The power of a smile: Stronger working memory effects for happy faces in adolescents compared to adults

Facial mimicry interference reduces working memory accuracy for facial emotion expressions

Facial mimicry, the tendency to imitate facial expressions of other individuals, has been shown to play a critical role in the processing of emotion expressions. At the same time, there is evidence suggesting that its role might change when the cognitive demands of the situation increase. In such situations, understanding another person is dependent on working memory. However, whether facial mimicry influences working memory representations for facial emotion expressions is not fully understood. In the present study, we experimentally interfered with facial mimicry by using established behavioral procedures, and investigated how this interference influenced working memory recall for facial emotion expressions. Healthy, young adults (N = 36) performed an emotion expression n-back paradigm with two levels of working memory load, low (1-back) and high (2-back), and three levels of mimicry interference: high, low, and no interference. Results showed that, after controlling for block order and individual differences in the perceived valence and arousal of the stimuli, the high level of mimicry interference impaired accuracy when working memory load was low (1-back) but, unexpectedly, not when load was high (2-back). Working memory load had a detrimental effect on performance in all three mimicry conditions. We conclude that facial mimicry might support working memory for emotion expressions when task load is low, but that the supporting effect possibly is reduced when the task becomes more cognitively challenging.

Associations between age, social reward processing and social anxiety symptoms

Reward processing undergoes marked changes in adolescence, with social interactions representing a powerful source of reward. Reward processing is also an important factor in the development of social anxiety disorder, a condition that most commonly first appears in adolescence. This study investigated the relationship between age, social reward processing and social anxiety in a cross-sectional sample of female participants (N = 80) aged 13-34. Participants performed two versions of a probabilistic reward anticipation task, in which a speeded response could result in different probabilities of receiving either social or monetary rewarding feedback. Participants also completed self-report assessments of social reward value, trait anxiety and social anxiety symptoms. At high reward probabilities, performance on both reward tasks showed a quadratic effect of age, with the fastest responses at around 22-24 years. A similar quadratic effect was found for subjective liking ratings of both reward stimuli, although these were not associated with performance. Social anxiety was not associated with a subjective liking of the rewards but did predict performance on both tasks at all reward probabilities. Age-related variation in reward processing was not accounted for by age-related variation in social anxiety symptoms, suggesting that, while both social anxiety and age were associated with variation in reward processing, their effects were largely independent. Together, these findings provide evidence that social reward processing continues to develop across adolescence and that individual differences in social anxiety should be considered when considering reward sensitivity during this period.

Supplementary Information

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s12144-023-04551-y.

Emotional body expressions facilitate working memory: Evidence from the n‐back task

In daily life, individuals need to recognize and update emotional information from others' changing body expressions. However, whether emotional bodies can enhance working memory (WM) remains unknown. In the present study, participants completed a modified n-back task, in which they were required to indicate whether a presented image of an emotional body matched that of an item displayed before each block (0-back) or two positions previously (2-back). Each block comprised only fear, happiness, or neutral. We found that in the 0-back trials, when compared with neutral body expressions, the participants took less time and showed comparable ceiling effects for accuracy in happy bodies followed by fearful bodies. When WM load increased to 2-back, both fearful and happy bodies significantly facilitated WM performance (i.e., faster reaction time and higher accuracy) relative to neutral conditions. In summary, the current findings reveal the enhancement effect of emotional body expressions on WM and highlight the importance of emotional action information in WM.

Comparing emotional working memory in adolescents and young adults with and without depressive symptoms: developmental and psychopathological differences

Depressive symptoms are associated with working memory impairments. Yet, comparative studies examining working memory across the developmental spectrum in depressed and non depressed cohorts are lacking. This study examined emotional working memory in 74 adolescents (mean age = 14; 21 with depressive symptoms) and 92 adults (mean age = 22; 36 with depressive symptoms). Participants completed two versions of an emotional face n-back task, and either paid attention to the valence of the emotion or the gender. Both tasks were completed at low load (0-back) and high load (2-back). In the high load condition, healthy adolescents showed a bias towards positive faces, both speeding up reaction times (RTs) when emotion was task relevant but slowing RTs when they were task irrelevant. This interaction was neither significant in adolescents with depressive symptoms nor in young adults. Depressive symptoms did not influence RTs in low load. The results indicate that adolescents with depressive symptoms might lack the bias towards positive affective material at high load WM task present in healthy adolescents.

