From Brain Networks to Social Dysfunction: A Transdiagnostic Framework for Precision Psychiatry

Host: Peter Falkai & Florian Raabe

About the talk:

Social dysfunction is a pervasive and disabling feature across psychiatric disorders, yet it remains poorly captured by categorical diagnostic systems. Mounting evidence from neuroscience, genetics, and behavioral research suggests that dimensional functional domains, rather than diagnostic labels, provide a more biologically meaningful framework for understanding psychopathology. Among these domains, social dysfunction emerges as a key transdiagnostic phenotype spanning major depression, schizophrenia, autism spectrum conditions, and personality disorders.

This lecture will present a translational perspective on the neurobiology of social dysfunction, focusing on the role of large-scale brain networks, particularly the Default Mode Network (DMN), in supporting social cognition, self-referential processing, and mentalizing. Converging neuroimaging studies indicate that alterations in DMN connectivity, and its interactions with reward, salience, and cognitive control networks, are consistently associated with impaired social functioning across diagnostic categories.

Drawing on work from large-scale initiatives such as the PRISM projects, Martien Kas will illustrate how multimodal phenotyping and computational approaches link individual differences in social functioning to distributed neural circuits rather than syndromic diagnoses. He will further discuss how these human findings can be back-translated into animal studies, where circuit-specific tools enable causal investigation of the neural mechanisms underlying social behavior. Integrating network neuroscience with cross-species circuit approaches provides a powerful strategy for identifying biologically grounded mechanisms of social dysfunction and advancing precision psychiatry beyond traditional diagnostic boundaries.

Bio:

Martien Kas is Professor of Behavioral Neuroscience at the Groningen Institute for Evolutionary Life Sciences at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands. The research of his group aims to develop a transdiagnostic and translational neurobiological approach to the understanding of neuropsychiatric disorders to accelerate the discovery and development of better treatments. To realize this ambition, he has implemented an innovative transdiagnostic strategy that also allows for back translation of human quantitative biological findings to animals to test for causality, to expand our knowledge of the underlying neurobiological mechanism, and to facilitate the drug discovery process.