Community structure analysis of rejection sensitive personality profiles: A common neural response to social evaluative threat?

Abstract

Monitoring social threat is essential for maintaining healthy social relationships, and recent studies suggest a neural alarm system that governs our response to social rejection. Frontal-midline theta (4–8 Hz) oscillatory power might act as a neural correlate of this system by being sensitive to unexpected social rejection. Here, we examined whether frontal-midline theta is modulated by individual differences in personality constructs sensitive to social disconnection. In addition, we examined the sensitivity of feedback-related brain potentials (i.e., the feedback-related negativity and P3) to social feedback. Sixty-five undergraduate female participants (mean age = 19.69 years) participated in the Social Judgment Paradigm, a fictitious peer-evaluation task in which participants provided expectancies about being liked/disliked by peer strangers. Thereafter, they received feedback signaling social acceptance/rejection. A community structure analysis was employed to delineate personality profiles in our data. Results provided evidence of two subgroups: one group scored high on attachment-related anxiety and fear of negative evaluation, whereas the other group scored high on attachment-related avoidance and low on fear of negative evaluation. In both groups, unexpected rejection feedback yielded a significant increase in theta power. The feedback-related negativity was sensitive to unexpected feedback, regardless of valence, and was largest for unexpected rejection feedback. The feedback-related P3 was significantly enhanced in response to expected social acceptance feedback. Together, these findings confirm the sensitivity of frontal midline theta oscillations to the processing of social threat, and suggest that this alleged neural alarm system behaves similarly in individuals that differ in personality constructs relevant to social evaluation.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (10.3758/s13415-018-0589-1) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Follow your heart? Examining heart rate variability as a predictor of neural reactivity to social rejection - A network approach to individual differences in social threat sensitivity

“…Especially the dACC, a main source of FM-theta, is involved in determining the necessity of eliciting cognitive control by means of a cost-benefit analysis (Shackman et al, 2011;Shenhav, Cohen, & Botvinick, 2016). This corresponds with findings that FM-theta is particularly increased in response to unexpected social rejection feedback (Kortink et al, 2018;van der Molen et al, 2017. Namely, unexpected rejection poses a particularly salient threat to social connectedness due to high amounts of cognitive conflict, uncertainty about what caused the rejection, and negative emotional force.…”

“…The aim of our study is to test whether baseline HRV is related to the neural activity evoked by the processing of social evaluative threat. Specifically, our previous studies have shown that processing of unexpected social rejection feedback is associated with a pronounced increase in EEG frontal midline (FM) theta (4 -8 Hz) oscillations (Kortink et al, 2018;van der Molen et al, 2017. The neural sources of this EEG response comprised the dorsal medial PFC, the supplementary motor area, and the dACC.…”

“…We recently showed that a community structure detection analysis (CSA) for the combined examination of such constructs was useful to identify idiosyncratic subgroups of people that differ in their rejection-sensitive personality profiles (Kortink et al, 2018). People within these subgroups are characterized by shared construct profiles (i.e., based on similar personality and/or behavioral traits), while people from different subgroups are characterized by distinct construct profiles.…”

“…A network-theoretical approach like CSA offers more detailed insight into how various traits are related within and between people. In the current study, we used CSA to identify subgroups of people differing in their self-esteem level and their behavioral responses during the 'Social Judgment Paradigm' (SJP; Kortink et al, 2018;van der Molen et al, 2017). This paradigm allows for studying the neural reactivity to social acceptance and rejection feedback, either congruent or incongruent with the participants prediction about the social evaluative outcome.…”

Elevations in EEG Power Spectra During the Recall of Sport Failure Amongst University Athletes

“…Other work shows that rejection events in Cyberball also elicit increases in power in the alpha and beta bandwidths, but it is only the increases in frontal midline theta power which tracks individual differences in participant distress (van Noordt et al, 2015). These findings converge with results from alternative paradigms inducing social rejection, which have demonstrated increases in frontal midline theta power time-locked to peer rejection events (Kortink et al, 2018;Morales et al, 2019;van der Molen et al, 2017).…”