Cognitive control deployment is flexibly modulated by social value in early adolescence

Recent mechanistic models of cognitive control define the normative level of control deployment as a function of the effort cost of exerting control balanced against the reward that can be attained by exerting control. Despite these models explaining empirical findings in adults, prior literature has suggested that adolescents may not adaptively integrate value into estimates of how much cognitive control they should deploy. Moreover, much work in adolescent neurodevelopment casts social valuation processes as competing with, and in many cases overwhelming, cognitive control in adolescence. Here, we test whether social incentives can adaptively increase cognitive control. Adolescents (M_age  = 14.64, 44 male, N = 87) completed an incentivized cognitive control task in which they could exert cognitive control to receive rewards on behalf of real peers who were rated by all peers in their school grade as being of either high- or low-status. Using Bayesian modeling, we find robust evidence that adolescents exert more cognitive control for high- relative to low-status peers. Moreover, we demonstrate that social incentives, irrespective of their high- or low-status, boost adolescent cognitive control above baseline control where no incentives are offered. Findings support the hypothesis that the cognitive control system in early adolescence is flexibly modulated by social value.

Ignore the faces: Neural characterisation of emotional inhibition from childhood to adulthood using MEG

The ability to effectively and automatically regulate one's response to emotional information is a basic, fundamental skill for social functioning. The neural mechanisms underlying emotion regulation processing have been assessed, however few investigations have leveraged neurophysiological techniques, particularly magnetoencephalography (MEG) to determine the development of this critical ability. The current MEG study is the first to examine developmental changes in the neural mechanisms supporting automatic emotion regulation. We used an emotional go/no-go task with happy and angry faces in a single-site cohort of 97 healthy participants, 4-40 years of age. We found age-related changes as a function of emotion and condition in brain regions key to emotion regulation, including the right inferior frontal gyrus, orbitofrontal cortices and primarily right-lateralized temporal areas. Interaction effects, including an age by emotion and condition, were also found in the left angular gyrus, an area critical in emotion regulation and attention. Findings demonstrate protracted and nonlinear development, due to the adolescent group, of emotion regulation processing from child to adulthood, and highlight that age-related differences in emotion regulation are modulated by emotional face type.

Differences in Reward Sensitivity between High and Low Problematic Smartphone Use Adolescents: An ERP Study

Background: Problematic smartphone use is highly prevalent in adolescent populations compared to other age groups (e.g., adults and young children). Previous studies suggested that higher levels of reward sensitivity were associated with problematic smartphone use. Therefore, the current study investigated the neural processing of monetary and social reward and punishment feedbacks between high and low problematic smartphone use adolescents. Methods: 46 adolescents participated in the current study and they were categorized into two groups based on their level of problematic smartphone use: those who obtained low scores on the measure of problematic smartphone use were categorized as Low Problematic Smartphone Use (LPSU), and those who obtained high scores on the measure of problematic smartphone use were categorized as High Problematic Smartphone Use (HPSU). Electrocortical activities were recorded during the processing of monetary and social reward and punishment feedback. Results: (1) LPSUs evoked larger P3 in the social punishment condition than in the monetary punishment condition. HPSUs evoked larger P3 in the social reward condition than in the monetary condition. (2) The feedback-related negativity (FRN) amplitudes in the reward condition were significantly larger than those in the punishment condition. (3) HPSUs induced larger reward positivity in social feedback conditions than in monetary feedback conditions, while there were no significant differences between the two types of conditions in the LPSUs. Discussion: The results provide neural underpinning evidence that high sensitivity to social rewards may be related to problematic smartphone use in adolescence.

The effect of social feedback from peers on adolescent cognitive control

INTRODUCTION

Social feedback can influence cognitive control during adolescence, particularly if provided by peers. The main aim of this study was to investigate if feedback given by liked or disliked peers differentially influenced adolescents' cognitive control. The second aim was to investigate if these effects could be linked to the participants' social embeddedness in their classroom.

METHODS

A personalized incentive go/no-go task was administered to 45 early adolescents (M = 11.6 years, 25 male) and 68 late adolescents (M = 16.7, 38 male) in the Netherlands. Feedback was given after no-go trials in two social feedback conditions (displaying a picture of a real liked or disliked classmate) and in a non-social control condition.

