"Take the Rough With the Smooth": Modesty Modulates Neurocognitive and Emotional Processing of Social Feedback

Area of Science:

• Psychology
• Neuroscience

Background:

• Self-enhancement drives preference for positive social feedback, creating emotional experiences.
• Emotion regulation strategies often struggle to balance reducing negative and enhancing positive outcomes.
• Modesty, linked to low self-focus, may offer advantages in processing self-relevant social feedback.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate how trait modesty influences emotional and neural responses to social feedback.
• To explore the emotion regulation strategies employed by individuals with varying levels of modesty.
• To identify the neural mechanisms underlying modesty's effect on processing social feedback.

Main Methods:

• Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used to scan participants with high and low modesty.
• Participants received social feedback varying in valence (liking) and congruency (expected vs. unexpected).
• Psychophysiological interaction and brain-behavior correlation analyses were conducted.

Main Results:

• Highly modest individuals were less inclined to use expressive suppression for emotion regulation.
• Trait modesty modulated brain activity in regions like the inferior parietal lobe and temporal gyrus (unexpected feedback).
• Modesty influenced activity in the anterior cingulate cortex and prefrontal cortex (acceptance vs. rejection).

Conclusions:

• Modesty shapes cognitive processing and neural activity when individuals encounter social feedback.
• Understanding these mechanisms offers insights into coping with social feedback effectively.
• Modest individuals may possess inherent advantages in emotional regulation related to social evaluation.