The first factor called "Fear of Rejection" consists of items indicating a lack of self-esteem and the fear of being rejected, e.g. "Knowing myself as I do, I can hardly imagine that my partner will appreciate me" or "I sometimes think that my partner only loves me as much as I meet his expectations".
In order to assess the neural correlates of successful recognition we contrasted neural activity associated with correctly recognised study items with activity associated with correct rejection of new items (old > new contrast).
However, in the short version, recognition of old items depended proportionally on the number of correct group responses, while rejection of new items only decreased significantly when all confederates gave an incorrect response.
More specifically, our results show that rejection of new items may be actually more accurate (and thus less susceptible to social conformity) than recognition of old items if stimuli are novel, rather distinct and participants are capable of distinguishing subtle details, as is the case for human faces.
Thus, rejection of new items is likely due to different mechanisms; in our study, detection of perceptual novelty is sufficient to categorize an item as new, while it requires distinction of recently seen versus not-recently seen familiar words in Reysen's [20] experiment.
The set of 102 items was discussed by a pluridisciplinary group (nephrologists, interviewers, methodologists and patients belonging to the national association of end stage renal disease patients) to test their comprehensiveness and acceptability, prompting the rejection of 17 items.
The broadband early RATN phase alignment we identified resembled rhinal cortex and hippocampus findings with similar timing reported during both successful retrieval and correct rejection of new items (Mormann et al., 2005), interpreted as an unspecific memory processing facilitator.
This is reflected, for example, in the endorsement of the item The first aider should tell the person that they will support them in getting professional help, and rejection of the item The first aider should encourage the person to seek professional help.
The two anxiety scales focus on fear of talking and fear of being in the focus of attention (TALK; 12 items: e.g., "I get nervous when I am the focus of attention") and fear of rejection (REJECT; 10 items: e.g., "For me it is hard to make a fool of myself").
Thus, in this short version of the task, correct rejections of new items were less susceptible to the confederates' responses as long as they were non-uniform.
