen & Hober-
man, 1983; Cohen & McKay, 1984)—a
function that involves the brain’s ability
to use both internal and external informa-
tion to make “bets” about how to deploy its
own resources in light of expected returns.
This perspective (1) highlights the impor-
tance of emotion as a source of information
about current and predicted resources, and
(2) entails a view of psychological measure-
ment that extends beyond the individual to
systemic processes within dyads and groups
(Schilbach et al., in press).
Social Proximity and the Economy
of Action
The economy of action suggests that adap-
tations to prevailing environmental con-
ditions must, at the very least, ensure that
more energy is acquired than lost (Krebs
& Davies, 1993). The alternative— more
energy out than in—leads ultimately to
death. But because environments are rife
with danger and competition, the economy
of action tends toward optimization, where
resources are both acquired and conserved
whenever possible. For example, foraging
animals optimize energy intake per unit
of time by abandoning even plentiful food
sources if the amount of energy (e.g., calo-
ries) acquired is not optimal (MacArthur
& Pianka, 1966; Schmidhempel, Kacelnik,
& Houston, 1985). Optimization strategies
CHAP T E R 14
Social Baseline Theory
and the Social Regulation of Emotion
James A. Coan
Erin L. Maresh
222 SOCIAL ASPECTS
are likely mediated through changes in sen-
sory perception. So simply wearing a heavy
backpack can make distances appear far-
ther away and hills seem steeper (Stefanucci,
Proffitt, Banton, & Epstein, 2005). Indeed,
it is increasingly apparent that perception is
influenced by not only the properties of sen-
sory stimuli but also emotions— emotions
that are themselves embodied instantia-
tions of prevailing circumstances, goals,
and physiological states (Stefanucci, Proffitt,
Clore, & Parekh, 2008).
SBT is rooted in the proposition that, for
humans, social proximity and interaction
powerfully optimize energy expenditures
(e.g., actual and perceived effort) devoted to
navigating potentially dangerous environ-
ments. Moreover, the best evidence suggests
these effects are mediated through rela-
tively automatic, bottom- up, unconditioned
perceptual mechanisms that modulate—
and regulate— emotional responding, as
opposed to mechanisms often associated
with the self-regulation of emotion (e.g., the
dorsolateral [dlPFC] and ventromedial pre-
frontal cortex [vmPFC]). SBT invokes the
economy of action here, too, by suggesting
that perceptual mechanisms of the central
nervous system are “inexpensive”1 when
compared to more effortful, self- regulatory,
vigilant, “future- thinking” processes associ-
ated with the operation of the PFC—a dif-
ference that leads to both phylogenetic and
ontogenetic pressures to achieve regulatory
ends by perceptual and hence social means.
We suggest that the ability to depend on oth-
ers for as many costly processes as possible
leads to (1) decreased overall cost in deal-
ing with an uncertain and potentially deadly
environment, and (2) pressure— throughout
the lifespan and over the course of evolu-
tion— to form and maintain close social
relationships.
Before going any further, we would like to
emphasize three important points. First, our
view of social emotion regulation does not
imply that any and all effects an individual’s
behavior may have on the emotional behav-
ior of another constitute regulatory effects.
If one individual insults or compliments
another, either behavior could cause the
receiver to activate an emotional response.
This would not, however, constitute an
instance of emotion regulation. An indi-
vidual regulates another’s emotions when
his or her behavior (which might encompass
social history with the other person, an offer
of aid, or simply close physical proximity)
influences another’s emotional response to
some additional current or potential stimu-
lus or situation. Second, we acknowledge
that people vary in the extent to which they
both seek out and derive benefit from social
contact (leading to individual differences in
the broad processes described here). But on
average and in the aggregate, it is probably
the case that for humans and other social
mammals, proximity to social resources
reduces the net cost of survival. Third,
although most of the empirical evidence we
review entails the regulatory impact of social
proximity and interaction on the regulation
of negative affect, we do not intend to argue
that negative affect is the only broad form of
emotional responding that can be regulated.
Indeed, below we address some instances of
the social regulation of positive emotion.
