ENIGMA-Social Health is a working group within the ENIGMA consortium focusing on the brain basis of social behavior. We define social health as our capacity to engage in and maintain functional social relationships, as expressed through dimensions of social abilities (internal factors) and social environments (external factors). The brain is at the center of these concepts: It facilitates social interactions by supporting social cognitive functions, but it is also malleable and adapts to socio-environmental influences shaping the brain through experience-dependent plasticity.

The core aim of the working group is to pool data from cohorts around the world to identify, characterize, and explain how our social environments and social abilities are linked and impact brain structure and function across the lifespan and from health to disease. To achieve this goal, we are looking for cohorts in which brain imaging (structural, diffusion, functional) and behavioural (on social abilities and environments) data were collected in clinical, non-clinical, and mixed cohorts.

Our call for participation is open!

If you are interested in participating, please complete our short data query poll here, and contact any of the Working Group chairs: Sofie L. Valk (valk@cbs.mpg.de) and Jessica Royer (royer@cbs.mpg.de). You can also contact our working group email for general inquiries (enigmasocialhealth@gmail.com).

ENIGMA-Social Health Working Group Memorandum of Understanding (MoU): ENIGMA Social Health Group members are asked to sign a short MoU agreement that has been standardized across ENIGMA projects. The MoU provides a basic framework to protect data privacy, facilitate data sharing, encourage academic productivity, ensure appropriate authorship and publication credit, and implements a system to track and archive data, analyses and publications related to the ENIGMA-Social Health Working Group.