Page 50 - Like me, or else... - Michelle Achterberg

Chapter 2
due to our limited sample sizes. Nevertheless, these individual differences in brain activation during social evaluation in children could be informative, as we recently showed that individual differences in dorsal lateral PFC activation during social evaluation in adults was related to individual differences in behavioral aggression (Achterberg et al., 2016b). Future studies should include larger developmental samples to investigate these associations, and explore why some children react with more aggression after negative social feedback than others.
Limitations
In addition to the methodological considerations, some limitation regarding the social evaluation paradigm used in this study need to be acknowledged. First, although the noise blast is often used as a measure of aggression, our cover story explicitly stated that the peers would not hear the noise blast. That is to say, the aggression measure reflects hypothetical aggression or frustration. This decision was based on previous studies using a similar design (Konijn et al., 2007), but future studies may separate real aggression from hypothetical aggression to test the neural differences in these two types of aggression. Secondly, our social evaluation paradigm included a neutral condition. However, our neutral feedback was not purely neutral, but more mixed (not specifically positive and not specifically negative). Nevertheless, the neutral condition was in between positive and negative feedback, therefore making this condition a solid baseline comparison condition.
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