Page 123 - Like me, or else... - Michelle Achterberg

Longitudinal changes of brain and behavior
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Introduction
Regulating emotions in social interactions is one of the most important requirements for developing social relations in childhood. With increasing age, children become better at regulating their emotions (Silvers et al., 2012), which has been suggested to be related to the development of cognitive and behavioral control functions between early childhood and adolescence (Diamond, 2013; Casey, 2015). Few studies have investigated the development of social emotion regulation within childhood, despite empirical findings showing that middle-to- late childhood marks the most rapid changes in cognitive control (Luna et al., 2004; Zelazo and Carlson, 2012; Peters et al., 2016). Although neuroimaging studies have shed light on the underlying neurobiological changes that sub serve childhood development in cognitive control, most studies have relied on cross- sectional comparisons which hinders the possibility to examine within-person change. The current study builds upon new insights in the neural processing of social emotion regulation by examining within childhood change in neural and behavioral social control in a longitudinal fMRI study.
Emotion regulation is of upmost importance when social interactions result in rejection. It is well documented that social rejection can lead to aggression and retaliation (Dodge et al., 2003; Nesdale and Lambert, 2007; Chester et al., 2014; Novin et al., 2018). Social evaluation, including social acceptance and rejection, has previously been studied using ecologically valid social judgment paradigms, in which participants’ profiles are evaluated by same- aged peers (Somerville et al., 2006; Gunther Moor et al., 2010b; Hughes and Beer, 2013; Silk et al., 2014). Developmental neuroimaging studies including adolescent participants showed that receiving positive (acceptance) relative to negative (rejection) social feedback was associated with increased neural activity in the ventral medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC), the anterior insula (AI), and the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) (Gunther Moor et al., 2010a; Guyer et al., 2016). The Social Network Aggression Task is an extended social evaluation paradigm that includes also a neutral feedback condition, and that provides participants with the opportunity to blast a loud noise towards the peer that evaluated them (Achterberg et al., 2016b; Achterberg et al., 2017; Achterberg et al., 2018b). Consistent with prior studies (Dalgleish et al., 2017), it was found that both adults and children showed stronger ACC and AI activity in this task after receiving both positive and negative feedback (relative to neutral feedback), indicating that these regions signal social salient cues (Achterberg et al., 2018b). How neural responses to social evaluation feedback influence behavioral aggression in childhood, and how these neural regions change over time, remains currently unknown.
Controlling emotions elicited by social evaluation feedback relies on cognitive control, that is: individuals with better cognitive control functions show less subsequent aggression following rejection (Chester et al., 2014). Moreover,
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