Our Social Baseline
There is little doubt that supportive social
behaviors can modify or quell our subjec-
tive, behavioral, and physiological responses
to stress (Holt- Lunstad, Smith, & Lay-
ton, 2010). Such effects are likely rooted
in human phylogeny. Indeed, Beckes and
Coan (2011) and others (Berscheid, 2003;
Brewer & Caporeal, 1990) have suggested
that the dominant ecology to which humans
are adapted is not any one terrain, diet, or
climate, but rather each other. One of the
defining features of human beings— our
adaptability— is yoked to our ability to
cooperate with others, an ability that was
likely shaped by periods of great environ-
mental instability (Richerson, Bettinger,
& Boyd, 2005). Cooperative behavior was
likely selected as a means of managing the
energy costs of our exceedingly expensive
bodies, brains, and activities (Hill et al.,
2011; McNally, Brown, & Jackson, 2012;
Moll & Tomasello, 2007). So the first sense
in which SBT refers to a social baseline is
that social relatedness and its psychological
correlates constitute the normal, baseline
ecology of the functional human brain. That
is, the human brain is designed to operate
within a relatively predictable network of
social relationships characterized by famil-
Social Baseline Theory 223
iarity, shared intentionality, and interdepen-
dence (Tomasello, Carpenter, Call, Behne,
& Moll, 2005).
The other sense in which SBT refers to
the social “baseline” results from work
using functional magnetic resonance imag-
ing (fMRI; Coan, Schaefer, & Davidson,
2006), which suggests that social proximity
and interaction regulate many aspects of the
brain’s response to potential threats. Spe-
cifically, the authors subjected 16 married
women to the threat of mild electric shock
under three conditions, counterbalanced
across subjects: while alone in the scanner,
while holding a stranger’s hand, and while
holding her husband’s hand. The brain was
maximally active while facing the threat
alone, exhibiting a set of responses repli-
cating a large body of work on the brain’s
response to threat, fear, stress, and pain
(Bishop, Duncan, Brett, & Lawrence, 2004;
Brooks, Nurmikko, Bimson, Singh, & Rob-
erts, 2002; Dedovic et al., 2005; Stark et al.,
2003). As levels of contact with perceived
social resources increased, however, many
of these activations either decreased in inten-
sity or vanished altogether.
For example, although both spouse and
stranger handholding caused decreased
threat responding in regions associated
with the regulation of bodily arousal and
the mobilization of behavioral action
plans—such as the ventral anterior cingu-
late cortex, supramarginal and postcentral
gyri, and posterior cingulate— only spouse
hand- holding was specifically associated
with additional attenuation in circuits asso-
ciated with effortful emotion regulation
and threat- related homeostatic functions,
such as the right dlPFC and superior col-
liculus. Most strikingly, women inhabiting
the highest quality relationships realized
dramatic attenuations in all the aforemen-
tioned threat- responsive regions in addition
to those supporting subjective suffering and
the release of stress hormones, such as the
right anterior insula and hypothalamus.
Putting it all together, there appeared to be
a relatively linear, monotonic decrease in
the degree of threat- related neural process-
ing as one progressed from being alone to
being with anyone (stranger or spouse), to
being with a spouse, to being with a spouse
in a very high- quality relationship. This sug-
gests that the perception of threat decreases
as a function of not only proximity to social
resources but also the perceived quality of
those resources.
From the perspective of SBT, the alone
condition used in the hand- holding para-
digm described earlier is not a “baseline”
condition against which the experimental
hand- holding conditions are compared. On
the contrary, the reverse is true—the hand-
holding conditions are closer to the environ-
mental conditions to which the human brain
is adapted, and the alone condition is far-
ther away. This conclusion forms part of the
basis of SBT—that social resources decrease
the perceived cost of managing a threaten-
ing environment, providing a primary and
largely unconditional opportunity for econ-
omizing both neural and behavioral activity.
Importantly, these effects are not depen-
dent upon physical touch per se. For
example, there is less hypothalamic activ-
ity during social rejection among individu-
als asked to imagine an attachment figure
(Karremans, Heslenfeld, van Dillen, & Van
Lange, 2011). Moreover, imagining a strong
attachment figure seems to have resulted in
not more but less activity in frontal regions
supporting self- regulatory effort, suggesting
that even imagining the presence of a secure
attachment figure may regulate one’s emo-
tions in such a way as to conserve perceived
resources.
Social Systems Regulate
the Emotions of Individuals
Critically, what we experience and catego-
rize as emotion powerfully impacts the way
we perceive and engage with the world (Ste-
fanucci, Gagnon, & Lessard, 2011). Emo-
tional processes carry vital, often implicit,
and embodied information about the good-
ness and badness of things (Clore & Tamir,
2002)—information that modifies percep-
tion and guides action (Barrett & Bar, 2009;
Schwarz & Clore, 1983). It follows that
emotions are indicators of, among other
things, the tension between perceived per-
sonal resources and perceived environmen-
tal demands (Moore, Vine, Wilson, & Free-
man, 2012; Tomaka, Blascovich, Kelsey,
& Leitten, 1993). In this way, emotion is
probably at or near the center of decisions
that economize activity (Bechara, 2011;
224 SOCIAL ASPECTS
Stefanucci et al., 2008). Accordingly, SBT
suggests that the brain uses affective, expe-
riential, conceptual, and contextual knowl-
edge— in effect, emotion (Barrett, 2006;
Lindquist & Barrett, 2008)—to bias percep-
tion in ways that guide actions toward more
favorable outcomes (Beckes & Coan, 2011;
Coan, 2008).
