Brugia Malayi - Clark Science Center - Smith College

Individual Feedback Sensitivity to Social Self-Conscious Emotions
Jennifer Tran
Feedback is a critical component to the process of learning. Understanding feedback leads to adaptations and regulation of
individual behavior. As social beings, humans are particularly sensitive to feedback cues that occur during interactions with others
and must use this information to moderate their behavior concurrently in situations. Interpersonal relationships and the ability to
process and adapt to the feedback cues influence individual’s mental health. For example, previous research has shown that when
accepted by their peers, adolescents form better social relationships and exhibit higher self-esteem while individuals that unable to
process and evaluate cues dynamically are rejected which can manifest into social avoidance, anxiety and depression.¹ Related to
the processing of social feedback is the experience and expression of self-conscious emotions. Self-conscious emotions include
shame, guilt, and pride. They are individual personal emotions that are evoked through self-reflection and perception of situations.
These emotions provide feedback to certain personal behaviors that allow for the individual to process the appropriateness of
their actions. Past studies on the emotional effects of social feedback cues have used global assessments such as questionnaires
and behavioral tasks as well as spatially sensitive measures of brain function such as fMRI. However I am interested in whether the
immediate emotional impact of social feedback cues can be differentiated in neural markers that are temporally sensitive such as
event-related potentials (ERPs).
To do this we designed and programmed a version of the flanker paradigm. The flanker paradigm requires participants to
look at a central item in a row of stimuli while ignoring the other flanking stimuli. After each set of stimuli the participant is
presented with a feedback screen showing how well they performed compared to their peers. This peer comparison feedback
was presented as a single line divided into three colors (red, yellow, and green) with an arrow pointing to the participant’s
performance. There were three general forms of feedback: “worse than”(red), “equal to”(yellow), and “better than”(green) their
peers. The “worse than” feedback attempts to illicit minor feelings of shame, while the “better than” feedback was used to evoke
minor feelings of pride. Within these three types of feedback, there are two different degrees of variation. For example, in the
“worse than” feedback there are two possible arrow locations where one represents doing a lot worse than average and the other
representing only doing a little worse than average. We have piloted this paradigm to begin to examine the patterns of neural
markers associated with the self-conscious emotions (pride and shame). These patterns show that there is a slight difference in
between the two degrees of negative feedback. There is a difference in what can be seen as a possible P2 or P3 which is not quite
so clear due to the lack of participants (see Graph 1). The positivity component (P2/P3) is related to stimuli salience and the
premature results show a possible difference between attentions towards the two different variations of feedback screens. With
additional participants we will be able to confirm the specific ERP components associated with processing the emotional feedback.
(Supported by the Frances Baker Holmes Fund)
Advisors: Beth Powell and Jennifer Martin McDermott (University of Massachusetts, Amherst)
References:
1
Rubin, K.H., Bukowski, W.M., Parker, J.G., (2006). Peer interactions, relationships, and groups. Handbook of Child Psychology 3(6), 571-645.
2012
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