Page 253 - Like me, or else... - Michelle Achterberg

Summary and general discussion
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have been related to motor planning and behavioral control (Casey, 2015; Riva et al., 2015) and neural activation in these regions might be related to the retaliation component of the SNAT paradigm. That is, participants might like the peers that provided positive feedback and therefore be intrinsically motivated to release the button as soon as possible, resulting in increased activation in the SMA and DLPFC. Indeed, the behavioral results showed that participants liked social acceptance the most and the rewarding value of positive feedback was also depicted in increased striatum activation (Sescousse et al., 2013). Increased striatal activation after positive feedback has been reported by previous social evaluation studies (Davey et al., 2010; Gunther Moor et al., 2010b; Guyer et al., 2012) and fits well with the SIPN model that highlights the importance of the “affective node” (including striatal regions) in the processing of social stimuli (Nelson et al., 2005; Nelson et al., 2016).
Figure 1. Meta-analytic activation maps for Social Network Aggression Task studies of chapters 3, 4 and 5. Neural activation for social rejection (negative > positive feedback) depicted in red. Neural activation for general social salience (positive and negative > neutral feedback) depicted in yellow. Meta-analyses were conducted using GingerALE with p<.005 and volume > 300 mm2.
Using the SNAT, I experimentally showed that there is a neural network sensitive for general social salience, irrespective of its valence. Both positive and negative social feedback resulted in increased neural activation in the ACCg, bilateral AI, medial frontal gyrus and visual regions in the occipital lobe (Figure 1, Table 1). These findings fit with the literature suggesting that the ACC and AI signal for social salience in general (Somerville et al., 2006; Dalgleish et al., 2017; Cheng et al., 2019). These findings add to previous theoretical models of social information processing which indicated the fusiform face area as an important social detection mechanism (Nelson et al., 2005; Nelson et al., 2016), by showing
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