Striatal dopamine synthesis capacity reflects smartphone social activity
Andrew Westbrook,
Arko Ghosh,
Ruben van den Bosch,
Jessica I. Määttä,
Lieke Hofmans,
Roshan Cools
Affiliations
Andrew Westbrook
Radboud University Medical Centre, Department of Psychiatry, Nijmegen 6525 GA, The Netherlands; Radboud University, Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Nijmegen 6525 EN, The Netherlands; Department of Cognitive, Linguistic & Psychological Sciences, Brown University, Providence, RI 02912, USA; Corresponding author
Arko Ghosh
Institute of Psychology, Cognitive Psychology Unit, Leiden University, Leiden 2333 AK, The Netherlands
Ruben van den Bosch
Radboud University Medical Centre, Department of Psychiatry, Nijmegen 6525 GA, The Netherlands; Radboud University, Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Nijmegen 6525 EN, The Netherlands
Jessica I. Määttä
Radboud University Medical Centre, Department of Psychiatry, Nijmegen 6525 GA, The Netherlands; Radboud University, Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Nijmegen 6525 EN, The Netherlands
Lieke Hofmans
Radboud University Medical Centre, Department of Psychiatry, Nijmegen 6525 GA, The Netherlands; Radboud University, Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Nijmegen 6525 EN, The Netherlands
Roshan Cools
Radboud University Medical Centre, Department of Psychiatry, Nijmegen 6525 GA, The Netherlands; Radboud University, Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Nijmegen 6525 EN, The Netherlands
Summary: Striatal dopamine and smartphone behavior have both been linked with behavioral variability. Here, we leverage day-to-day logs of natural, unconstrained smartphone behavior and establish a correlation between a measure of smartphone social activity previously linked with behavioral variability and a measure of striatal dopamine synthesis capacity using [18F]-DOPA PET in (N = 22) healthy adult humans. Specifically, we find that a higher proportion of social app interactions correlates with lower dopamine synthesis capacity in the bilateral putamen. Permutation tests and penalized regressions provide evidence that this link between dopamine synthesis capacity and social versus non-social smartphone interactions is specific. These observations provide a key empirical grounding for current speculations about dopamine's role in digital social behavior.
