Upward and downward comparisons across monetary and status domains

Abstract

The ability to accurately infer one's place with respect to others is crucial for social interactions. Individuals tend to evaluate their own actions and outcomes by comparing themselves to others in either an upward or downward direction. We performed two fMRI meta-analyses on monetary (n = 39; 1,231 participants) and status (n = 23; 572 participants) social comparisons to examine how domain and the direction of comparison can modulate neural correlates of social hierarchy. Overall, both status and monetary downward comparisons activated regions associated with reward processing (striatum) while upward comparisons yielded loss-related activity. These findings provide partial support for the common currency hypothesis in that downward and upward comparisons from both monetary and status domains resemble gains and losses, respectively. Furthermore, status upward and monetary downward comparisons revealed concordant orbitofrontal cortical activity, an area associated with evaluating the value of goals and decisions implicated in both lesion and empirical fMRI studies investigating social hierarchy. These findings may offer new insight into how people relate to individuals with higher social status and how these social comparisons deviate across monetary and social status domains.

Cooperation and competition have same benefits but different costs

“…These results might in part be also explained by recent meta-analytic studies reporting consistent associations between upward comparison and activations in pain-related brain areas as well as between downward comparison and activations in reward-related circuits. 72 , 73 While these findings support the idea that upward and downward comparisons are associated with negative and positive emotional states, respectively, 74 , 75 nonetheless, our results suggest that such associations might be selective depending on the social context. Only within a competition context, the upward comparison leads to increased stress and autonomic reactivity with respect to the downward comparison.…”

The relationship between self-esteem and self-concept clarity is modulated by spontaneous activities of the dACC

“…Second, we thought that the right dACC might be a critical region to divide true and contingent self-esteem based on our results, yet direct evidence is still absent. In the future, the role of the right dACC in the processing of contingent information should be considered (van Schie et al, 2018 ; Yaple and Yu, 2020 ; van Houtum et al, 2021 ; Tan et al, 2022 ), which might help uncover the neural basis of the relationships between self-esteem and self-concept clarity (e.g., Deci, 1971 ; Deci et al, 1999 ).…”

“…The dACC deals with signaling the presence of conflicts in information processing and the need for higher cognitive control to resolve them, producing neural and behavioral adjustments (Kerns et al, 2004 ; Carter and van Veen, 2007 ). For example, the dACC is more active when some cues potentially indicate competence being negatively evaluated, such as negative feedback for task performance (Zanolie et al, 2008 ; van Schie et al, 2018 ) or acquiring a lower status relative to others (Yaple and Yu, 2020 ). Experiencing social exclusion that directly thwarts relatedness could also make the dACC more active (Eisenberger et al, 2003 , 2007 ; Slavich et al, 2010 ; Rotge et al, 2014 ).…”

Bridging Phenomenology and Neural Mechanisms of Inner Speech: ALE Meta-Analysis on Egocentricity and Intentionality in a Dual-Mechanistic Framework

“…Each cluster was scored as a percentage, which represents the proportion of analysis iterations in which the convergence was replicated. Clusters which were present in over 80% of the iterations were considered robust (Yaple & Yu, 2020).…”