Neural correlates of social decision-making before and after acute rejection in stable accepted and chronically rejected children: enriching an ongoing longitudinal study

Social exclusion is very stressful and results in feelings of hurt, which is
reflected in activity in brain regions involved in affective processing and
physical pain. Children and adolescents who are rejected by classroom peers
suffer from widespread impairments in mental health that can persist across
development. A potential mechanism through which peer rejected children may
develop mental health problems is a heightened emotional and neural reactivity
to negative experiences that accompanies a rejected status (e.g., being
ignored, excluded). Such psychosocial stress can have detrimental effects on
long-term decision-making and can affect prosocial behaviour both positively
towards new sources of and negatively towards excluders. It is unclear,
however, whether these tendencies are evoked only after an acute experience of
social rejection equally among all children, or whether previous experiences of
rejection in classrooms shape the responses of individuals to a new social
rejection experience. We hypothesize that prior experiences of peer social
rejection enhance children*s sensitivity towards future rejection.
Research on the shaping of responses following social rejection have
used adult and adolescent samples. However, peer rejection emerges directly
following the transition to elementary school. This childhood period is also a
crucial period for the onset and development of internalizing and anxiety
problems, as such problems surface in childhood, and are predictive of serious
maladjustment later in life such as psychiatric disorders. Furthermore,
studying elementary school children in addition to adolescents is important
because of a number of relevant differences between the childhood and
adolescent period. For example, a disruption of social networks accompanies the
transition to high school, as the transition into adolescence is marked by an
increase in peer orientation. This fills the need for peer acceptance.
Importantly, adolescent changes in this social reorientation co-occur with
structural and functional changes in the brain. Consequently, results from
studies that focus on peer orientation in young adolescents are not necessarily
transferable to elementary school children. It therefore seems crucial to study
what the role is of peer rejection on social decision-making in late childhood
and what it*s neural correlates are.

The overall aim of this study is to elucidate the neural correlates of the
effect of social exclusion on social decision-making in chronically rejected
and stable accepted children. The secondary aim is to investigate whether
deviant sensitivity towards rejection signals also encompasses task independent
functional connectivity differences of brain regions involved in social
rejection.

This study will be a controlled non-randomized observational explorative fMRI
study.

The Cyberball game (Williams & Jarvis, 2006) will be used as an experimental
manipulation. This paradigm was chosen because research has shown that
Cybermall results in only temporary effect on mood (Will, van Lier, Crone, &
Güro*lu, 2015). Specifically, in this study it was found that all participants
showed decreases in mood following Cyberball exclusion, and that these
decreases were similar between children with high versus low social preference
scores. Importantly, such decreases were temporarily as 30 minutes after
Cyberball exclusion both children with low or high social preference scores had
similar levels of mood, which were similar to their mood levels at
pre-exclusion.

There are no risks directly associated with this study if the exclusion
criteria are met. The burden associated with participation is minimal. On the
testing day, participants will complete questionnaires on their social
experiences and mood state and will have a practise session in a mock fMRI
scanner. After that, subjects perform computer tasks (Dictator Game and
Cyberball Game) in the fMRI scanner (time in scanner max. 50 min). The visit
will last 2 hours in total. The risks of MRI scanning are negligible. This
study is relevant to gain more insight into the brain function of peer rejected
and peer accepted children in social contexts.