Cardiac deceleration following positive and negative feedback is influenced by competence-based social status

ABSTRACT

Previous studies indicate that neurophysiological signatures of feedback processing might be enhanced when participants are assigned a low-status position. Error commission and negative feedback can evoke responses in the peripheral (autonomic) nervous system including heart rate deceleration. We conducted an exploratory study to investigate whether such activity can be modulated by the participant’s social status in a competence-based hierarchy. Participants were engaged in a cooperative time estimation task with two same-gender confederates. On each trial, they were provided with positive or negative feedback depending on their time estimation performance. Their social status varied during the task, so that they were either at the top (high-status) or at the bottom (low-status) of the hierarchy in different blocks. Results showed that cardiac deceleration was significantly modulated by feedback valence in the high-status but not in the low-status condition. We interpret this result as an increased activation of the performance monitoring system elicited by the desire to maintain a high-status position in an unstable hierarchy. In this vein, negative feedback might be processed as an aversive stimulus that signals a threat to the acquired status.

KEYWORDS:

• social status
• competence
• feedback processing
• heart rate deceleration
• autonomic reactivity

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Marta Silva for her help in setting the experiment.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

All the data and the R codes that were used for the statistical analyses are available at the OSF repository: https://osf.io/x8e67/?view_only=c5b4b7e7868345199c3617d1beae50c8

CrediT statement. Conceptualization

SB, SG, UC; Investigation: SB; Data Curation: SB; Formal Analysis: SB; Funding Acquisition: SG, UC; Supervision: SG, UC; Writing – original draft: SB; Writing – review & editing: SB, SG, UC.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a mobility grant for PhD students from Sapienza, University of Rome awarded to SB and by a donation from Dr Mortimer and Theresa Sackler Foundation to University of Sussex Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science.