Page 51 - Like me, or else... - Michelle Achterberg

Social evaluation in childhood
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Conclusion
Using both a replication and a meta-analytical approach, we showed that the Social Network Aggression Task reveals robust and reliable behavioral results. Negative social feedback resulted in the highest levels of behavioral aggression. Moreover, meta-analyses on predefined ROIs revealed that negative social feedback resulted in more neural activation in the amygdala (compared to positive feedback) and in the anterior insula and mPFC/ACCg (compared to neutral feedback). Exploratory whole brain analyses confirmed heightened activation in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) after negative relative to neutral social feedback. Future research should examine how neural responses to social feedback and subsequent aggression are related, using larger samples that allow for testing correlates of individual differences in aggression after negative social feedback. The current findings show that the Social Network Aggression Task is a reliable paradigm for the investigation of social evaluation and aggression in children, and indicate that this paradigm is feasible for use in larger and longitudinal developmental studies.
Acknowledgments
The Leiden Consortium on Individual Development is funded through the Gravitation program of the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture, and Science and the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO grant number 024.001.003).
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