The impact of social distance on the processing of social evaluation: evidence from brain potentials and neural oscillations

Previous research indicates that social distance can influence people's social evaluations of others. Individuals tend to evaluate intimate others more positively than distant others. The present study investigates the modulating effect of social distance on the time course underlying individuals' evaluation processes of others using adequate electroencephalography methods. The results reveal that in the initial processing stage, the P2 component is larger when friends are negatively evaluated, whereas this pattern is the opposite for strangers. In the second stage, medial frontal negativity and early mid-frontal theta band activity is enhanced for negative evaluations of friends, whereas this effect is absent in social evaluations of strangers. At the late stage, the P3 is larger for positive evaluations of friends but insensitive to social evaluations of strangers, and the late mid-frontal theta is also modulated by social distance. These findings provide direct and powerful evidence that social distance modulates individuals' evaluations of others with different levels of intimacy throughout all processing stages.