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A crucial aspect of social decision-making is the ability to learn from the outcomes of preceding decisions. In particular, learning might be influenced by the expectedness of feedback and its valence. Expectedness has largely been operationalized as the frequency of stimulus occurrence and not in terms of its social context. Therefore, we investigated the influence of socially unexpected feedback, i.e., smiling upon adverse events, on behavioral and neural responses. We used a modified version of the ultimatum game, a commonly used paradigm for economic decision-making, by implementing different proposer identities with a distinct reaction pattern towards accepted and rejected monetary offers. We could show that an identity, who reacted with a smile towards rejected offers, evoked lower acceptance rates compared to identities, who reward acceptance with a smile. Electrophysiological correlates indicate N170 effects for emotional identities compared to a neutral control identity. Regarding FRN and P3 brain potentials, we detected a particular function of the smiling face when used as a socially unexpected, negative feedback stimulus. Hence, individuals seek an unexpected smile despite the associated monetary loss, which is accompanied by distinct neural patterns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In many daily situations, the consequences of our actions are predicted by cues that are often social in nature. For instance, seeing the face of an evaluator (e.g., a supervisor at work) may activate certain evaluative expectancies, depending on the history of prior encounters with that particular person. We investigated how such face-induced expectancies influence neurocognitive functions of performance monitoring. We recorded an electroencephalogram while participants completed a time-estimation task, during which they received performance feedback from a strict and a lenient evaluator. During each trial, participants first saw the evaluator's face before performing the task and, finally, receiving feedback. Therefore, faces could be used as predictive cues for the upcoming evaluation. We analyzed electrocortical signatures of performance monitoring at the stages of cue processing, task performance, and feedback reception. Our results indicate that, at the cue stage, seeing the strict evaluator's face results in an anticipatory preparation of fronto-medial monitoring mechanisms, as reflected by a sustained negative-going amplitude shift (i.e., the contingent negative variation). At the performance stage, face-induced expectancies of a strict evaluation rule led to increases of early performance monitoring signals (i.e., frontal-midline theta power). At the final stage of feedback reception, violations of outcome expectancies differentially affected the feedback-related negativity and frontal-midline theta power, pointing to a functional dissociation between these signatures. Altogether, our results indicate that evaluative expectancies induced by face-cues lead to adjustments of internal performance monitoring mechanisms at various stages of task processing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]