“Take the Rough With the Smooth”: Modesty Modulates Neurocognitive and Emotional Processing of Social Feedback

Self-enhancement motivates individuals to prefer positive or expected social feedback over negative or unexpected feedback, thereby eliciting corresponding emotional experiences. Emotion regulation strategies that aim to reduce negative experiences and enhance positive ones often face the dilemma of prioritizing one outcome at the expense of the other. Modest individuals, characterized by the low self-focus perspective, may demonstrate advantages in managing emotional experiences derived from self-relevant social feedback. In this study, participants with high and low levels of modesty were scanned with functional magnetic resonance imaging while receiving social feedback of different valences and congruencies, with feedback indicating whether others liked participants. Results showed that highly modest individuals were less likely to use expressive suppression as an emotion regulation strategy. At the neural level, trait modesty modulated brain activity in the inferior parietal lobe and left superior temporal gyrus under unexpected conditions compared to expected conditions, as well as in the ventral anterior cingulate cortex, ventral medial prefrontal cortex, dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex under acceptance versus rejection conditions. Psychophysiological interaction analysis and brain-behavior correlation analyses further explored the mechanisms of modesty, helping individuals reduce negative experiences and enhance positive experiences. Our findings reveal the cognitive processing patterns and brain activity of modest individuals when dealing with social feedback and provide insights into how individuals can better cope with social feedback.