Emotion has been identified by others
as a key link between social relationships
and health. For example, the social buffer-
ing hypothesis suggests that social relation-
ships can provide support that is tangible,
such as material support when facing loss
of income, appraisal- based support, such as
when familiar others reduce the incidence
or intensity of threat- related appraisals, or
emotional support, such as when famil-
iar others repair threats to self- esteem or
increase a sense of felt belonging (Cohen &
McKay, 1984). It has been suggested further
that social relationships grow into part of
the brain’s understanding of itself and its
available resources (Beckes, Coan, & Has-
selmo, 2012). Moreover, as it makes predic-
tions about the potential cost of coping with
a given situation, the brain follows Bayes-
ian rules of inference (Friston, 2010; Knill
& Pouget, 2004), in which judgments about
the level of personal resources to deploy are
based on (1) the current situation (particu-
larly constraints, risks, and opportunities),
(2) predicted possible future situations, (3)
situational goals, (4) current energy states,
and (5) expected future energy states (Sali-
nas, 2011).
For example, hills appear to be less steep
when standing next to a friend (Schnall,
Harber, Stefanucci, & Proffitt, 2008), and
this effect is correlated with friendship dura-
tion: the longer the friendship, the less steep
the hill appears to be. The perception that
the hill is less steep serves as a marker that
one has, in effect, more bioenergetic capi-
tal in one’s budget— capital that can either
be spent more freely walking up the hill, or
conserved over time. Diverse studies hint
at similar conclusions regarding the brain’s
Bayesian properties. For example, Kraus,
Huang, and Keltner (2010) have observed
that more frequent physical touching among
professional basketball players corresponds
with increased late- season performance,
even after accounting for player status, pre-
season expectations, and early season per-
formance. Others have observed that one of
the best predictors of collective IQ is not the
IQs of individual group members but rather
the degree to which each member is sensitive
to social cues expressed on the face (Wool-
ley, Chabris, Pentland, Hashmi, & Malone,
2010). From the perspective of SBT, each
of these findings is attributable to the way
social resources help to conserve costly vigi-
lance and self- regulation efforts, either by
imposing less interference with motor and
perceptual activity (in the case of players in
the NBA), or by devoting those resources to
solving other kinds of problems (in the case
of collective IQ). But the question of why
social resources economize human neural
and behavioral activity remains. We pro-
pose at least two broad, distal mechanisms
by which this is accomplished: risk distribu-
tion and load sharing.
Risk Distribution
In group settings, many species adjust the
level of their energy expenditure in accor-
dance with the size of the group they inhabit
(Krause & Ruxton, 2002). This benefit
of group living is called risk distribution
(Coan, 2008), in that environmental risk is
probabilistically distributed across the group
rather than being concentrated on one indi-
vidual. A clear example of this can be seen
in optimal foraging theory, which proposes
that animals forage in a way that maximizes
energy intake per unit of time (MacArthur
& Pianka, 1966). For example, animals
that forage must spend a certain amount
of energy maintaining vigilance for preda-
tors. Foraging in a larger group decreases
the burden of vigilance on any one member,
and indeed, in many species, the number of
individuals that are vigilant for predators
at any given time decreases as group size
increases (Elgar, 1989; Roberts, 1996). With
regard to the social regulation of emotion,
we can construe threat vigilance as a form
of negative affect— or at least as the result
of a negative affect process that reflects the
demand for vigilance. If true, then social
proximity can be viewed as decreasing vigi-
lance behavior via the regulation of negative
affect. Evidence for this can even be seen
in the modulation by group size of physi-
Social Baseline Theory 225
ological indicators of stress in nonhuman
animals. For example, salivary cortisol con-
centration in sheep is higher when the flock
size is smaller (Michelena et al., 2012). Risk
distribution suggests further that the num-
ber of proximal conspecifics decreases nega-
tive affect, because doing so conserves effort
that would otherwise be spent either on vigi-
lance, self- regulation, or both. This is exem-
plified in humans in the hand- holding study
discussed earlier, by the finding that holding
any hand—even that of a stranger— reduces
neural activity related to threat (Coan et
al., 2006), especially in regions supporting
responses to acute threats (Mobbs et al.,
2007).
