Socioeconomic inequities shape physical health and emotional well-being. As such, recent work has examined the neural mechanisms through which socioeconomic position (SEP) may influence health. However, there remain critical gaps in knowledge regarding the relationships between SEP and brain function. These gaps include a lack of research on: (1) the association between SEP and brain functioning in later life, (2) relationships between SEP and functioning of the whole brain beyond specific regions of interest, and (3) how neural responses to positive affective stimuli differ by SEP. The current study addressed these gaps by examining the association between SEP (i.e., education, income) and neural responses to affective stimuli among 122 mid- to late-life adults. During MRI scanning, participants viewed 30 positive, 30 negative, and 30 neutral images; activation and network connectivity analyses explored associations between SEP and neural responses to these affective stimuli. Analyses revealed that those with lower SEP showed greater neural activity to both positive and negative images in regions within the allostatic-interoceptive network, a system of regions implicated in representing and regulating physiological states of the body and the external environment. There were no positive associations between SEP and neural responses to negative or positive images. In addition, graph–theory network analyses showed that individuals with lower SEP demonstrated greater global efficiency within the allostatic-interoceptive network and executive control network, across all task conditions. The findings suggest that lower SEP is associated with enhanced neural sensitivity to affective cues that may be metabolically costly to maintain over time and suggest a mechanism by which SEP might get “under the skull” to influence mental and physical well-being.

A reliable observation in neuroimaging studies of cognitive control is the response of dorsal ACC (dACC) to events that demand increased cognitive control (e.g., response conflicts and performance errors). This observation is apparently at odds with a comparably reliable association of the dACC with the subjective experience of negative affective states such as pain, fear, and anxiety. Whereas “affective” associates of the dACC are based on studies that explicitly manipulate and/or measure the subjective experience of negative affect, the “cognitive” associates of dACC are based on studies using tasks designed to manipulate the demand for cognitive control, such as the Stroop, flanker, and stop-signal tasks. Critically, extant neuroimaging research has not systematically considered the extent to which these cognitive tasks induce negative affective experiences and, if so, to what extent negative affect can account for any variance in the dACC response during task performance. While undergoing fMRI, participants in this study performed a stop-signal task while regularly reporting their experience of performance on several dimensions. We observed that within-subject variability in the dACC response to stop-signal errors tracked changes in subjective frustration throughout task performance. This association remained when controlling for within-subject variability in subjective reports of cognitive engagement and several performance-related variables indexing task difficulty. These results fit with existing models characterizing the dACC as a hub for monitoring ongoing behavior and motivating adjustments when necessary and further emphasize that such a function may be linked to the subjective experience of negative affect.