Electrocortical reactivity to social feedback in youth: A pilot study of the Island Getaway task

Reward processing is often considered to be a monolithic construct, with different incentive types eliciting equivalent neural and behavioural responses. The majority of the literature on reward processing has used monetary incentives to elicit reward-related activity; yet social incentives may be particularly important due to their powerful ability to shape behaviour. Findings from studies comparing social and monetary rewards have identified both overlapping and distinct responses. In order to explore whether reward processing is domain-general or category-specific (i.e., the same or different across reward types), the present study recorded event-related potentials (ERPs) from early adolescents (ages 12-13) and emerging adults (ages 18-25) while they completed social and monetary reward tasks. Temporospatial principal components analysis revealed morphologically-similar reward positivities (RewPs) in the social and monetary reward tasks in each age group. In early adolescents, no significant difference was found between the magnitude of the RewP to social and monetary rewards. In emerging adults, however, the RewP to monetary rewards was significantly larger than the RewP to social rewards. Additionally, responses to feedback between the two tasks were not significantly correlated in either age group. These results suggest that both domain-general and category-specific processes underlie neural responses to rewards and that the relative incentive value of different types of rewards may change across development. Findings from this study have important implications for understanding the role that neural response to rewards plays in the development of psychopathology during adolescence.

Social exclusion is a potent elicitor of distress. Previous studies have shown that medial frontal theta oscillations are modulated by the experience of social exclusion. Using the Cyberball paradigm, we examined event-related dynamics of theta power in the EEG at medial frontal sites while children aged 8–12 years were exposed to conditions of fair play and social exclusion. Using an event-related design, we found that medial frontal theta oscillations (4–8 Hz) increase during both early (i.e., 200–400 ms) and late (i.e., 400–800 ms) processing of rejection events during social exclusion relative to perceptually identical “not my turn” events during inclusion. Importantly, we show that only for the later time window (400–800 ms) slow-wave theta power tracks self-reported ostracism distress. Specifically, greater theta power at medial frontal sites to “rejection” events predicted higher levels of ostracism distress. Alpha and beta oscillations for rejection events were unrelated to ostracism distress at either 200–400 ms or 400–800 ms time windows. Our findings extend previous studies by showing that medial frontal theta oscillations for rejection events are a neural signature of social exclusion, linked to experienced distress in middle childhood.

Interpersonal stress in adolescence has been associated with alterations in neural responses to peer feedback, and increased vulnerability to psychopathology. However, it is unclear whether the associations of interpersonal problems with neural responses are global across event‐related potentials (ERPs) or might result in alterations only in specific ERPs. We examined associations between multiple informants of peer stress (self‐reported, parent‐reported, and peer‐reported) and multiple ERPs (N1, P2, RewP, and LPP) to social feedback in a sample of 46 early adolescents (aged 12–13 years). Reports of peer stress were only moderately correlated with one another, indicating different informants capture different aspects of peer stress. Regressions using informant reports to predict ERPs revealed greater parent‐reported peer stress was associated with a smaller RewP, whereas self‐reported stress was associated with a smaller P2, to acceptance. In contrast, greater peer‐reported stress was associated with larger P2, RewP, and LPP to acceptance. Findings suggest that different sources of stress measurement are differentially associated with ERPs. Future research using social feedback‐related ERPs should consider multiple sources of information as well as multiple ERP components across the time‐course of feedback processing, to gain a clearer understanding of the effects of peer stress on neural responses to feedback.