Well-Being Is Associated With Local to Remote Cortical Connectivity

Wellbeing refers to cognitive and emotional appraisal of an individual’s life and social functioning, which is of great significance to the quality of life of an individual and society. Previous studies have revealed the neural basis of wellbeing, which mostly focused on human brain morphology or network-level connectivity. However, local-to-remote cortical connectivity, which plays a crucial role in defining the human brain architecture, has not been investigated in wellbeing. To examine whether wellbeing was associated with local-to-remote cortical connectivity, we acquired resting-state images from 60 healthy participants and employed the Mental Health Continuum Short Form to measure wellbeing, including three dimensions, namely, emotional wellbeing, psychological wellbeing, and social wellbeing. Functional homogeneity (ReHo) and seed-based functional connectivity were used to evaluate local-to-remote cortical connectivity in these participants. For local connectivity, our results showed that ReHo in the right orbitofrontal sulcus was significantly positively correlated with psychological wellbeing but negatively correlated with social wellbeing. For remote connectivity, connectivity within the right orbitofrontal cortex and interhemispheric connectivity of the orbitofrontal sulcus were both positively associated with psychological wellbeing; functional connectivity between the right orbitofrontal sulcus and the left postcentral sulcus was positively associated with social wellbeing. Our results showed that wellbeing was indeed associated with local-to-remote cortical connectivity, and our findings supplied a new perspective of distance-related neural mechanisms of wellbeing.