Social performance monitoring can be defined as one’s ability to detect errors and to adjust one’s behavior accordingly while performing actions in a social context. As such, it might require...Show moreSocial performance monitoring can be defined as one’s ability to detect errors and to adjust one’s behavior accordingly while performing actions in a social context. As such, it might require perspective taking abilities. The present study thus explores the relationship between social performance monitoring and empathy in children and adolescents across different contexts. Participants (N= 107) aged 9-19 completed self-report measures of empathy and engaged in a performance monitoring task (i.e., shooting a moving cannon whenever it lined up with a target) in individual, cooperative, and competitive settings. Results showed that the older children were, the better they performed in the cannonball task, pointing to age-related improvements in performance monitoring capabilities. Surprisingly, task performance did not differ between individual and social contexts. Moreover, neither cognitive nor affective empathy significantly predicted task performance in any condition. Regarding changes in empathy dimensions across development, our results revealed that, in line with our hypotheses, cognitive empathy increased with age, while affective empathy remained stable. Moreover, as expected, no effects of gender on cognitive empathy were found, while girls did report significantly higher levels of affective empathy than boys. Our behavioral study adds new insights to existing literature mostly consisting of electrophysiological and neuroimaging studies, suggesting that children and adolescents’ performance monitoring behavior is possibly neither influenced by the social context, nor by how empathetic they are. Further behavioral research on the potentially complex interplay between empathy and social performance monitoring in children and adolescents is thus warranted.Show less
Psychopathic traits are associated with reduced empathy, lack of concern for others and a tendency for externalisation of blame, which are important motivating factors for monitoring our own...Show morePsychopathic traits are associated with reduced empathy, lack of concern for others and a tendency for externalisation of blame, which are important motivating factors for monitoring our own actions with negative consequences for others. Those with high levels of psychopathic traits may therefore engage in reduced performance monitoring in a social responsibility context than those with low levels. To investigate this, healthy adults scoring low or high on psychopathic traits (N=23 each) performed the error-responsibility task, a social variant of the Flanker task, in two contexts: they were led to believe their mistakes either resulted in non-harmful consequence (soft sound) or harmful consequence (loud, aversive sound) for a confederate. Error-related event-related potentials in the form of the error-related negativity (ERN), the early error positivity (Pe) and the late Pe were recorded as electrophysiological correlates of performance monitoring and analysed with linear mixed effect models. The study hypothesised that those scoring high on psychopathic traits would show reduced ERN amplitudes and differentiate less between the harmful versus non-harmful context than low scorers. As expected, ERN amplitudes were reduced for high scores in comparison to low scorers; context, however, did not affect any electrophysiological measures. Early and late Pe as well as behavioural measures were generally unaffected by psychopathic traits. These results indicate those scoring high on psychopathic traits engage in less performance monitoring in social responsibility contexts than low scorers, although further research is required to explore mediating factors such as motivation and examine whether this differs to a non-social context.Show less
People with social anxiety symptoms (SAS) have an inflated sense of responsibility towards the mistakes that might cause them embarrassment or humiliation. This event-related potential (ERP) study...Show morePeople with social anxiety symptoms (SAS) have an inflated sense of responsibility towards the mistakes that might cause them embarrassment or humiliation. This event-related potential (ERP) study examined individual differences in SAS in social performance monitoring through focusing on the role of perceived responsibility in error-related negativity (ERN) and error positivity (Pe). Healthy volunteers with low (N = 22), specific (N = 26), or generalized (N = 17) SAS took part in the study. Participants completed a Flanker task under the observation of a co-actor in three conditions where their errors resulted in one of the following negative monetary consequences: no harm, harm to oneself, or harm to the other. Behavioural findings suggested an opposite direction of responding to errors between two groups where the low showed more impulsive response patterns, while the specific one showed a cautious one. Moreover, ERP results showed no group differences and unaffected ERN and Pe across conditions. However, an exploratory analysis comparing only generalized and low SAS groups showed that people with generalized SAS displayed enhanced ERNs when they were responsible for other’s compared to their own bonus, but not after controlling for OCD symptoms. These findings suggest that inflated sense of responsibility in generalized SAS is more relevant to situations that involve responsibility towards others compared to oneself. The study also highlights the need for investigating the impact of perceived responsibility in social performance monitoring of people with SAS, but then by explicitly focusing on mistakes that trigger embarrassment.Show less
Both an enhanced error sensitivity, measured in the electroencephalogram as the error-related negativity (ERN) and inflated responsibility attitudes, have been found to play a role in...Show moreBoth an enhanced error sensitivity, measured in the electroencephalogram as the error-related negativity (ERN) and inflated responsibility attitudes, have been found to play a role in psychopathology. This was found especially in the obsessive-compulsive disorder, with both patients and healthy volunteers scoring high on symptoms showing elevated ERN amplitudes. The aim of the study was to investigate the relation of the ERN amplitude and responsibility attitudes as measured by the Responsibility Attitude Scale (RAS) in healthy participants. As both concepts may play a central role in the social life of individuals, we used a speeded choice reaction-time task that was performed both in a medium responsibility and high responsibility context where mistakes harmed the financial bonus of the participants and of an observer respectively. Healthy volunteers (N = 65) performed a social variant of the Flanker task while EEG recording were obtained. The results showed that there was no statistically significant difference between the ERN amplitudes measured in the different conditions, that participants felt more responsible when performing the Flanker task under the high responsibility condition, and that there was a negative correlation between the ERN and RAS subscale pertaining to responsibility to oneself. We concluded that while the participants perceived one condition to require more responsibility, this either did not affect their performance or distress, or there was a ceiling effect. The negative ERN – RAS in the “self” subscale correlation was unexpected as it contradicts the previous literature on the subject. A possible explanation might be associated with the outcome expectation that participants with high responsibility attitudes had.Show less
