Page 47 - Like me, or else... - Michelle Achterberg

Social evaluation in childhood
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Discussion
This study investigated the behavioral and neural correlates of social evaluation in middle childhood, using a new experimental paradigm: the Social Network Aggression Task (SNAT, Achterberg et al. (2016b)). With the combination of a replication design and a meta-analytical approach we thoroughly tested this new experimental paradigm in 7-to-10-year-old children. Overall, we found consistent findings over the pilot, test and replication samples for behavioral aggression following negative social feedback, showing significantly more aggression after negative social feedback compared to positive or neutral social feedback The neural effects indicated increased activity in the amygdala, insula and mPFC/ACCg after negative feedback, but these effects were only significant in part of the samples and in the meta-analyses. The specific social evaluation effects and methodological considerations for future research are described in more detail below.
Social evaluation in childhood
The SNAT showed reliable and consistent behavioral results, with stronger behavioral aggression (noise blast duration) after social rejection. The meta- analysis showed medium to (very) large combined effect sizes over the three samples. This study complements the large number of prior studies that focused mainly on withdrawal, as we showed that social rejection feedback also elicits aggression in children. This is in line with previous results in adults (Achterberg et al., 2016b), suggesting that children make similar distinctions between social evaluation as adults do. Moreover, these results are consistent with questionnaire studies that show more (teacher reported) aggression after social rejection in children (Dodge et al., 2003; Nesdale and Lambert, 2007; Lansford et al., 2010).
The next question concerned whether neural activation differed depending on whether the participant received positive, neutral or negative social feedback. The separate samples did show the same significant condition effects. In the pilot sample, we found significant heightened activation in the insula after negative vs. neutral social feedback, similar to the effects reported in adults (Achterberg et al., 2016b). However, whole brain analyses did not reveal this effect in the test or replication samples. Moreover, although heightened activation in the visual cortex (including the fusiform gyrus) after positive compared to negative and neutral feedback was consistent over the pilot and test sample, we could not confirm this in the replication sample. Our relatively small samples (with sample sizes ranging between n=19 and n=28) might not have had sufficient power to detect robust condition effects in whole brain analyses.
In the larger combined sample (including twin siblings, N=55) rejection feedback was associated with increased activity in mPFC. This region borders the mPFC/ACCg region observed in adults, with increased activity in response to
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