Linking social reward responsiveness and affective responses to the
social environment: an ecological momentary assessment study
Abstract
Social support is a key predictor of well-being, but not everyone
experiences mental health benefits from receiving it. However, given
that a growing number of interventions are based on social support, it
is crucial to identify features that make individuals more likely to
benefit from social ties. Emerging evidence suggests that neural
responses to positive social feedback (i.e., social reward) might relate
to individual differences in social functioning, but potential
mechanisms linking these neural responses to psychological outcomes are
yet unclear. This study examined whether neural correlates of social
reward processing, indexed by the reward positivity (RewP), relate to
individuals’ affective experience following self-reported real-world
positive social support events. To this aim, 193 university students (71
% females) underwent an EEG assessment during the Island Getaway task
and completed a 10-day ecological momentary assessment where
participants reported their positive and negative affect (PA, NA) nine
times a day and the count of daily positive and negative events.
Experiencing a higher number of social support positive events was
associated with higher PA. The RewP moderated this association, such
that individuals with greater neural response to social feedback at
baseline had a more positive association between social support positive
events count and PA. Individual differences in the RewP to social
feedback might be one indicator of the likelihood of experiencing
positive affect when receiving social support.