Page 254 - Like me, or else... - Michelle Achterberg

Chapter 9
that the ACC and AI are also important in the detection and signaling of social relevant information. Moreover, the social salience networks reported in adults (chapter 3), middle childhood (chapter 4) and late childhood (chapter 5) show remarkable resemblances, indicating this might be a core social motivational mechanism in humans. This highlights the importance of incorporating childhood neurodevelopmental changes into theoretical frameworks, as social processing networks are already active during childhood. Moreover, chapter 5 describes how activation in the AI was related to behavioral aggression, and future studies should further explore whether individual differences in neural activation of the social salience network are related to individual differences in sensitivity to social evaluation. By taking real-life social interactions into account, future studies might be able to examine whether individual differences in sensitivity to social evaluations are a cause or an effect of individual differences in social (offline or online) interactions.
Aggression regulation following social feedback
Previous theoretical models of social emotion regulation have suggested that the lateral PFC is important for top down control over affective-motivational subcortical regions (Nelson et al., 2005; Casey et al., 2008; Casey, 2015; Nelson et al., 2016). By including a retaliation component to the Social Network Aggression Task, I was able to directly test how individual differences in social emotion regulation were related to neural activation in the DLPFC. Consistent with prior experimental studies (Riva et al., 2015), chapter 3 revealed that increased activation in the DLPFC after social rejection was related to less subsequent aggression in adults, suggesting that these individuals were more successful at regulating their behavioral aggression. Region of interest analyses of the DLPFC in a middle childhood sample (chapter 4) provided some indications of an aggression regulation network, but this was not strong enough to be depicted using whole brain-behavior analyses. When examining these same children two years later - now during late childhood - there was a significant association between brain and behavior. Similarly to adults, increased neural activation in the DLPFC was related to less behavioral aggression after negative social feedback. Importantly, the children who displayed the largest developmental increases in DLPFC activity across childhood also displayed the largest changes in social emotion regulation. These findings add to previous studies that suggested that the DLPFC is an important region for cool (non- emotional) cognitive control (Luna et al., 2004; Luna et al., 2010; Crone and Steinbeis, 2017) by showing that the DLPFC is also important in controlling hot emotional control (Zelazo and Carlson, 2012; Welsh and Peterson, 2014). Moreover, the results provide evidence for developmental models of social emotion regulation (Nelson et al., 2005; Casey et al., 2008; Casey, 2015; Nelson et al., 2016) in such a way that they confirm that the DLPFC serves as a regulatory
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