Facing disapproval: Performance monitoring in a social context

Abstract

Facial expressions are a potent source of information about how others evaluate our behavior. In the present study, we investigated how the internal performance-monitoring system, as reflected by error-related negativity (ERN), is affected by external cues of positive (happy faces) or negative evaluation (disgusted faces) of performance. We hypothesized that if the social context indeed impacts on how we evaluate our own performance, we would expect that the same performance error would result in larger ERN amplitudes in the context of negative evaluation than in a positive evaluation context. Our findings confirm our predictions: ERN amplitudes were largest when stimuli consisted of disgusted faces, compared to when stimuli consisted of happy faces. Importantly, ERN amplitudes in our control condition, in which sad faces were used as stimuli, were no different from the positive evaluation condition, ruling out the possibility that effects in the negative evaluation condition resulted from negative affect per se. We suggest that external social cues of approval or disapproval impact on how we evaluate our own performance at a very basic level: The brain processes errors that are associated with social disapproval as more motivationally salient, signaling the need for additional cognitive resources to prevent subsequent failures.

Keywords:

• Error-related negativity
• Event-related potentials
• Emotion
• Affect

Notes

¹To control for potential contamination of response-locked ERPs by stimulus-evoked ERPs (most notably the P3), we also performed all ERP analyses with P3 amplitudes (measured 300–500 ms post-stimulus onset) included as a covariate. Results from these additional analyses were not different from those reported in the main text, indicating that our findings specifically reflect the impact of social context on performance evaluation.

²A neural structure that is consistently co-activated with the ACC in processing these “social error” signals is the anterior insula (AI) (Lamm & Singer, 2010). In addition, this neural structure is consistently activated by viewing disgusted faces, as in the present experiment (Philips, Endrass, Kathmann, Neumann, J., von Cramon, & Ullsperger, 1997), by becoming aware of having made a mistake (Klein et al., 2007), while the AI also has a necessary role in the normal occurrence of the ERN (Ullsperger & von Cramon, 2003). Indeed, it has been proposed that the role of the AI in these processes may reflect the processing of personally and motivationally important salient information, and the subsequent recruitment of cognitive effort (Ullsperger et al., 2010). This interpretation is very similar to our suggestions that ERN may reflect engagement (Tops & Boksem, 2010), emphasizing the role of both ACC and AI in this process.