Imagined veridicality of social feedback amplifies early and late brain responses

Higher social relevance has been shown to modulate event-related potentials (ERPs). It is unclear whether such modulations can be observed if one only imagines stimuli to be socially relevant. In a preregistered EEG study (N = 40), participants were presented neutral, positive and negative personality-descriptive adjectives, and given a subsequent feedback revealing whether or not the adjective described their personality. While it was emphasized that feedback occurred randomly, participants were asked either to treat the feedback information as randomly chosen or to imagine it represented a veridical social feedback. Imagined social context increased EPN, P3, and LPP amplitudes to feedback. Importantly, social context and emotional content interacted, resulting in enhanced processing of imagined social negative feedback for the N1 and EPN. These results demonstrate that social attributions can easily be elicited by instructions, modulating early and late processing stages, speaking for a strong affiliation motive.