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Development of self-protective biases in response to social evaluative feedback.

ABSTRACT: Adolescence is a developmental period marked by heightened attunement to social evaluation. While adults have been shown to enact self-protective processes to buffer their self-views from evaluative threats like peer rejection, it is unclear whether adolescents avail themselves of the same defenses. The present study examines how social evaluation shapes views of the self and others differently across development. N?=?107 participants ages 10-23 completed a reciprocal social evaluation task that involved predicting and receiving peer acceptance and rejection feedback, along with assessments of self-views and likability ratings of peers. Here, we show that, despite equivalent experiences of social evaluation, adolescents internalized peer rejection, experiencing a feedback-induced drop in self-views, whereas adults externalized peer rejection, reporting a task-induced boost in self-views and deprecating the peers who rejected them. The results identify codeveloping processes underlying why peer rejection may lead to more dramatic alterations in self-views during adolescence than other phases of the lifespan.

SUBMITTER: Rodman AM

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5740641 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Development of self-protective biases in response to social evaluative feedback.

Rodman Alexandra M AM Powers Katherine E KE Somerville Leah H LH

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 20171127 50

Adolescence is a developmental period marked by heightened attunement to social evaluation. While adults have been shown to enact self-protective processes to buffer their self-views from evaluative threats like peer rejection, it is unclear whether adolescents avail themselves of the same defenses. The present study examines how social evaluation shapes views of the self and others differently across development. <i>N</i> = 107 participants ages 10-23 completed a reciprocal social evaluation ta ...[more]

PMID: 29180428

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Project description:The dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC) is recruited when a person is socially rejected or negatively evaluated. However, it remains to be fully understood how this region responds to repeated exposure to personally-relevant social evaluation, in both healthy populations and those vulnerable to Major Depressive Disorder (MDD), as well as how responding in these regions is associated with subsequent clinical functioning. To address this gap in the literature, we recruited 17 young women with past history of MDD (previously depressed) and 31 healthy controls and exposed them to a social evaluative session in a neuroimaging environment. In two bouts, participants received an equal amount of positive, negative, and neutral feedback from a confederate. All participants reported increases in feelings of social evaluation in response to the evaluative task. However, compared to healthy controls, previously depressed participants tended to show greater increases in depressed mood following the task. At the neural level, in response to negative (vs. positive) feedback, no main effect of group or evaluation periods was observed. However, a significant interaction between group and evaluation periods was found. Specifically, over the two bouts of evaluation, activity in the dACC decreased among healthy participants while it increased among previously depressed individuals. Interestingly and unexpectedly, in the previously depressed group specifically, this increased activity in dACC over time was associated with lower levels of depressive symptoms at baseline and at 6-months following the evaluation session (controlling for baseline levels). Thus, the subset of previously depressed participants who showed increases in the recruitment of the dACC over time in response to the negative evaluation seemed to fair better emotionally. These findings suggest that examining how the dACC responds to repeated bouts of negative evaluation reveals a new dimension to the role of the dACC in processing exclusion and contributing to mental health outcomes in a population vulnerable to MDD. Further, investigation of the dynamics of the dACC response to negative social evaluation is warranted.

Dataset Information

Development of self-protective biases in response to social evaluative feedback.

Publications

Development of self-protective biases in response to social evaluative feedback.

Similar Datasets

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