Interestingly, the individual benefits of
group living described earlier often benefit
the group as well, such that as each individ-
ual’s vigilance effort decreases, total group
vigilance actually increases (Bertram, 1978;
Pulliam, Pyke, & Caraco, 1982) and time
to detect predators decreases (Siegfried &
Underhill, 1975). It is important to note,
however, that group living introduces certain
risks and stressors as well, such as increased
competition for resources, increased likeli-
hood of disease transmission, and increased
conspicuousness (Alexander, 1974). Groups
therefore iteratively move toward an optimal
size given the availability of food and other
resources (Higashi & Yamamura, 1993).
Note that risk distribution concerns only the
number of members in a group and makes
no reference to the nature and quality of the
relationships between the group members.
Coan (2008) has speculated that the brain
is sensitive to risk distribution as a general
purpose strategy that employs Bayesian- like
calculations to assess the cost- effectiveness
of affective behaviors at any given time.
Load Sharing
Load sharing builds on the benefits of risk
distribution by adding information that
increases certainty about the availability of
a given social resource— namely, familiar-
ity, reliability, and interdependence. The
presence of an individual with whom one
has established a close relationship not only
probabilistically reduces one’s risk of envi-
ronmental threat but also signals access to a
person who will use his or her own resources
on one’s behalf, thus further reducing the
need to expend one’s own energy, and com-
mensurably decreasing the need, for exam-
ple, for negative affect. In other words, a
close companion can be trusted to share an
interest in one’s well-being. He or she may
provide additional vigilance not only in some
general sense but also specifically, with one’s
own welfare in mind (Davis, 1984). A close
companion may share resources (e.g., Rog-
ers & DeBoer, 2001), help care for young
(e.g., Ehrenberg, Gearing- Small, Hunter, &
Small, 2001), and help when one is sick or
injured (e.g., Townsend & Franks, 1995).
These additional benefits provide a much
greater opportunity for economizing neural
and behavioral activity, as can be seen in
the enhanced effect of holding hands with
a close friend or a spouse (Coan, Beckes, &
Allen, 2013; Coan et al., 2006).
SBT maintains that load sharing impacts
decisions about personal resource budget-
ing in part by altering the way the brain
encodes what constitutes the “self,” with
implications for the level of resources the
self is able to access. This is consistent with
the observation that the neural representa-
tions of threats directed at the self are highly
correlated with those directed at friends,
implying a kind of “involuntary breach of
individual separateness” (Langer, 1974,
p. 129) that does not seem to generalize to
strangers (Beckes et al., 2012). In this way,
an individual’s social support system can be
construed as an extension of the self and,
in turn, of how one perceives and interacts
with the world.
Capitalization
Importantly, social proximity and interac-
tion serve not only to down- regulate negative
emotions, but also to maintain and increase
positive, approach- related emotions. Admit-
tedly, our research has focused on the
social regulation of response to threat, but
we believe the basic ideas behind SBT are
generalizable to positive emotions as well.
People frequently expend energy to induce,
maintain, or even dampen experiences of
positive emotion, and this is reflected in
neural activity in prefrontal areas similar to
those seen in the self- regulation of negative
emotion (Kim & Hamann, 2007). Social
226 SOCIAL ASPECTS
relationships may act to conserve effortful
positive self- regulation, possibly by reducing
reliance on prefrontal activity and increas-
ing activity in reward circuits. Interestingly,
neural activity in the medial PFC decreases
in mothers observing pictures of their chil-
dren, and in adults observing pictures of
their romantic partner, as compared to
when they are observing pictures of a friend
(Bartels & Zeki, 2000, 2004). Moreover,
positive responses by a relational partner to
one’s own positive news, a process known
as capitalization, may be a mechanism by
which social relationships enhance positive
emotions in ways that are less individually
effortful. Capitalization increases daily posi-
tive affect over and above the impact of the
positive event itself (Gable, Reis, Impett, &
Asher, 2004; Langston, 1994). Furthermore,
capitalization may strengthen trust and pro-
social behavior, even when one is interacting
with a stranger (Reis et al., 2010). Following
the SBT model, then, receiving supportive,
positive feedback from a partner may sig-
nal an increase in both personal and social
resources. It is interesting to note that the
perceived responsiveness of one’s partner
during positive events may be more strongly
linked with the relationship’s well-being
and longevity than perceived responsiveness
during negative events (Gable, Gonzaga, &
Strachman, 2006).
Importantly, SBT views all forms of
social emotion regulation as systemic
and dynamic, challenging the widely held
assumption that the basic unit of analysis in
human psychology is the single individual
(Beckes & Coan, 2011). By extending the
unit of analysis to the dyad or group, social
interaction and proximity emerge as adap-
tive strategies rooted in the sharing of efforts
that, left only to each individual member of
a dyad or group, would be redundant, costly,
and inefficient. Ultimately, it may be that
dyads or groups benefit from social emo-
tion regulation at least as much as the indi-
viduals who inhabit them (McComb, Moss,
Durant, Baker, & Sayialel, 2001). In consid-
ering mechanisms for these dyadic or group
effects, social emotion regulation can be
mediational, reflecting a direct intervention
on an emotional process by social resources,
or moderational, modifying the perception
of potentially emotional situations. In the
following sections, we briefly describe and
propose potential mechanisms for the dis-
tinction.
