Social re-orientation and brain development: An expanded and updated view.

Social development has been the focus of a great deal of neuroscience based research over the past decade. In this review, we focus on providing a framework for understanding how changes in facets of social development may correspond with changes in brain function. We argue that (1) distinct phases of social behavior emerge based on whether the organizing social force is the mother, peer play, peer integration, or romantic intimacy; (2) each phase is marked by a high degree of affect-driven motivation that elicits a distinct response in subcortical structures; (3) activity generated by these structures interacts with circuits in prefrontal cortex that guide executive functions, and occipital and temporal lobe circuits, which generate specific sensory and perceptual social representations. We propose that the direction, magnitude and duration of interaction among these affective, executive, and perceptual systems may relate to distinct sensitive periods across development that contribute to establishing long-term patterns of brain function and behavior

Sleep-amount differentially affects fear-processing neural circuitry in pediatric anxiety: A preliminary fMRI investigation.

Insufficient sleep, as well as the incidence of anxiety disorders, both peak during adolescence. While both conditions present perturbations in fear-processing-related neurocircuitry, it is unknown whether these neurofunctional alterations directly link anxiety and compromised sleep in adolescents. Fourteen anxious adolescents (AAs) and 19 healthy adolescents (HAs) were compared on a measure of sleep amount and neural responses to negatively valenced faces during fMRI. Group differences in neural response to negative faces emerged in the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC) and the hippocampus. In both regions, correlation of sleep amount with BOLD activation was positive in AAs, but negative in HAs. Follow-up psychophysiological interaction (PPI) analyses indicated positive connectivity between dACC and dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, and between hippocampus and insula. This connectivity was correlated negatively with sleep amount in AAs, but positively in HAs. In conclusion, the presence of clinical anxiety modulated the effects of sleep-amount on neural reactivity to negative faces differently among this group of adolescents, which may contribute to different clinical significance and outcomes of sleep disturbances in healthy adolescents and patients with anxiety disorders

Cognitive distortions mediate depression and affective response to social acceptance and rejection

BackgroundThe emotional context insensitivity (ECI) hypothesis suggests individuals with depression have blunted affective responses to both positive and negative events. We tested ECI in a social context to examine how depression relates to affective responses to social acceptance and rejection outcomes. Furthermore, we aimed to identify cognitive mechanisms linking depression with affective response to social feedback. Finally, we tested whether these processes are similar for social anxiety.Method90 participants (age 18-26 years; 53 women) completed the two-visit Chatroom task. At Visit 1 they rated their expectations about being liked by 60 peers. At Visit 2 they completed self-reports of depressive and social anxiety symptoms, and of cognitive flexibility, then received acceptance or rejection feedback from each peer and rated their affective response.ResultsGreater depressive symptoms related to negative expectancy bias, lower cognitive flexibility, and less positive affective response to acceptance, but did not relate to rejection. Negative expectations and cognitive flexibility mediated the relationship between depressive symptoms and affective response for acceptance; only negative expectations mediated rejection responses. These cognitive mechanisms were not related to social anxiety.LimitationsA community sample was used to assess depression. Rumination and current mood state were omitted as potential predictors of affective response.ConclusionsFindings support the ECI framework. Depression but not social anxiety interferes with positive and negative affect through cognitively mediated dampening of emotional response to social acceptance and rejection. Emotion regulation strategies in depression therapy can target social flexibility to improve alignment of affective reactions to social outcomes

Probing the Neural Correlates of Anticipated Peer Evaluation in Adolescence

Neural correlates of social cognition were assessed in 9-to-17-year-olds using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Participants appraised how unfamiliar peers they had previously identified as being of high or low interest would evaluate them for an anticipated online chat session. Differential age- and sex-related activation patterns emerged in several regions previously implicated in affective processing. These included the ventral striatum, hippocampus, hypothalamus, and insula. In general, activation patterns shifted with age in older relative to younger females, but showed no association with age in males. Relating these neural response patterns to changes in adolescent social-cognition enriches theories of adolescent social development through enhanced neurobiological understanding of social behavior

Prediction of adolescent depression from prenatal and childhood data from ALSPAC using machine learning

