Schedule of Events | Symposia

Resilience through regulation?: Inhibitory control and early-life socioeconomic context shape neural responses to ostracism

Poster Session D - Monday, March 31, 2025, 8:00 – 10:00 am EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Minwoo Lee¹ (dl858@cornell.edu), Marlen Z. Gonzalez¹; ¹Cornell University

Ostracism is an ecologically salient negative experience that impacts health and well-being. Individuals with effective emotional regulation may better mitigate its adverse effects. We thus examined how the capacity for inhibitory control, a key component of emotional regulation, modulates neural and psychological responses to ostracism. We also tested whether developmental contexts contribute to these individual differences to explore sources of variability in emotional resilience. Thirty-four healthy college students (Mean Age: 21.4±2.4) completed a color-word Stroop task, followed by two rounds of the Cyberball task during multi-echo fMRI scans. Participants’ childhood socioeconomic privilege was assessed with self-report questionnaires. Brain areas tracking individual differences in inhibitory control were identified using Stroop interference on %Hit. These neural indices and developmental context were tested for predictive value in brain responses to ostracism during Cyberball. Stroop interference correlated with BOLD fMRI signals in the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC) during incongruent vs. congruent conditions. Heightened dACC activity predicted greater dorsolateral (dlPFC) and ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (vlPFC) recruitment during exclusion vs. inclusion in Cyberball, which was associated with greater self-reported distress due to ostracism. Childhood socioeconomic privilege was linked to reduced dlPFC and vlPFC activation during exclusion, mediated by the magnitudes of Stroop interference in the dACC. Our findings show that inhibitory control shapes neural and psychological responses to ostracism, with developmental contexts influencing these processes. Heightened prefrontal responses during ostracism may reflect a more costly self-regulation, which may be more pronounced among students with lower socioeconomic privilege navigating distinct social environments in a private university.

Topic Area: EMOTION & SOCIAL: Emotional responding