Mediating Mechanisms of Social
Emotion Regulation
As mediators of emotion regulation (Baron
& Kenny, 1986), social resources serve as a
proximal mechanism through which emo-
tion regulation effects are achieved. Attach-
ment theory provides the quintessential
example of socially regulated emotion in
its description of mother– child attachment
interactions, in which infants seek attach-
ment figures during periods of distress and
are soothed by their caregiver’s presence
(Ainsworth, Blehar, Waters, & Wall, 1978;
Bowlby, 1969/1982). A common example
might be a child’s vaccination procedure,
where the child— distressed at the prospect
of receiving a shot—calls for the mother’s
support. In response, the mother may engage
in soothing behaviors like hand- holding and
offering reassuring words in a calm tone of
voice. Here, the mother’s behavior provides
an obvious mechanism through which the
child’s distress is attenuated. Specifically,
the child identifies a potential threat (the
needle), and this threat causes two reactions,
distress and the seeking of support from the
mother. In turn, the mother’s support behav-
ior exerts a down- regulatory influence on
the distress response.
The mother– child dynamic is a par-
ticularly powerful example of how social
resources can mediate emotion regulation
in part because the child in the example is
developmentally limited in his or her self-
regulatory abilities, a limitation that is itself
rooted in the slow development of neural
systems that will eventually serve the child’s
self- regulatory needs (Coan, 2008). That
the mother’s soothing works is obvious and
well documented (Cassidy & Shaver, 2008).
Less obvious is that the child is relatively
incapable of emotion regulation without
the mother. Thus, we can view the mother
and child as an interactive system that is
intimately linked in an emotion activation–
regulation dynamic. Importantly, however,
the mother– child behavioral and experiential
dynamics described by attachment theorists
play out similarly within adult relationships
(Mikulincer & Shaver, 2007), where stress-
ful situations motivate social proximity, and
Social Baseline Theory 227
social proximity lowers autonomic arousal,
attenuates hypothalamic– pituitary– adrenal
(HPA) axis activity, and improves immune
function (Baron, Cutrona, Hicklin, Russell,
& Lubaroff, 1990; Heinrichs, Baumgart-
ner, Kirschbaum, & Ehlert, 2003; Uchino,
Cacioppo, & Kiecolt- Glaser, 1996). Of
interest with regard to adult relationships
is that, unlike mother– infant dyads, two or
more adults each possess fully developed and
functioning brains. Thus, although children
require maternal support for emotion regu-
lation, adults appear to utilize each other for
similar purposes more strategically.
A major focus of our work has been the
identification of proximal neural mechanisms
linking social relationships to decreased
threat responding and, in turn, increased
health and well-being. Although many can-
didate mechanisms have been postulated,
few or none have been definitively identified.
Recently, Eisenberger and colleagues (2011)
provided what they characterized as media-
tional evidence for the social regulation of
emotion by portions of the vmPFC. In this
work, participants were shown pictures of
a romantic partner, pictures of strangers, or
pictures of objects, while receiving painful
stimulation. Putative pain- related activa-
tions in regions such as the dorsal anterior
cingulate cortex (dACC) and anterior insula
were less active while participants viewed
images of a romantic partner. Moreover, the
vmPFC was more active while participants
viewed romantic partners, even during pain
stimuli, and vmPFC activation was positively
associated with relationship duration and
perceived partner support, while negatively
associated with both subjective pain ratings
and pain- related neural activity. In a simi-
lar study, Younger, Aron, Parke, Chatterjee,
and Mackey (2010) collected brain images
from 15 participants as they experienced
moderate levels of thermal pain while they
viewed pictures of their romantic partner,
pictures of attractive strangers, or engaged
in a distraction task, hypothesizing that pic-
tures of romantic partners would attenuate
pain processing via putative “reward sys-
tems.” Indeed, viewing pictures of roman-
tic partners both reduced subjective pain
reports and attenuated circuits associated
with pain processing. Moreover, subjective
pain reports were inversely correlated dur-
ing romantic partner picture viewing with
the activation of neural circuits associated
with reward processing (e.g., the caudate
nucleus, the nucleus accumbens) and effort-
ful self- regulation (e.g., the dlPFC).
