Page 246 - Like me, or else... - Michelle Achterberg

Chapter 9
Summary
The is thesis had the goal to provide a better understanding of why some children are more sensitive to social evaluation than others, a question that is currently more urgent than ever, given that young individuals connect not only through personal interactions but also through online communication. This thesis examined this question from a neurocognitive development perspective and incorporated both behavioral genetic modeling as well as longitudinal analyses. Neurodevelopmental models suggest that social emotional regulation can be partly explained by protracted development of subcortical and prefrontal cortex regions, as well as their connections (Nelson et al., 2005; Casey et al., 2008; Casey, 2015; Nelson et al., 2016). These models focus mostly on adolescence, the transition period between childhood and adulthood, whereas childhood is a relatively unexplored phase in experimental neuroimaging research. Nevertheless, during childhood rapid changes in executive functioning occur (Luna et al., 2004; Zelazo and Carlson, 2012; Peters et al., 2016) and the first long lasting friendships emerge during this time (Berndt, 2004).
Social emotion regulation is an important factor in developing and maintaining these social relations. Social emotion regulation consists of processing social information (such as peer feedback) and regulating subsequent emotions and behaviors (such as aggression). A broad range of literature has shown that social rejection can result in behavioral 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), but little is known about the underlying mechanisms of social rejection related aggression. This thesis aimed to fill this gap by investigating the nature, nurture, and neural mechanisms underlying social emotion regulation in childhood.
Testing the Social Network Aggression Task
In order to gain a better understanding of the underlying mechanisms of responses to social acceptance and rejection, I co-designed a novel experimental paradigm that is suitable to combine with neuroimaging. In the Social Network Aggression Task (SNAT) participants view pictures of peers that provide positive, neutral or negative feedback to the participant’s profile. In addition to neural activation related to social acceptance and rejection, this paradigm enables studying regions that signal for general social salience, by contrasting both positive and negative feedback to a neutral social feedback condition. To study individual differences in behavioral responses towards social evaluation, we included a retaliation component to the SNAT. After viewing the social feedback, participants could blast a loud noise towards the peer, which was used as an index of aggression.
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