The Neural Circuitry of Reward Processing in Complex Social Comparison: Evidence from an Event-Related fMRI Study

In this study, Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was conducted to investigate the mechanisms by which the brain activity in a complex social comparison context. One true subject and two pseudo-subjects were asked to complete a simple number estimate task at the same time which including upward and downward comparisons. Two categories of social comparison rewards (fair and unfair rewards distributions) were mainly presented by comparing the true subject with other two pseudo-subjects. Particularly, there were five conditions of unfair distribution when all the three subjects were correct but received different rewards. Behavioral data indicated that the ability to self-regulate was important in satisfaction judgment when the subject perceived an unfair reward distribution. fMRI data indicated that the interaction between the ventral striatum and the prefrontal cortex was important in self-regulation under specific conditions in complex social comparison, especially under condition of reward processing when there were two different reward values and the subject failed to exhibit upward comparison.