Figure 2.

FMRI results. A Pupil dilation as indicator of arousal. Increased activation of the ventral anterior insula (vAI) associated with increases in pupil dilation during individual feedback trials across all conditions (p < .05, whole-brain corrected). For further details see also Table A.4. B Audience effect. Increased activation of the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) and precuneus during public (PUB) compared to private (PRIV) performance averaged across PERFORMANCE levels was associated with mentalizing processes when thinking about others’ evaluations (p < .05, whole-brain corrected, see also Table A. 2) C Performance effect. Increased activation of the dorsal anterior insula (dAI) during LOW and HIGH compared to mediocre (NEUT) performance indicating increased processing of affective arousal (conjunction analysis LOW-NEUT∩HIGH-NEUT, p < .05, whole-brain corrected). For further results see also Fig. A.1 and Table A.1. D Increased functional connectivity during embarrassment. Psychophysiological interaction analyses revealed increased functional connectivity during LOW compared to HIGH performance (p < .05 uncorrected for display purposes, results survive correction within our amygdala and vAI search volumes). Seed regions are based on the arousal (left and right dAIs; results presented in red, for seed regions see Fig. 2c) and mentalizing (precuneus and mPFC; results presented in green, for seed regions see Fig. 2b) networks. Overlap is presented in yellow. Dashed lines illustrate the anatomically defined search volumes including the amygdalae (AAL; Tzourio-Mazoyer et al., 2002) and the functional vAI (Kelly et al., 2012).