Social conflicts elicit an N400-like component

The pursuit of social acceptance: aberrant conformity in social anxiety disorder

“…The N400 component has been found specifically sensitive to violations of social norms, suggesting that the component might serve as a social deviance marker in the human brain (Mu et al , 2015). Complementing the current findings, recent ERP studies have indicated that disagreement with other induced increased N400 deflection (Chen et al , 2010; Huang et al , 2014; Schnuerch et al , 2016), especially when one’s own ratings were lower than group ratings (Huang et al , 2014). A possible explanation of these findings is that individuals, especially those with social anxiety disorder, might feel ashamed and guilty about rating others as less attractive than the average, which might be more unacceptable than the situation when their initial ratings were above group ratings (see also Huang et al , 2014).…”

“…Complementing fMRI findings, recent ERP studies have demonstrated that the discrepancy between oneself and majority opinions induces ERP components previously implicated in error or conflict detection, such as feedback-related negativity (FRN) (Chen et al , 2012; Kim et al , 2012; Shestakova et al , 2013; Schnuerch et al , 2014; Schnuerch and Gibbons, 2015) and N400 (Huang et al , 2014). For instance, disagreement with group opinions evoked more pronounced N400 component than agreement with group opinions, and amplitudes of the N400 were modulated as a function of levels of disagreement with normative opinions (Huang et al , 2014).…”

“…Participants then rated the attractiveness of the same faces (initial ratings) and, following the ratings of themselves, would be shown the average rating from 200 other peer participants (normative feedback). Unbeknownst to participants, the normative feedback was generated by a pseudorandom algorithm that resulted in three experimental conditions (Zaki et al , 2011; Huang et al , 2014): on ∼30% of the trials, normative ratings were same as the participant’s ratings (peers-agree condition); on ∼30% of the trials, normative ratings were one to three points higher than the participant’s ratings (peers-higher condition); whereas on the remaining approximately 30% of trials, normative ratings were one to three points lower than participant’s ratings (peers-lower condition). Using an adaptive algorithm, we kept the overall ratio of ‘lower’ and ‘higher’ normative ratings approximately equal across the experiment.…”

“…For instance, disagreement with group opinions evoked more pronounced N400 component than agreement with group opinions, and amplitudes of the N400 were modulated as a function of levels of disagreement with normative opinions (Huang et al , 2014). Moreover, the N400 was induced by counter-conformity choices that inherently resulted in disagreement with group opinions (Chen et al , 2010).…”

Oxytocin enhances implicit social conformity to both in-group and out-group opinions

“…These photographs either were downloaded from free Internet sources or were pictures taken of university students (with consent). These photos had Page 6 of 19 A c c e p t e d M a n u s c r i p t Huang et al 6 been pre-rated by the participants in our previous study (Huang et al, 2014b) and only those with moderate attraction ratings were selected. All photos were in color and of similar quality and general appearance.…”