Many functional magnetic resonance imaging studies have explored the neural correlates of social pain that results from social threat, exclusion, rejection, loss or negative evaluation. Although activations have consistently been reported within the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), it remains unclear which ACC subdivision is particularly involved. To provide a quantitative estimation of the specific involvement of ACC subdivisions in social pain, we conducted a voxel-based meta-analysis. The literature search identified 46 articles that included 940 subjects, the majority of which used the cyberball task. Significant likelihoods of activation were found in both the ventral and dorsal ACC for both social pain elicitation and self-reported distress during social pain. Self-reported distress involved more specifically the subgenual and pregenual ACC than social pain-related contrasts. The cyberball task involved the anterior midcingulate cortex to a lesser extent than other experimental tasks. During social pain, children exhibited subgenual activations to a greater extent than adults. Finally, the ventro-dorsal gradient of ACC activations in cyberball studies was related to the length of exclusion phases. The present meta-analysis contributes to a better understanding of the role of ACC subdivisions in social pain, and it could be of particular importance for guiding future studies of social pain and its neural underpinnings.

International audienceThere is ample evidence today in the stereotype threat literature that women and girls are influenced by gender-stereotyped expectations on standardized. math tests. Despite its high relevance to education, this phenomenon has not received much attention in school settings. The present studies offer the 1 st evidence to date indicating that middle school girls exhibit a performance deficit in quasi-ordinary classroom circumstances when they are simply led to believe that the task at hand measures mathematical skills. This deficit occurred in girls working alone or in mixed-gender groups (i.e., presence of regular classmates) but not in same-gender groups (i.e., presence of only same-gender classmates). Compared with the mixed-gender groups, the same-gender groups were also associated for girls in the stereotype threat condition with greater accessibility of positive role models (i.e., female classmates who excel in math), at the expense of both stereotypic in-group and out-group members (i.e., low-math-achievement girls and high-math-achievement boys). Finally, the greater accessibility of positive role models mediated the impact of the activated stereotype on girls' performance, exactly as one would expect from C. M. Steele's (1997) stereotype threat theory. Taken together, these findings clearly show that reducing stereotype threat in the classroom is a crucial challenge for both scientists and teachers

It has been speculated that the big-fish-little-pond effect (BFLPE; the negative impact of highly selective academic settings on academic self-concept) is a consequence of invidious social comparisons experienced in higher ability schools. However, the direct role of such comparisons for the BFLPE has not heretofore been documented. The present study comprises the first evidence that the BFLPE (a) is eliminated after controlling for students' invidious comparisons with their class and (b) coexists with the assimilative and contrastive effects of upward social comparison choices on academic self-concept. These results increase understanding of the BFLPE and offer support for integrative approaches of social comparison (selective accessibility and interpretation comparison models) in a natural setting. They also lend support for the distinction between forced and deliberate social comparisons and the usefulness of distinguishing between absolute and relative comparison-level choice in self-assessment.