{"doi":"10.1093/scan/nsab139","title":"Frontostriatal functional connectivity underlies self-enhancement during social evaluation","abstract":"Self-enhancement, the tendency to view oneself positively, is a pervasive social motive widely investigated in the psychological sciences. Relatively little is known about the neurocognitive mechanisms underlying this motive, specifically in social-evaluative situations. To investigate whether positive emotion regulation circuitry, circuitry involved in modulating positive affect, relates to the self-enhancement motive in social contexts, we conducted an functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study in a healthy young adult sample. We hypothesized that self-enhancement indices (state and trait self-esteem) would relate to greater functional connectivity between right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (RVLPFC), a region implicated in emotion regulation, and the ventral striatum (VS), a region associated with reward-related affect, during a social feedback task. Following social evaluation, participants experienced stable or decreased state self-esteem. Results showed that stable state self-esteem from pre- to post-scan and higher trait self-esteem related to greater RVLPFC-VS connectivity during positive evaluation. Stable-state self-esteem also related to greater RVLPFC-VS connectivity during negative evaluation. Moreover, RVLPFC activation during all types of feedback processing and left VS activation during negative feedback processing was greater for participants with stable-state self-esteem. These findings implicate neurocognitive mechanisms underlying emotion regulation in the self-enhancement motive and highlight a pathway through which self-enhancement may restore feelings of self-worth during threatening situations.","journal":"Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience","year":2022,"id":276248,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":8,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9509,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2022-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":796475,"name":"Janine M. Dutcher","orcid":"0000-0002-8678-8585","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":666509,"name":"Keely A. Muscatell","orcid":"0000-0002-7893-5565","position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":666510,"name":"Tristen K. Inagaki","orcid":"0000-0002-8825-2637","position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":485880,"name":"Mona Moieni","orcid":null,"position":4,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":350863,"name":"Michael R. Irwin","orcid":"0000-0002-1502-8431","position":5,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":426475,"name":"Naomi I. Eisenberger","orcid":"0009-0002-6425-4416","position":6,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":595019,"name":"Michael H. Parrish","orcid":"0000-0002-5873-386X","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":48,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-19T00:28:26.545826Z","pmid":"34984459","pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}