"Loser" or "Popular"?: Neural response to social status words in adolescents with major depressive disorder

Sleep to Internalizing Pathway in Young Adolescents (SIPYA): A proposed neurodevelopmental model

The prevalence of internalizing disorders, i.e., anxiety and depressive disorders, spikes in adolescence and has been increasing amongst adolescents despite the existence of evidence-based treatments, highlighting the need for advancing theories on how internalizing disorders emerge. The current review presents a theoretical model, called the Sleep to Internalizing Pathway in Young Adolescents (SIPYA) Model, to explain how risk factors, namely sleep-related problems (SRPs), are prospectively associated with internalizing disorders in adolescence. Specifically, SRPs during late childhood and early adolescence, around the initiation of pubertal development, contribute to the interruption of intrinsic brain networks dynamics, both within the default mode network and between the default mode network and other networks in the brain. This interruption leaves adolescents vulnerable to repetitive negative thought, such as worry or rumination, which then increases vulnerability to internalizing symptoms and disorders later in adolescence. Sleep-related behaviors are observable, modifiable, low-stigma, and beneficial beyond treating internalizing psychopathology, highlighting the intervention potential associated with understanding the neurodevelopmental impact of SRPs around the transition to adolescence. This review details support for the SIPYA Model, as well as gaps in the literature and future directions.

Testing the adolescent social reorientation model during self and other evaluation using hierarchical growth curve modeling with parcellated fMRI data

Adolescence is characterized as a period when relationships and experiences shift toward peers. The social reorientation model of adolescence posits this shift is driven by neurobiological changes that increase the salience of social information related to peer integration and acceptance. Although influential, this model has rarely been subjected to tests that could falsify it, or studied in longitudinal samples assessing within-person development. We focused on two phenomena that are highly salient and dynamic during adolescence—social status and self-perception—and examined longitudinal changes in neural responses during a self/other evaluation task. We expected status-related social information to uniquely increase across adolescence in social brain regions. Despite using hierarchical growth curve modeling with parcellated whole-brain data to increase power to detect developmental effects, we didn’t find evidence in support of this hypothesis. Social brain regions showed increased responsivity across adolescence, but this trajectory was not unique to status-related information. Additionally, brain regions associated with self-focused cognition showed heightened responses during self-evaluation in the transition to mid-adolescence, especially for status-related information. These results qualify existing models of adolescent social reorientation and highlight the multifaceted changes in self and social development that could be leveraged in novel ways to support adolescent health and well-being.

A Social Affective Neuroscience Model of Risk and Resilience in Adolescent Depression: Preliminary Evidence and Application to Sexual and Gender Minority Adolescents

Depression is a disorder of dysregulated affective and social functioning, with attenuated response to reward, heightened response to threat (perhaps especially social threat), excessive focus on negative aspects of the self, ineffective engagement with other people, and difficulty modulating all of these responses. Known risk factors provide a starting point for a model of developmental pathways to resilience, and we propose that the interplay of social threat experiences and neural social-affective systems is critical to those pathways. We describe a model of risk and resilience, review supporting evidence, and apply the model to sexual and gender minority adolescents, a population with high disparities in depression and unique social risk factors. This approach illustrates the fundamental role of a socially and developmentally informed clinical neuroscience model for understanding a population disproportionately affected by risk factors and psychopathology outcomes. We consider it a public health imperative to apply conceptual models to high-need populations to elucidate targets for effective interventions to promote healthy development and enhance resilience.

Adolescents with an entity theory of personality are more vigilant to social status and use relational aggression to maintain social status

The present research proposed that one social-cognitive root of adolescents' willingness to use relational aggression to maintain social status in high school is an entity theory of personality, which is the belief that people's social status-relevant traits are fixed and cannot change. Aggregated data from three studies (N=882) showed that first-year high school adolescents in the U.S. who endorsed more of an entity theory were more likely to show cognitive and motivational vigilance to social status, in terms of judgments on a novel social categorization task and reports of goals related to demonstrating social status to peers. Those with an entity theory then showed a greater willingness to use relational aggression, as measured by retrospective self-reports, responses to a hypothetical scenario, and a behavioral choice task. Discussion centers on theoretical and translational implications of the proposed model and of the novel measures.

