Page 247 - Like me, or else... - Michelle Achterberg

Summary and general discussion
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A crucial first step in understanding social evaluation processing in childhood is to detect robust behavioral patterns and neural signals that are related to processing social feedback. Therefore, in chapter 2 I used a meta- analytic approach to examine behavioral and neural correlates of social evaluation processing in seven-to-eleven-year-old children. I used three different samples: a pilot sample (n=19), a test sample (n=28), and a replication sample (n=27). The results showed that the SNAT revealed robust and reliable behavioral results with negative social feedback resulting in the highest levels of behavioral aggression. Moreover, meta-analyses on predefined brain regions of interest (ROIs) revealed that negative social feedback resulted in more neural activation in the amygdala (compared to positive feedback), the anterior insula (AI) and the anterior cingulate cortex gyrus (ACCg) (compared to neutral feedback). Exploratory whole brain analyses demonstrated heightened activation in the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) after negative relative to neutral social feedback. These findings show that the SNAT is a reliable paradigm for the investigation of social evaluation processing and aggression in children, and indicate that this paradigm is feasible for use in larger and longitudinal developmental studies.
Next, in chapter 3, I investigated the neural processes of social evaluation in adults. The aims of this study were three-fold: (1) to disentangle neural signals of positive and negative social feedback, (2) to examine aggressive responses toward the person signaling negative social feedback and (3) to test whether dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) activity was related to aggression regulation after experiencing negative social feedback, based on prior studies with comparable paradigms (Riva et al., 2015). The DLPFC is a region often found implicated in behavioral control (Casey, 2015; Crone and Steinbeis, 2017). In line with the meta-analytical results of chapter 2, I found that negative social feedback was related to applying a longer noise blast toward the peer. At the neural level, conjunction analyses showed that both negative and positive social feedback resulted in increased activity in the ACCg and the bilateral AI, suggesting that these two regions generally respond to socially salient feedback, with no significant differentiation between negative and positive feedback. Neural activation that was specific for positive feedback was located in the striatum and the ventral MPFC, whereas there was no specific significant activation after negative (versus positive) social feedback. Brain-behavioral analyses, however, showed that increased DLPFC activity after negative social feedback was related to more aggression regulation. These results imply that individuals who show stronger activation in the DLPFC after negative social feedback may be better able to regulate social emotions and behavioral impulses.
Social emotion regulation in childhood
After verifying the experimental paradigm in children and adults, the next step was to examine to what extent individual variation in social evaluation was
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