Depression is a major cause of disability and mortality for young people worldwide and is typically first diagnosed during adolescence. In this work, we present a machine learning framework to predict adolescent depression occurring between ages 12 and 18 years using environmental, biological, and lifestyle features of the child, mother, and partner from the child's prenatal period to age 10 years using data from 8467 participants enrolled in the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC). We trained and compared several cross-sectional and longitudinal machine learning techniques and found the resulting models predicted adolescent depression with recall (0.59 ± 0.20), specificity (0.61 ± 0.17), and accuracy (0.64 ± 0.13), using on average 39 out of the 885 total features (4.4%) included in the models. The leading informative features in our predictive models of adolescent depression were female sex, parental depression and anxiety, and exposure to stressful events or environments. This work demonstrates how using a broad array of evidence-driven predictors from early in life can inform the development of preventative decision support tools to assist in the early detection of risk for mental illness

Warm Parenting Throughout Adolescence Predicts Basal Parasympathetic Activity Among Mexican‐Origin Youths

Parenting that is warm and supportive has been consistently linked to better emotion regulation in children, but less is known about this association in adolescents. Adolescence is thought to be an important period for emotion regulation development given that it coincides with the emergence of mental health issues. Respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) is a measure of parasympathetic regulation linked to emotion and behavior regulation. Despite the well-documented links between parenting practices and emotion regulation, and between RSA and emotion regulation, few studies have focused on the association between positive parenting and adolescent RSA or included both mothers and fathers. The current study analyzed the influence of warm parenting throughout adolescence (ages 10-16) on basal RSA at age 17 in 229 Mexican-origin youths. Latent-growth curve models were used to analyze associations between maternal and paternal warmth and baseline RSA. Changes in maternal, but not paternal, warmth from age 10 to 16 were related to youths' basal RSA at age 17. Specifically, youths who perceived increasing (or less decreasing) maternal warmth across adolescence had higher basal RSA. This finding suggests that positive maternal parenting experiences during adolescence "get under the skin" to enhance parasympathetic functioning that supports youths' emotion regulation capacities

Neural Responses to Peer Rejection in Anxious Adolescents: Contributions from the Amygdala-Hippocampal Complex

Peer rejection powerfully predicts adolescent anxiety. While cognitive differences influence anxious responses to social feedback, little is known about neural contributions. Twelve anxious and 12 age-, gender- and IQ-matched, psychiatrically-healthy adolescents received ‘not interested’ and ‘interested’ feedback from unknown peers during a Chatroom task administered in a neuroimaging scanner. No group differences emerged in subjective ratings to peer feedback, but all participants reported more negative emotion at being rejected (than accepted) by peers to whom they had assigned high desirability ratings. Further highlighting the salience of such feedback, all adolescents, independent of anxiety levels, manifested elevated responses in the amygdala-hippocampal complex bilaterally, during the anticipation of feedback. However, anxious adolescents differed from healthy adolescents in their patterns of persistent amygdala-hippocampal activation following rejection. These data carry interesting implications for using neuroimaging data to inform psychotherapeutic approaches to social anxiety

Neural connectivity biotypes: associations with internalizing problems throughout adolescence.

BackgroundNeurophysiological patterns may distinguish which youth are at risk for the well-documented increase in internalizing symptoms during adolescence. Adolescents with internalizing problems exhibit altered resting-state functional connectivity (RSFC) of brain regions involved in socio-affective processing. Whether connectivity-based biotypes differentiate adolescents' levels of internalizing problems remains unknown.MethodSixty-eight adolescents (37 females) reported on their internalizing problems at ages 14, 16, and 18 years. A resting-state functional neuroimaging scan was collected at age 16. Time-series data of 15 internalizing-relevant brain regions were entered into the Subgroup-Group Iterative Multi-Model Estimation program to identify subgroups based on RSFC maps. Associations between internalizing problems and connectivity-based biotypes were tested with regression analyses.ResultsTwo connectivity-based biotypes were found: a Diffusely-connected biotype (N = 46), with long-range fronto-parietal paths, and a Hyper-connected biotype (N = 22), with paths between subcortical and medial frontal areas (e.g. affective and default-mode network regions). Higher levels of past (age 14) internalizing problems predicted a greater likelihood of belonging to the Hyper-connected biotype at age 16. The Hyper-connected biotype showed higher levels of concurrent problems (age 16) and future (age 18) internalizing problems.ConclusionsDifferential patterns of RSFC among socio-affective brain regions were predicted by earlier internalizing problems and predicted future internalizing problems in adolescence. Measuring connectivity-based biotypes in adolescence may offer insight into which youth face an elevated risk for internalizing disorders during this critical developmental period