Page 19 - Like me, or else... - Michelle Achterberg

General introduction
develop during childhood. In order to experimentally examine developmental changes in social emotion regulation, we included a retaliation aspect to the Social Network Aggression Task (SNAT, Figure 3). After the participants viewed the positive, neutral or negative social feedback, participants got the opportunity to blast a loud noise towards the peer, allowing us to directly examine aggression following social evaluation. By examining differences in aggression regulation after social evaluation within and across individuals, we can examine why some children might be more sensitive for social rejection. By combining this new experimental paradigm with neuroimaging, important insights in the underlying mechanisms of social emotion regulation can be gathered.
Figure 3. Social network aggression task (SNAT), a newly developed social evaluation paradigm that includes positive, neutral and negative social feedback from unknown, same-aged peers. In response to the peer feedback, participants are able to blast a loud noise towards the peer, which is used as an index of aggression. The faces used in this figure are cartoon approximations of the photo stimuli used in Achterberg et al. (2016b).
Nature and Nurture
In a rapid changing digital world with dense social connectedness, it is important to understand why some children are more sensitive to social evaluation than others. Perhaps some children are more sensitive through genetic predisposition. On the other hand, it is possible that specific environments stimulate certain social behavior. An important scientific question is to what extent development
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