Session: Social Work and Neuroscience: Using Neuroimaging to Study and Address Social Problems (Society for Social Work and Research 22nd Annual Conference - Achieving Equal Opportunity, Equity, and Justice)

Social work has adopted a biopsychosocial perspective to understanding and helping people in need for many decades. There is now a growing emphasis in social work research on identifying the interactions between biological, social, and environmental contributors to social problems. Nowhere has the advancement of biopsychosocial studies in social work been more prominent than in the area of neuroscience, where assessments of brain structure, function, and communication are increasingly recognized as holding direct relevance for developing novel interventions to support mental health and addiction recovery. Further, the rapidly advancing technology in the field of cognitive neuroscience is making it possible for investigators in social work to include neuroscience measures in their research at relatively low burden and cost, with high potential impact. Through incorporating cognitive neuroscience measures to understand the plasticity of the human brain and its reciprocal influence by the social environment, social work investigators are advancing a truly biopsychosocial research agenda to facilitate the development of more effective and holistic interventions that address the biological and psychosocial foundations of social problems.

The proposed symposium follows our first, highly-successful social work neuroscience symposium at SSWR in 2016, and assembles leading social work neuroscientists in the field to present the latest data on the role of the brain in studies of social work phenomena and its impact by social work interventions. The symposium will provide a much needed update, informing SSWR participants about key developments in this new domain of social work inquiry that have occurred in the past several years. Multimodal neuroimaging data from NIH-funded randomized-controlled trials and outcome studies will be presented to examine the impact of social work interventions on the brain, as well as the contribution of brain function to community outcomes, across a range of behavioral health conditions.

Eack and colleagues will present data from a new randomized-controlled trial (N=45) showing that Cognitive Enhancement Therapy can improve social brain function in adults living with autism. Garland will present the results from three separate controlled trials (N=115, N=37, and N=13, respectively), indicating that Mindfulness-Oriented Recovery Enhancement can alter brain functions supporting reward processing to reduce tobacco and opioid addiction. Smith and colleagues will introduce a community outcome study (N=60) demonstrating that brain communication at rest is reliable biomarker and predictor of social functioning in people living with schizophrenia. Finally, Wojtalik and colleagues will present data from a new randomized trial (N=98) of Cognitive Enhancement Therapy for early course schizophrenia, indicating the neuroprotective effects of cognitive remediation against brain loss in the condition.

Taken together, these diverse biobehavioral studies demonstrate how applied social work research can be enriched by incorporating measures from cognitive neuroscience to gain a greater understanding of the whole individual. The results of these studies add support to the growing body of evidence indicating that the brain is plastic, malleable by social work interventions, and reciprocally influenced by the environment, underscoring the importance of a biopsychosocial approach to social work research and practice.