Page 18 - Like me, or else... - Michelle Achterberg

Chapter 1
16
regions and the prefrontal cortex was related to better delay of gratification abilities (Peper et al., 2013; van den Bos et al., 2015).
Regulating aggression in the case of negative social feedback can been seen as a similar delay of gratification: For some individuals it might feel good to retaliate on the short term (Chester and DeWall, 2016), but on the long term this could result in even more social rejection (Lansford et al., 2010). In fact, examining aggression following social rejection can provide an excellent case to study ‘hot’ emotion regulation in an ecological valid social context. This requires a new social evaluation paradigm that exposes the mechanisms through experimental design, ideally combined with neuroimaging measures to inform about brain functions and connections. Such a paradigm can shed light on the underlying neural mechanisms of social acceptance and rejection, and can provide information on why some children are more sensitive to social evaluation than others.
Social Network Aggression Task
In order to gain a better understanding of the mechanisms of social acceptance and rejection, an innovative experimental paradigm is needed that is suitable to combine with neuroimaging. Task-based functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is based on contrasts between different conditions (for a concise overview of fMRI methodology see Glover (2011)). Most social evaluation studies till date have included only two conditions: participants receive either positive or negative social feedback from unknown, same-aged peers (Somerville et al., 2006; Gunther Moor et al., 2010b; Silk et al., 2014; Rodman et al., 2017). However, such paradigms are unable to investigate brain regions that are active after both positive and negative feedback, as these regions are washed out when both conditions are contrasted against each other. In order to understand the neural mechanisms of social evaluation, it is important to disentangle if regions are specifically sensitive to social rejection, or whether they are sensitive to social evaluation in general, and might signal for social salience (see also Dalgleish et al. (2017)). Therefore, we developed a new social evaluation paradigm that included a neutral feedback condition: the Social Network Aggression Task (SNAT), see Figure 3. This paradigm enables to study regions that signal for general social salience, by contrasting both positive and negative feedback to a neutral social feedback condition.
Few studies have investigated the neural mechanisms of ‘hot’ social emotion regulation during childhood, however, today’s youth is constantly connected to each other and they find themselves in an inexhaustible and unceasing pool of social information and subsequent emotions. It is therefore important that we understand how mechanisms of social emotion regulation