Thus, emerging evidence for proximal
mechanisms supporting socially medi-
ated emotion regulation appears to include
regions associated with both the automatic
and effortful self-regulation of emotion
(vmPFC and dlPFC, respectively), as well
as putative reward circuits (e.g., the nucleus
accumbens). However, our laboratory has
not been able to produce similar results, in
our original study of hand- holding by mar-
ried couples (Coan et al., 2006), in a more
recent study of hand- holding by platonic
friends (Coan et al., 2013), or in a study of
the regulation of threat responses in chil-
dren by the presence of adult caregivers
(Conner et al., 2012). Indeed, in the latter
study, we observed decreased activation spe-
cifically in the vmPFC and ventrolateral PFC
(vlPFC), where we used a region of interest
(ROI) approach for the purpose of address-
ing the question of prefrontal mediation of
social support. Ultimately, we have thus far
failed to reliably identify any regions of the
brain that are normatively more active under
threat conditions during supportive presence
or hand- holding than while alone. More-
over, none of the regions identified by Eisen-
berger et al. (2011) and Younger et al. (2010)
are negatively correlated with any of the
threat- responsive circuits apparently down-
regulated in our work by hand- holding.
What may account for these apparently
inconsistent results? The answer, we think,
has to do with the difference between touch
and picture viewing. Specifically, there is
ample evidence that touch acts as an uncon-
ditioned or primary stimulus in social ani-
mals, not least humans (Francis et al., 1999),
who may also use touch to exchange impor-
tant social information (Gazzola et al.,
2012; Morrison, Löken, & Olausson, 2010).
By contrast, picture viewing likely involves
associative learning, particularly involv-
ing the expected value of the photographic
image—a task often mediated through
vmPFC activity (Kable & Glimcher, 2007).
Thus, vmPFC activity may be necessary
when utilizing photographs of loved ones to
regulate emotion. But a careful reading of
Younger et al. (2010) reveals that, in addi-
tion to showing their participants pictures
228 SOCIAL ASPECTS
of loved ones, they instructed participants to
“focus on the picture and think about the
displayed person” (p. 2), effectively encour-
aging self-mediated rather than socially
mediated emotion regulation. Ultimately,
we would argue that both the Eisenberger et
al. (2011) and Younger et al. (2010) experi-
ments manipulated self- regulatory systems
and are not best understood as examples of
socially mediated emotion regulation at all.
Moderating Mechanisms of Social
Emotion Regulation
Strictly speaking, the hand- holding study
discussed earlier may also provide an
example of socially moderated emotion
regulation, in part because the provision
of social support preceded the presentation
of threat cues, thus potentially altering the
perception of those threat cues and obviat-
ing the activation of portions of the threat
response. This illustrates one of the many
ways in which social proximity and interac-
tion can be viewed as moderating emotional
responses and self- regulation needs, acting
as third variables that modify the conditions
under which emotional responses and self-
regulation strategies are either called upon
or maximally effective. Taking the example
of the vaccination procedure discussed ear-
lier, it may be the case that, as in our hand-
holding experiments, the mother holds the
child’s hand not in response to the child’s
obvious distress but in anticipation of the
child’s potential distress. In this case, mater-
nal hand- holding may cause relaxation of
the child’s vigilance processing, rendering
the appearance of the needle less threaten-
ing when it does arrive.
Past social experiences also impact an
individual’s self- regulation requirements
and capabilities (Allen, Moore, Kuperminc,
& Bell, 1998; Prinstein & La Greca, 2004;
Weaver et al., 2004). For example, ongo-
ing current daily social support may mod-
erate the perception of threats encountered
while alone, which may in turn reduce the
perceived need for engaging self- regulation
capabilities (Eisenberger, Taylor, Gable,
Hilmert, & Lieberman, 2007). Similarly,
mental representations of loved ones may be
used as methods by which one can exert self-
regulatory strategies related to distraction
or reappraisal. Any or all of these possibili-
ties can be modeled by SBT, such that past
social experiences or even prevailing social
conditions alter an individual’s perception of
potential threats and rewards in his or her
immediate environment even when he or she
is alone at the occasion of measurement.
A number of researchers have argued
that early childhood experiences critically
influence the ways in which individuals
view social relationships later in life. For
humans and many other species, filial bond-
ing—bonding with siblings and caregivers—
occurs rapidly, unconditionally, and during a
period of neural development that may hold
powerful consequences for subsequent func-
tioning (Bowlby, 1969/1982; Coan, 2008).
