Page 14 - Like me, or else... - Michelle Achterberg

Chapter 1
is especially important, as social rejection is often related to negative behavioral outcomes such as anger and frustration.
Regulate or Retaliate?
In some individuals, negative social feedback triggers feelings of anger and frustration, which can lead to reactive aggression (Twenge et al., 2001; Dodge et al., 2003; Leary et al., 2006; Nesdale and Lambert, 2007; Nesdale and Duffy, 2011; Chester et al., 2014). A tragic example of how socially excluded youth can turn violent are school shootings, of which almost all perpetrators have a long history of peer rejection and social exclusion (Leary et al., 2003). But even incidental social rejection can lead to aggression. Reactive aggression after social rejection has been examined experimentally by providing participants with the opportunity to blast a loud noise towards the peer that had just socially excluded them (Bushman and Baumeister, 1998; Twenge et al., 2001; Reijntjes et al., 2010). The participants can set the intensity and duration of the noise blast heard by the other person, providing them with a way to retaliate (Bushman and Baumeister, 1998). These studies consistently showed that rejected participants were considerably more aggressive than accepted participants (Twenge et al., 2001; Leary et al., 2006; Reijntjes et al., 2010; DeWall and Bushman, 2011; Chester et al., 2014; Riva et al., 2015).
The effects of social rejection in terms of behavioral aggression might be associated with a lack of impulse control or inadequate emotion regulation (Chester et al., 2014; Riva et al., 2015). For example, in adults it was found that the extent to which individuals responded aggressively after social rejection was dependent on whether the participant showed high or low executive control (Chester et al., 2014). Participants with high executive control were less aggressive after social rejection, indicating that executive control might down- regulate aggression tendencies. It has been suggested that this form of self- control is dependent on top-down control of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC, Figure 1) over subcortical-limbic regions (such as the VS), to inhibit responses that lead to impulsive actions (Casey, 2015). Evidence for this hypothesis was provided by a study using transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS), a method to increase neural activation in specific brain regions. Riva and colleagues showed that increased neural activation in the lateral prefrontal cortex during social rejection was related to decreased behavioral aggression, compared to participants that did not receive active tDCS (Riva et al., 2015). Moreover, stronger functional connectivity between the lateral prefrontal cortex and limbic regions was related to less retaliatory aggression (Chester and DeWall, 2016). Similar associations have been found for structural connectivity: stronger connections between subcortical and prefrontal brain regions were related to less
12