Abstract
The effects of neuroticism and depressive symptoms on psychophysiological responses in a social judgment task were examined in a sample of 101 healthy young adults. Participants performed a social judgment task in which they had to predict whether or not a virtual peer presented on a computer screen liked them. After the prediction, the actual judgment was shown, and behavioral, electrocortical, and cardiac responses to this judgment were measured. The feedback-related negativity (FRN) was largest after unexpected feedback. The largest P3 was found after the expected “like” judgments, and cardiac deceleration was largest following unexpected “do not like” judgments. Both the P3 and cardiac deceleration were affected by gender—that is, only males showed differential P3 responses to social judgments, and males showed stronger cardiac decelerations. Time–frequency analyses were performed to explore theta and delta oscillations. Theta oscillations were largest following unexpected outcomes and correlated with FRN amplitudes. Delta oscillations were largest following expected “like” judgments and correlated with P3 amplitudes. Self-reported trait neuroticism was significantly related to social evaluative predictions and cardiac reactivity to social feedback, but not to the electrocortical responses. That is, higher neuroticism scores were associated with a more negative prediction bias and with smaller cardiac responses to judgments for which a positive outcome was predicted. Depressive symptoms did not affect the behavioral and psychophysiological responses in this study. The results confirmed the differential sensitivities of various outcome measures to different psychological processes, but the found individual differences could only partly be ascribed to the collected subjective measures.
Highlights
The effects of neuroticism and depressive symptoms on psychophysiological responses in a social judgment task were examined in a sample of 101 healthy young adults
The first version of this social judgment paradigm has been used to evaluate whether the two important properties of social evaluation can be measured in different output systems by using cardiovascular (Moor, Crone, & van der Molen, 2010) and event-related brain potential (ERP; Dekkers, van der Molen, Moor, van der Veen, & van der Molen, 2015; van der Veen, van der Molen, Sahibdin, & Franken, 2014) responses, and how the behavioral and psychophysiological responses develop during childhood (Moor, van Leijenhorst, Rombouts, Crone, & Van der Molen, 2010) and are modulated by anxiety (Van der Molen et al, 2013)
The P3 in this task was interpreted as a P3a, and the finding of a larger P3 amplitude following expected Blike^ judgments was related to activation of the ventral part of the ACC (vACC) and the motivational properties of positive social evaluations when one is expecting to get a positive social evaluation
Summary
The effects of neuroticism and depressive symptoms on psychophysiological responses in a social judgment task were examined in a sample of 101 healthy young adults. Moor, Crone, and van der Molen (2010) found that the cardiovascular system was sensitive to a combination of both the congruence and valence of the social judgment, as was shown by a stronger decelerative response to unexpected Bdo not like^ judgments This finding has been replicated a number of times (Dekkers et al, 2015; van der Veen et al, 2014) and has been related to activation of the dACC, which might possibly play the role of a neural alarm system activated by cues that signal social pain (Eisenberger & Lieberman, 2004). Similar findings were recently reported in a study that examined the influence of fear of negative evaluation (Van der Molen et al, 2013), in which a strong effect of congruence on FRN amplitudes was found, but no effect of congruence or valence on P3 amplitudes
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