Feeling left out or just surprised? Neural correlates of social exclusion and expectancy violations in adolescence

Description: Affective distress and expectancy-violation based models of dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC) functioning cannot be disentangled by neuroimaging paradigms of social exclusion that confound these processes. The current study addresses this limitation by comparing social exclusion to over-inclusion, a condition that similarly violates fair play expectations but does not induce feelings of rejection. In an fMRI adaptation of the Cyberball paradigm with adolescents 11-18 years of age (N=69), we employed parametric modulators to examine scaling of neural signal with cumulative exclusion and inclusion events.