Abstract
Humans form impressions of others by associating persons (faces) with negative or positive social outcomes. This learning process has been referred to as social conditioning. In everyday life, affective nonverbal gestures may constitute important social signals cueing threat or safety, which therefore may support aforementioned learning processes. In conventional aversive conditioning, studies using electroencephalography to investigate visuocortical processing of visual stimuli paired with danger cues such as aversive noise have demonstrated facilitated processing and enhanced sensory gain in visual cortex. The present study aimed at extending this line of research to the field of social conditioning by pairing neutral face stimuli with affective nonverbal gestures. To this end, electro-cortical processing of faces serving as different conditioned stimuli was investigated in a differential social conditioning paradigm. Behavioral ratings and visually evoked steady-state potentials (ssVEP) were recorded in twenty healthy human participants, who underwent a differential conditioning procedure in which three neutral faces were paired with pictures of negative (raised middle finger), neutral (pointing), or positive (thumbs-up) gestures. As expected, faces associated with the aversive hand gesture (raised middle finger) elicited larger ssVEP amplitudes during conditioning. Moreover, theses faces were rated as to be more arousing and unpleasant. These results suggest that cortical engagement in response to faces aversively conditioned with nonverbal gestures is facilitated in order to establish persistent vigilance for social threat-related cues. This form of social conditioning allows to establish a predictive relationship between social stimuli and motivationally relevant outcomes.
Highlights
In classical aversive conditioning either highly aversive electric stimuli [1,2,3,4,5] or loud aversive bursts of noise [6,7,8,9,10] have been used as aversive unconditioned stimulus (US), which have been proven to elicit strong fear reactions and enhanced amygdala activity in response to the conditioned stimulus (CS)
Based on differential amygdala activity findings in social conditioning and larger motivational relevance of negative gestures of insult, we further explored whether visual cortex activity was higher for CS cues paired with negative compared to CS cues paired with positive gestures
Electrocortical activity The ANOVA on the mean amplitudes across the whole viewing time revealed a significant interaction of phase and CS type, F(4,76) = 2.88, GG-e = .63, p = .045, gp2 = .13
Summary
In classical aversive conditioning either highly aversive electric stimuli [1,2,3,4,5] or loud aversive bursts of (white) noise [6,7,8,9,10] have been used as aversive unconditioned stimulus (US), which have been proven to elicit strong fear reactions and enhanced amygdala activity in response to the conditioned stimulus (CS). From a social neuroscience perspective one has to note that affective and social learning processes outside the laboratory are rarely happening with these types of US stimuli. Social stimuli (verbal or non-verbal) are much more likely to function as US in everyday social learning situations, and contribute to impression formation and social and affective learning. The ability to identify individual faces based on the social consequences they have predicted in the past constitutes an essential form of associative learning in humans. This learning mechanism has been coined social conditioning, defined as process whereby an individual learns to identify other individuals that have predicted threats or rewards in the past [13]
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