Psychobiological Mechanisms Underlying the Social Buffering of the HPA Axis: A Review of Animal Models and Human Studies across Development

By Camelia E. Hostinar, R. Sullivan, Megan R. Gunnar. Psychological bulletin, 2013

666 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Discovering the stress-buffering effects of social relationships has been one of the major findings in psychobiology in the last century. However, an understanding of the underlying neurobiological and psychological mechanisms of this buffering is only beginning to emerge. An important avenue of this research concerns the neurocircuitry that can regulate the activity of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenocortical (HPA) axis. The present review is a translational effort aimed at integrating animal models and human studies of the social regulation of the HPA axis from infancy to adulthood, specifically focusing on the process that has been named social buffering. This process has been noted across species and consists of a dampened HPA axis stress response to threat or challenge that occurs with the presence or assistance of a conspecific. We describe aspects of the relevant underlying neurobiology when enough information exists and expose major gaps in our understanding across all domains of the literatures we aimed to integrate. We provide a working conceptual model focused on the role of oxytocinergic systems and prefrontal neural networks as two of the putative biological mediators of this process, and propose that the role of early experiences is critical in shaping later social buffering effects. This synthesis points to both general future directions and specific experiments that need to be conducted to build a more comprehensive model of the HPA social buffering effect across the lifespan that incorporates multiple levels of analysis: neuroendocrine, behavioral, and social.

Subfields: Behavioral Neuroscience, Clinical Psychology, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/22cd06c4a9b3ebd14eac8a64401c3463ddc99f91

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Citations in the corpus

Executive Function: Implications for Education. NCER 2017-2000. (2016, background): “Longitudinal developmental studies have demonstrated that chronic stress is associated with elevated stress hormone levels and reduced EF (Blair et al. 2011; Evans and Schamberg 2009; Hostinar, Sullivan, and Gunnar 2014).”
The Neuroendocrinology of Social Isolation (2014, background): “A major focus in recent years has been on the environmental factors early in life that have lasting effects on HPA functioning and stress reactivity (e.g., Hostinar et al. 2014, Meaney & Szyf 2005).”
The Neurobiology of Social Distance (2020, positive): “Such perturbed brain maturation through social deprivation may be mediated by glucocorticoids, which are known to be inhibited by maternal care in primates [142].”