Puberty and functional brain development in humans: Convergence in findings?

Although there is a long history of studying the influence of pubertal hormones on brain function/structure in animals, this research in human adolescents is young but burgeoning. Here, we provide a comprehensive review of findings from neuroimaging studies investigating the relation between pubertal and functional brain development in humans. We quantified the findings from this literature in which statistics required for standard meta-analyses are often not provided (i.e., effect size in fMRI studies). To do so, we assessed convergence in findings within content domains (reward, facial emotion, social information, cognitive processing) in terms of the locus and directionality (i.e., positive/negative) of effects. Face processing is the only domain with convergence in the locus of effects in the amygdala. Social information processing is the only domain with convergence of positive effects; however, these effects are not consistently present in any brain region. There is no convergence of effects in either the reward or cognitive processing domains. This limited convergence in findings across domains is not the result of null findings or even due to the variety of experimental paradigms researchers employ. Instead, there are critical theoretical, methodological, and analytical issues that must be addressed in order to move the field forward.

Parental coping socialization is associated with healthy and anxious early-adolescents' neural and real-world response to threat

The ways parents socialize their adolescents to cope with anxiety (i.e., coping socialization) may be instrumental in the development of threat processing and coping responses. Coping socialization may be important for anxious adolescents, as they show altered neural threat processing and over reliance on disengaged coping (e.g., avoidance and distraction), which can maintain anxiety. We investigated whether coping socialization was associated with anxious and healthy adolescents' neural response to threat, and whether neural activation was associated with disengaged coping. Healthy and clinically anxious early adolescents (N = 120; M = 11.46 years; 71 girls) and a parent engaged in interactions designed to elicit adolescents' anxiety and parents' response to adolescents' anxiety. Parents' use of reframing and problem solving statements was coded to measure coping socialization. In a subsequent visit, we assessed adolescents' neural response to threat words during a neuroimaging task. Adolescents' disengaged coping was measured using ecological momentary assessment. Greater coping socialization was associated with lower anterior insula and perigenual cingulate activation in healthy adolescents and higher activation in anxious adolescents. Coping socialization was indirectly associated with less disengaged coping for anxious adolescents through neural activation. Findings suggest that associations between coping socialization and early adolescents' neural response to threat differ depending on clinical status and have implications for anxious adolescents' coping.

The Hippocampus and Social Impairment in Psychiatric Disorders

Social deficits, such as poor social skills (i.e., the inability to engage in appropriate and effective social interactions) and social withdrawal, are prevalent across psychiatric disorders and often co-occur with hippocampal structural and functional abnormalities. The centrality of both social and hippocampal dysfunction in psychiatric research prompts the question: Are they linked? The social cognitive map framework provides a clue: The hippocampus tracks social information in the physical environment, maps others along social dimensions, and supports social memory and decision-making. Hippocampal dysfunction might disrupt social map representation and contribute to commonly seen social behavioral symptoms. This review summarizes evidence for the role of the hippocampus in social cognitive mapping, followed by evidence that hippocampal dysfunction and social dysfunction co-occur in psychiatric disorders. We argue that the co-occurrence of hippocampal and social impairment may be related via hippocampal social cognitive mapping.

Immediate early gene activation throughout the brain is associated with dynamic changes in social context

Social competence is dependent on successful processing of social context information. The social opportunity paradigm is a methodology in which dynamic shifts in social context are induced through removal of the alpha male in a dominance hierarchy, leading to rapid ascent in the hierarchy of the beta male and of other subordinate males in the social group. In the current study, we use the social opportunity paradigm to determine what brain regions respond to this dynamic change in social context, allowing an individual to recognize the absence of the alpha male and subsequently perform status-appropriate social behaviors. Replicating our previous work, we show that following removal of the alpha male, beta males rapidly ascend the social hierarchy and attain dominant status by increasing aggression towards more subordinate individuals. Analysis of patterns of Fos immunoreactivity throughout the brain indicates that in individuals undergoing social ascent, there is increased activity in regions of the social behavior network, as well as the infralimbic and prelimbic regions of the prefrontal cortex and areas of the hippocampus. Our findings demonstrate that male mice are able to respond to changes in social context and provide insight into the how the brain processes these complex behavioral changes.