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Contextual exclusion processing: an fMRI study of rejection in a performance-related context

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Abstract

Social stress has a major detrimental impact on subjective well-being. Previous research mainly focused on two methods to induce and measure social stress: social exclusion and performance evaluation. For social exclusion researchers frequently focused on the Cyberball task, which in contrast to many psychosocial stress paradigms does not include a performance component. The aim of the current study was to establish an optimized psychosocial stress paradigm by combining both, social exclusion as well as performance evaluation within a single fMRI paradigm. We implemented a modification of the Cyberball task including a performance game (with exclusion and inclusion periods) in addition to the already established exclusion and inclusion periods. This indeed resulted in increased subjective stress in the performance game. Hence, the modified Cyberball version seems to be superior in mapping relevant neural social stress correlates more pronounced and reliably. Exclusion within the performance-related context contrasted to the unmodified exclusion was associated with higher activation in the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex and the anterior insula. Moreover, the modified exclusion reflected greater social processing in the precuneus, several temporo-parietal and medial prefrontal areas, as suggested by the additional task aspects of social evaluation and social perspective taking. The findings emphasize that public negative evaluation is effective in substantially enlarging and potentiating the distressing effect of exclusion on a subjective as well as on a neural level. This may have a great potential for further experimental research on social stress.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the State of North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW, Germany), the European Union through the ‘NRW Ziel2 Program’ as a part of the European Fund for Regional Development and by the German Research Foundation (DFG, IRTG 1328). The authors thank Andre Schueppen, from the Brain Imaging Facility of the Interdisciplinary Centre for Clinical Research at the RWTH Aachen University and the radiographers Cordula Kemper and Maria Peters, for their assistance with data acquisition. Furthermore, the authors thank Monica Bell and Katharina Görlich for their assistance in editing the manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychiatry, Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics, Medical Faculty RWTH Aachen, Pauwelsstrasse 30, 52074, Aachen, Germany

    Lisa Wagels, Rene Bergs, Benjamin Clemens, Magdalena Bauchmüller, Frank Schneider, Ute Habel & Nils Kohn

  2. JARA – BRAIN Institute I: Structure Function Relationship, Jülich, Germany

    Frank Schneider & Ute Habel

  3. Departments of Psychiatry, Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, USA

    Ruben C. Gur

  4. Department for Cognitive Neuroscience, Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Radboud University Medical Centre, Nijmegen, Netherlands

    Nils Kohn

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  1. Lisa Wagels
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Fig. 3 Significant clusters for the contrast of exclusion > inclusion (Ex > IN) are indicated in red (left part) and significant clusters for the contrast of performance context > free game context (PG > FG) are indicated in yellow (right part). A voxel level threshold of p < .05 FWE corrected was used for all clusters. (GIF 38 kb)

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Wagels, L., Bergs, R., Clemens, B. et al. Contextual exclusion processing: an fMRI study of rejection in a performance-related context. Brain Imaging and Behavior 11, 874–886 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11682-016-9561-2

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