Hostility bias or sadness bias in excluded individuals: does anodal transcranial direct current stimulation of right VLPFC vs. left DLPFC have a mitigating effect?

Abstract

HAs are a tendency to interpret behaviors of others as intentional (Wilkowski et al., 2007) but also to perceive anger in the emotional facial expressions, which carry a broad range of socially relevant information on the internal state of the sender (Schönenberg & Jusyte, 2014). [...]a temporarily impaired ability to decode subtle changes in facial cues resulting from experience of exclusion may drive biased interpretation of actions of the excluder leading to aggressive behavior. [...]this "happiness effect" after exclusion has its boundaries, because a chronic exclusion (stigmatization) is related to slower recognition of happiness when the expression turned from neutral to a smile (Richman et al., 2016). [...]participants with low depressive symptoms exhibited an increased perceptual sensitivity for happy expressions, but only toward an includer and a stranger, but not the excluder models (Müller et al., 2016). Along with the conventional SIP model (Crick & Dodge, 1996), interpretation of the situation (mental representation) is based on previous decoding of social cues (De Castro et al., 2002), which at the same time can be affected by preexisting schemas (Horsley et al., 2010; Wilkowski et al., 2007) or by induced negative affect, e.g., anxiety (Attwood et al., 2017). [...]people who experience exclusion and feel angry or sad (DeBono & Muraven, 2014; Chow et al., 2008) may differently encode information from the excluders' faces. Most importantly, however, it is involved in negative affect suppression after threats to the sense of belonging (Eisenberger et al., 2003; Lieberman et al., 2003, 2007). [...]this function of rVLPFC is relevant to the negative affect response to social exclusion experience.