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SOCIAL-NEUROBEHAVIORAL PHENOTYPES FOR ADVANCEMENT OF SOCIAL-TARGET INTERVENTION IN COCAINE USE DISORDER

Keren Bachi — The Addiction Institute of Mount Sinai; Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai Individual

2026 ASCP Annual Meeting

Background

Cocaine use disorder (CUD) and childhood trauma, commonly co-occurring, feature concurrent social dysfunction that profoundly impact treatment outcomes. Yet, social dysfunction is understudied and has limited recognition as a treatment target in this population.

Methods

Participants [CUD n=32; healthy controls (HC) n=38] completed a naturalistic social navigation functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) task. To probe the neural correlates of social decision-making, we used representational similarity analysis, with region-of-interest approach to test two predictions: 1) the social trajectory effect for CUD participants would be reduced in prefrontal cortex, specifically in right inferior frontal gyrus (rIFG), a region involved in processing navigational demands 2) individuals with higher childhood trauma would have a reduced social trajectory representation in left hippocampus, given the region’s sensitivity to stress.

Results

We observed a smaller pattern similarity effect in CUD than HC in the rIFG (t = 2.16, right-tailed p < 0.05), suggesting altered engagement of this region during social navigation in CUD. Independent of CUD status, childhood trauma negatively correlated with the pattern similarity effect in the left hippocampus (t = -2.88, right-tailed p < 0.01), a region previously shown to track abstract social locations.

Conclusions

CUD-related prefrontal dysfunction and childhood trauma-related hippocampal dysfunction extend to the neural tracking of social relationships. Childhood trauma had similar reductions in left hippocampal effects in both CUD and HC participants, suggesting that the effect of trauma on representing social relationships is separable from the effects of cocaine addiction. Social-neurobehavioral phenotypes may inform the development of novel social-target interventions in substance use disorders.

References

  1. Sahani, V., Hurd, Y.L., Bachi, K. (2022). “Neural Underpinnings of Social Stress in Substance Use Disorders.” Curr Top Behav Neurosci.
  2. Schafer, M., Kamilar-Britt, P., Sahani, V., Bachi, K., Schiller, D. (2024). “Neural Trajectories of Conceptually Related Events.” eLife DOI 10.7554/elife.96895.1.