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                                Chapter 9
 Network Aggression Task is the first social evaluation paradigm to experimentally disentangle neural activation for social rejection and social salience, by contrasting positive and negative social feedback to a neutral condition. In order to provide a comprehensive overview of the findings from the SNAT paradigm, I conducted a meta-analysis on the neural activation after general social salience (positive and negative feedback vs. neutral feedback), social rejection (negative vs. positive feedback) and social acceptance (positive vs. negative feedback). For this analyses I used GingerALE (Eickhoff et al., 2009; Eickhoff et al., 2012; Turkeltaub et al., 2012), a Brainmap application that is based on activation likelihood estimation, with p<.005 and a minimal volume threshold of 300 mm2. Meta-analytical results are based on the findings of adults (chapter 3, table S1 and S3), middle childhood (chapter 4, table 3) and late childhood (chapter 5, table S6) and show distinct neural activation for social rejection and social acceptance, and additionally reveal a network of brain regions that are sensitive to general social salience, see Table 1 and Figure 1.
Social rejection resulted in increased neural activation in the bilateral IFG, the MPFC, and visual regions in the occipital lobe, including the cuneus (Table 1, Figure 1). Previous studies often failed to find significant neural activation after negative social feedback (Gunther Moor et al., 2010b; Guyer et al., 2012) which could be related to low statistical power, as these studies often used small sample sizes (Mumford and Nichols, 2008; Button et al., 2013). In chapter 3 of this thesis I also did not report significant activation after social rejection using a smaller sample size (n=30) in an adult sample. However, in the studies with large samples and strong statistical power (chapter 4 and 5) I consistently report strong activation in the IFG and MPFC in childhood. The MPFC has shown to play an important role in social cognition and behavior (Blakemore, 2008; Adolphs, 2009) and is specifically implicated when thinking about others (Apps et al., 2016; Lee and Seo, 2016). Receiving negative social feedback may leave the children wondering what the other might have thought about them (Gallagher and Frith, 2003). Indeed, the social information processing network (SIPN) suggests that the MPFC is part of the “cognitive-regulatory node” were the mental states of others are perceived before inhibition of pre-potent responses are regulated by the lateral PFC (Nelson et al., 2005; Nelson et al., 2016). This corresponds to the MPFC specifically being activated after social rejection, as this might result in a stronger need for social emotion regulation than feedback leading to social acceptance.
Meta-analytical results showed that social acceptance specifically activated regions in the DLPFC, the SMA, and visual regions in the occipital lobe (Table 1), consistent with prior studies on social evaluation processing (Gunther Moor et al., 2010b; Guyer et al., 2012). The chosen GingerALE setting of clusters > 300 mm2 limits the possibility of finding meta-analytical activation in small regions such as the striatum, however, I did report significant activation in the caudate in both adults (chapter 3) and children (chapter 4). The SMA and DLPFC
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