{"doi":"10.1101/2020.06.06.137976","title":"Striatal dopamine synthesis capacity reflects smartphone social activity","abstract":"Abstract Striatal dopamine has been implicated in social behavior across humans, rodents, and non-human primates in artificial laboratory settings with highly-practiced tasks and fixed reward contingencies. Whether striatal dopamine drives naturalistic, spontaneous social behavior remains unclear. Here, we leverage day-to-day logs of unconstrained smartphone behavior and establish a novel link between smartphone social activity and individual differences in striatal dopamine synthesis capacity using [ 18 F]-DOPA PET in (N=22) healthy adult humans. We find a strong relationship such that a higher proportion of social app interactions correlates with lower dopamine synthesis capacity in the bi-lateral putamen. Permutation tests and penalized regressions provide evidence that this link between dopamine synthesis capacity and social versus non-social smartphone taps is specific. These observations provide a key empirical grounding for current speculations about dopamine’s role in digital social behavior.","journal":"bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory)","year":2020,"id":123743,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":3,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9411,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2020-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":567183,"name":"Arko Ghosh","orcid":"0000-0002-2924-5146","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":230626,"name":"Ruben van den Bosch","orcid":"0000-0002-3994-8291","position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":230630,"name":"Roshan Cools","orcid":"0000-0001-8994-5534","position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":230625,"name":"Andrew Westbrook","orcid":"0000-0002-7956-2609","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":21,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-18T23:15:03.403566Z","pmid":null,"pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}