The emotional mechanism underlying the adverse effect of social exclusion on working memory performance: A tDCS study

Abstract

Social exclusion has been found to impair working memory (WM). However, the emotional mechanism underlying this adverse effect remains unclear. Besides, little is known about how to alleviate this adverse effect. In the current study, 128 participants were randomly assigned to a social excluded group or an included group while they received anodal transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) or sham tDCS over the right ventrolateral pre-frontal cortex (rVLPFC), then they completed the 2-back task. ANOVA results showed that under the sham tDCS condition, mood rating score and 2-back task accuracy of excluded participants were both lower than included participants, and after anodal tDCS, mood rating score and 2-back task accuracy of excluded participants were both higher compared to sham tDCS. Besides, the mediation model showed that negative emotion mediated the relationship between social exclusion and WM under the sham tDCS condition, while the mediating effect disappeared under the anodal tDCS condition. Based on these results, we argued that anodal tDCS over the rVLPFC could alleviate the adverse effect of social exclusion on WM by reducing negative emotion. These findings contributed to further understanding of the emotional mechanism underlying the adverse effect of social exclusion on WM, and providing a clinical treatment in response to social exclusion.