Abstract
Social comparison is ubiquitous across human societies with dramatic influence on people's well-being and decision making. Downward comparison (comparing to worse-off others) and upward comparison (comparing to better-off others) constitute two types of social comparisons that produce different neuropsychological consequences. Based on studies exploring neural signatures associated with downward and upward comparisons, the current study utilized a coordinate-based meta-analysis to provide a refinement of understanding about the underlying neural architecture of social comparison. We identified consistent involvement of the ventral striatum and ventromedial prefrontal cortex in downward comparison and consistent involvement of the anterior insula and dorsal anterior cingulate cortex in upward comparison. These findings fit well with the "common-currency" hypothesis that neural representations of social gain or loss resemble those for non-social reward or loss processing. Accordingly, we discussed our findings in the framework of general reinforcement learning (RL) hypothesis, arguing how social gain/loss induced by social comparisons could be encoded by the brain as a domain-general signal (i.e., prediction errors) serving to adjust people's decisions in social settings. Although the RL account may serve as a heuristic framework for the future research, other plausible accounts on the neuropsychological mechanism of social comparison were also acknowledged. Hum Brain Mapp 39:440-458, 2018. © 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Highlights
Social comparison—“Is this person better looking? More successful?”— is a key and inevitable aspect of human social life
Previous neuroimaging studies on human social comparison have revealed a neural network consisting of ventral striatum (VS), ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), AI and dACC that is engaged in non-social reward/loss processing. These findings suggest that the influence of social comparison on human behaviors is implemented through a similar neuropsychological mechanism with non-social reward/loss
The search resulted into 119 potential studies, which were further assessed according to the following criteria: (i) subjects were free from psychiatric or neurological diagnoses and neuropharmacological influence; (ii) subjects performed tasks in the context of social comparison; (iii) fMRI was used as the imaging modality; (iv) whole-brain generallinear-model-based analyses were applied; (v) statistical models for contrasts of downward/upward social comparison or relevant parametric analyses were reported; and (vi) activations were presented in a standardized stereotaxic space (Talairach or MNI)
Summary
Social comparison—“Is this person better looking? More successful?”— is a key and inevitable aspect of human social life. The RL framework argues that humans improve choices by adjusting behaviors according to prediction errors, i.e., the differences between the predicted and actual reward of an action [Schultz et al, 1997; Schultz, 2006] These error signals are often encoded in the neural acitivty of VS, vmPFC, dACC and AI [Haber and Behrens, 2014; Palminteri et al, 2012; Rushworth et al, 2011; Santesso et al, 2008], brain regions that have been shown to be involved in social comparisons. Downward comparison activating the VS and vmPFC might signal positive prediction errors (i.e., better than one’s expectations) whereas upward comparison activating the dACC and AI might signal negative prediction errors (i.e., worse than one’s expectations) These error signals might facilitate behavioral adjustments and improve performance in the context of social comparison or competition. We utilized a coordinate-based meta-analysis to quantitatively synthesize previous neuroimaging findings on social comparison with the goal of providing a comprehensive overview of the underlying neural architecture of this phenomenon
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