In infants, the PFC is particularly under-
developed in comparison to that of adults,
and its development takes approximately
two decades to complete. The human brain
in general grows exponentially during just
the first 2 years of life (Franceschini et al.,
2007)—growth reflected in the brain’s con-
sumption of glucose, which continues to be
approximately double that of adults until 10
years of age (Chugani, 1998). Throughout
this early development, the brain is in effect
adapting itself to environmental contingen-
cies through a process of axonal, dendritic,
and synaptic “pruning”—a process that is
itself dependent upon neural activity associ-
ated with environmental stimulation (Can-
cedda et al., 2004; Reichardt, 2006). Put
another way, the brain in early development
adheres roughly to the colloquialism “use it
or lose it”; environmental demands shape a
developing brain prepared for a wide range
of behavioral possibilities. By the process of
pruning, the brain’s responses to prevail-
ing contextual demands become more fixed
and hence more rapid—it becomes adapted
ontogenetically to its expected environment
(Hebb, 1949; Posner & Rothbart, 2007).
During this development, interactions
between social experiences, self- regulatory
activity and socially bound activations in
medial prefrontal, temporoparietal, and
posterior temporal cortices, as well as in
the amygdala, ventral tegmentum, nucleus
accumbens, periaqueductal gray and else-
where, may shape expectations about the
availability of social resources, opportuni-
ties for affiliation, expectations about the
reliability of close relational partners, and so
on (Lieberman, 2007). This in turn is likely
Social Baseline Theory 229
to shape individual differences in the way
social resources are approached and main-
tained, perhaps especially in situations that
blend social proximity with potential stress-
ors. Indeed, it is just this sort of experience-
based developmental divergence that early
attachment researchers described as mani-
festing in “working models” of attachment
figures, a theoretical perspective expressed
in more recent terms as attachment styles
(Ainsworth et al., 1978; Main, 1996; Miku-
lincer & Shaver, 2007).
A large and growing body of research has
documented effects consistent with early psy-
chosocial brain development. For example,
primates are highly sensitive to early proxim-
ity to and interaction with caregivers (Har-
low, 1958). In rats, maternal grooming may
influence the methylation of glucocorticoid
receptor genes throughout the hippocampus
and possibly elsewhere, influencing in turn
the stress reactivity of the pups throughout
their lives and even into subsequent genera-
tions (Weaver et al., 2004). Evidence sug-
gests a similar methylation process may
occur in humans (McGowan et al., 2009;
van IJzendoorn, Bakermans- Kranenburg, &
Ebstein, 2011). Hofer (2006) has proposed
that early interactions with caregivers slowly
evolve from the indirect regulation of sen-
sorimotor, thermal, and nutrient functions
via responses to expressed emotion. At first
the infant is totally dependent upon caregiv-
ers for access to primary reinforcers (food,
water, warmth, touch). The only way for the
infant to access these resources is to get the
caregiver’s attention with expressed emo-
tion. A predictable pattern emerges where
the infant cries out when a basic resource is
needed, followed by the caregiver’s response,
after which the infant stops crying. As the
infant develops, his or her emotional reper-
toire expands to include preferences beyond
simple metabolic or thermal needs, but the
process of caregiver responsiveness contin-
ues in much the same way, until it can be
said that the emotional feelings and expres-
sions are themselves the targets of the care-
giver’s responses.
Attachment theorists have had perhaps
the most to say about how social experiences
contribute to individual differences in the
social regulation of emotion (Mikulincer &
Shaver, 2005; Mikulincer, Shaver, & Pereg,
2003). Specifically, attachment theory posits
the existence of trait-like expectations— the
aforementioned attachment styles—regard-
ing the availability of social resources.
Dominant views of attachment style can
be expressed as two independent axes rep-
resenting tendencies toward social anxi-
ety and social avoidance. Individuals low
in both are said to be secure, in that their
appraisals of potential threats and views of
emotional disclosure tend to be less negative
(Mikulincer & Florian, 1998; Mikulincer &
Orbach, 1995). Critically, such individuals
are likelier to seek out, utilize, and benefit
from emotional support from others (Fraley
& Shaver, 2000; Larose, Bernier, Soucy, &
Duchesne, 1999; Rholes, Simpson, & Grich
Stevens, 1998). Secure individuals may even
benefit more from capitalization attempts:
Shallcross, Howland, Bemis, Simpson, and
Frazier (2011) found that insecurely attached
individuals more often underestimated
the responsiveness of their partners when
sharing a positive event than did securely
attached individuals. Although neuroscien-
tific investigations of attachment style are
rare, Gillath, Bunge, Shaver, Wendelken,
and Mikulincer (2005) have observed that
greater trait attachment anxiety is associ-
ated with more activity in the dACC and
temporal pole, areas associated with alarm
and negative affect— and decreased activity
in the orbitofrontal cortex— when partici-
pants are asked to think about a threatening
relationship scenario.
