Psychology Commons^™

An Event-Related Examination Of Neural Activity During Social Interactions, Jason Themanson, Stephanie Khatcherian, Aaron Ball, Peter Rosen

Scholarship

Social exclusion is known to cause alterations in neural activity and perceptions of social distress. However, previous research is largely limited to examining social interactions as a unitary phenomenon without investigating adjustments in neural and attentional processes that occur during social interactions. To address this limitation, we examined neural activity on a trial-by-trial basis during different social interactions. Our results show conflict monitoring neural alarm activation, indexed by the N2, in response to specific exclusionary events; even during interactions that are inclusionary overall and in the absence of self-reported feelings of social pain. Furthermore, we show enhanced attentional activation to …