A fluid self-concept: How the brain maintains coherence and positivity across an interconnected self-concept while incorporating social feedback

People experience instances of social feedback not as isolated events, but as interdependent experiences with potential implications for their entire self-concept. Here we examine the neurobiological processes involved in maintaining a positive and coherent self-concept while incorporating social feedback. We present a network model that describes how the brain represents information about the dependency relations amongst traits, how feedback propagates across the system of self-beliefs to maintain global consistency, and how updating from negative feedback is constrained to avoid changes to self-beliefs that lead to loss of overall positivity and coherence. A key prediction of this model is that people will be less likely to change self-beliefs for traits that have many other traits that depend upon them. To test our model, we scanned human participants using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while they completed a self-evaluation task and received trait-by-trait social feedback. Consistent with our predictions, participants were less likely to change their self-views for traits that had more dependencies, and they learned more rapidly from positive than negative feedback. Processing in ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) during feedback reflected these behavioral effects: vmPFC activation was not only greater for feedback that was more positive than expected, but negative feedback for traits with many dependencies was associated with less activation, consistent with the vmPFC’s role in constraining updating from negative feedback with greater implications for other self-beliefs. These results suggest that vmPFC processing while receiving social feedback may play a role in maintaining positivity and coherence of the self-concept.