We anticipated that punishment of excluders would be associa

We anticipated that punishment of excluders would be associated with increased activity in the pre-SMA/ACC and AI (Sanfey et al., 2003; Strobel et al., 2011). In contrast, forgiveness was expected to be associated with increased activity in the dmPFC, TPJ and lPFC (Brüne et al., 2013; Will et al., 2015). With respect to individual differences, we expected that adolescents with a history of chronic peer rejection, relative to adolescents with a history of stable peer acceptance, would show enhanced recruitment of calcium channel blockers regions implicated in social cognition (e.g. dmPFC, TPJ) and executive control (e.g. lPFC) during forgiveness of excluders, consistent with findings demonstrating that adults who showed less forgiveness behavior activated these networks to a greater extent when they did decide to forgive (Will et al., 2015). To further explore how individual differences in social cognition (i.e. perspective taking) and executive control (i.e. behavioral regulation) were associated with punishment and forgiveness behavior and neural activity during forgiveness, we tested for correlations with self-reported perspective-taking and parent-reported behavioral regulation skills.
Material and methods
Results
Discussion The second main finding was that punishment was associated with heightened activity in the striatum, the dlPFC and parietal cortex in both groups of adolescents. The striatum has previously been shown to be involved in processing both primary (e.g. food) and social rewards, including punishment of unfair interaction partners (Singer et al., 2006). Furthermore, striatum activation during punishment has been shown to correlate with the self-reported desire for revenge and has therefore been suggested to code for the rewarding aspect of retaliation. Activation in the dlPFC has been linked to punishing criminal intent (Buckholtz et al., 2008) and economic unfairness (Güroğlu et al., 2011). The dlPFC – in concert with the parietal cortex – has been proposed to integrate different value signals and execute a punishment response among competing response options (Buckholtz and Marois, 2012). Contrary to our hypotheses, chronically rejected adolescents did not show lower levels of forgiveness than stably highly accepted adolescents. Nonetheless, despite both groups displaying similar levels of forgiveness behavior, meaningful differences emerged on a neural level. To be specific, the third main finding was that chronically rejected adolescents, compared to stably highly accepted adolescents, displayed higher levels of activity in the dorsal striatum and the lPFC when polynucleotides forgave the excluders. The dorsal striatum is strongly connected with a dorsal fronto-parietal network that plays a vital role executive control (Haber and Knutson, 2010; van den Bos et al., 2014). Together with the chronically rejected adolescents’ higher levels of behavioral regulation difficulties (indexing problems in inhibition, shifting and emotional control), heightened activity in this dorsal fronto-striatal network suggests that chronically rejected adolescents have to exert greater levels of control in order to act prosocial toward those who previously excluded them. This dovetails with findings showing that when children are asked to react to a peer hassle under time pressure, those with a rejected status generate more aggressive reactions than children with an accepted status (Rabiner et al., 1990), consistent with their higher levels of aggressive behavior in daily life (Dodge et al., 2003a; Ladd, 2006). However, when they were given enough time to think about their reactions, the reactions of most children with a rejected status became indistinguishable from their peers with an accepted status. Taken together, a greater demand on neural circuitry implicated in cognitive control during prosocial reactions to exclusion could be a correlate of these reactions being more effortful for adolescents who were chronically rejected.