Future Directions
We feel these perspectives on social relation-
ships and social emotion regulation have
implications that extend both to basic and
applied domains of psychological science,
and that the ecological framework of SBT
may be useful for understanding a number
of important new findings. Clinically, we
have recently noted that SBT holds implica-
tions for how we understand the frontolim-
bic dysfunction and emotional dysregula-
tion that characterize borderline personality
disorder (Hughes, Crowell, Uyeji, & Coan,
2012), and we believe that SBT may be rel-
evant to the development and maintenance
of other psychopathologies as well. For
example, although speculative, it is possible
that the disruptions in social relationships
230 SOCIAL ASPECTS
that characterize autism spectrum disorders
result in an overreliance on self- regulation,
leading to chronic depletion and the use of
self- regulatory strategies associated with
small children. We suggest further that SBT
may be useful for understanding emerging
approaches to relationship therapy that are
proving to be efficacious for a number of
problems traditionally treated by individu-
ally oriented psychotherapies alone (Mon-
son et al., 2012; Naaman, Radwan, & John-
son, 2009).
Ultimately, we emphasize that human life
is in many ways defined by social relation-
ships. According to SBT, a key function of
social relationships is the social regulation
of emotion. Emotions provide rapid, embod-
ied information about current states and
contextual demands (Clore & Tamir, 2002),
guiding decision making and modifying per-
ception (Bechara, 2011; Stefanucci et al.,
2008). The modification of perception via
emotional responding is itself yoked to the
management of bioenergetic resources for the
purpose of economizing action (Stefanucci
et al., 2011). Because emotion is powerfully
regulated by social proximity (Coan et al.,
2013; Coan et al., 2006), all of the above is
controlled by proximity to social resources
(Schnall et al., 2008). Thus, the impact of
social relationships ripples through virtu-
ally everything humans do, because social
relationships are tightly linked to emotional
processes, and emotional processes inform,
bias, and direct many, if not most, of the
brain’s activities. This may not always work
in ways that are broadly socially desirable.
For example, the social regulatory pro-
cesses described throughout this chapter
may contribute to phenomena such as social
loafing (Karau & Williams, 1993), and the
“outsourcing” of health behaviors (Fitzsi-
mons & Finkel, 2011). The impact of social
relationships— manifest as perceived prox-
imity, interaction, and history— is thus likely
to be felt within any specific subdomain of
psychological science, suggesting that any
such subdomain that does not account for
social processes will be limited in impor-
tant ways. On the other hand, the extent to
which social processes impact psychological
phenomena opens wide the possibilities for
new testable hypotheses and exciting pro-
grams of research.
Note
1. Accumulating evidence from a diverse col-
lection of laboratories suggests the psycho-
logical functions supported by the cortex—
including the PFC—are computationally, and
hence bioenergetically, expensive, especially
relative to more computationally basic per-
ceptual processes (Dietrich, 2009; Halford,
Wilson, & Phillips, 1997, 1998). At the very
least, psychological processes supported by
the PFC are often subjectively experienced
as effortful (Muraven & Baumeister, 2000;
Sheppes, Catran, & Meiran, 2009). Sus-
tained prefrontally mediated behaviors (e.g.,
attention, self- control, vigilance, behavioral
inhibition) cause subjective exhaustion and a
steady decrease in the ability to perform those
very behaviors (Baumeister, Vohs, & Tice,
2007; Vohs & Heatherton, 2000). Because
the brain maintains a fairly constant meta-
bolic rate regardless of task (Sokoloff, Man-
gold, Wechsler, Kennedy, & Kety, 1955), an
extended reliance on prefrontally mediated
processes may reduce resources (e.g., blood)
available to other regions. Indeed, there is
evidence of intrabrain competition for blood,
even within the cortex (Dietrich, 2009).
Although open to serious criticism (Kurzban,
2010), it may yet be possible that the PFC
even places a higher metabolic demand on
the brain’s resources. For example, the ratio
of glia to neurons— a ratio that covaries with
metabolic demand— is higher in the PFC of
humans than in other primates (Sherwood
et al., 2006). The PFC is among the last neu-
ral systems to develop fully (Fuster, 2002)
and among the first to show functional defi-
cits in the case of extreme emotional stress,
malnourishment, intoxication, addiction,
old age, and even exercise (Arnsten, 2009;
Del Giorno, Hall, O’Leary, Bixby, & Miller,
2010; Goldstein & Volkow, 2011; Lipina &
Colombo, 2009; Paxton, Barch, Racine, &
Braver, 2008). All of this is despite a general
consensus that the human PFC is one of the
defining characteristics of human phylogeny
(Ehrlich & Ehrlich, 2008)—a resource shaped
over evolutionary development that allows
humans a level of abstraction, creativity, vigi-
lance, self- control, and anticipatory judgment
that is unprecedented in the animal kingdom
and largely responsible for the globally domi-
nant status that humans enjoy.
Social Baseline Theory 231
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