RESULTS

Performance on the task significantly improved with age. We found no differences between conditions in cognitive control, as measured by d-prime. However, analysis of task speed revealed slower reaction times during the liked peer condition as compared to the disliked peer and the control condition, potentially suggesting that participants responded more cautiously, or alternatively that participants were more distracted. These effects did not differ between age groups. Participants' differences in task performance were not reflected in their social embeddedness in the classroom.

CONCLUSIONS

This study shows that the same kind of social feedback can have different effects on adolescent behaviour depending on the peer delivering the feedback. It demonstrates the importance of studying the effects of real life social environments to better understand and utilize their impact on adolescent development.

The role of affective control in emotion regulation during adolescence

In this review, we evaluate evidence for the hypothesis that developmental changes in emotion regulation tendencies during adolescence depend on the maturation of affective control. Affective control refers to the application of cognitive control to affective contexts, that is, the capacity to attend and respond to goal-relevant affective information, while inhibiting attention and responses toward distracting affective information. The evidence suggests that affective control develops throughout adolescence into adulthood. However, the developmental trajectory appears not to be uniform across different facets of affective control. In particular, the capacity to inhibit attention and responses to distracting affective information may be reduced during adolescence relative to childhood and adulthood. Focusing on the association between affective control and emotion regulation development in adolescence, the research reviewed supports the notion of affective control as a cognitive building block of successful emotion regulation. Good affective control appears related to fewer ruminative tendencies in adolescence as well as more frequent and successful reappraisal in older adolescents. Lower use of habitual suppression, itself a type of affective inhibition, shows an association with updating capacity. We conclude by discussing the implications of these findings for mental health and the potential mental health benefits associated with improving affective control. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Age-related differences in affective control and its association with mental health difficulties

Difficulties in regulating affect are core characteristics of a wide range of mental health conditions and are associated with deficits in cognitive control, particularly in affective contexts, affective control. The current study explored how affective control relates to mental health over the course of adolescence. We developed an Affective Control Task, which was administered to young adolescents (11-14 years; n = 29); mid-adolescents (15-18 years; n = 31), and adults (22-30 years; n = 31). The task required individuals to sort cards according to continuously changing rules: color, number, or item type. There was a neutral condition in which items were shapes, and an affective condition, in which items were emotional facial expressions. Better affective control was associated with fewer mental health difficulties (p < .001, R2 = .15). Affective control partially accounted for the association between age group and mental health problems, z = 2.61, p = .009, Akaike information criterion = 484, with the association being strongest in young adolescents, r (27) = -.44, p = .018. Affective control further accounted for variance in the association between self-reported (but not experimental) emotion regulation and mental health (z = -3.44, p < .001, Akaike information criterion = 440). Poor affective control, especially in young adolescents, is associated with more mental health problems and higher levels of emotion regulation difficulties. Improving affective control therefore may constitute a promising target for prevention.

Type-1 diabetes shapes working memory processing strategies

BACKGROUND

Type 1 diabetes (T1D) is a metabolic disorder characterized by recurrent hypo- and hyperglycemic episodes, whose clinical development has been associated with cognitive and working memory (WM) deficits.

OBJECTIVE

To contrast quantitative electroencephalography (qEEG) measures between young patients with T1D and healthy controls while performing a visuospatial WM task with two memory load levels and facial emotional stimuli.

METHODS

Four or five neutral or happy faces were sequentially and pseudo-randomly presented in different spatial locations, followed by subsequent sequences displaying the reversed spatial order or any other. Participants were instructed to discriminate between these two alternatives during EEG recording.

RESULTS

A significant increase in the absolute power of the delta and theta bands, distributed mainly over the frontal region was found during task execution, with a slight decrease of alpha band power in both groups but mainly in control individuals. However, these changes were more pronounced in the T1D patients, and reached their maximum level during the WM encoding phase, even on trials with the lower memory load. In contrast, changes seemed to occur more gradually in controls and results differed significantly only on the trials with the higher WM load.

CONCLUSIONS

These results reflect adaptive WM-processing mechanisms in which cognitive strategies have evolved in T1D patients in order to meet task demands.

Preserved Proactive Control in Ageing: A Stroop Study With Emotional Faces vs. Words

Previous studies regarding age-related changes in proactive control were inconclusive and the effects of emotion on proactive control in ageing are yet to be determined. Here, we assessed the role of task-relevant emotion on proactive control in younger and older adults. Proactive control was manipulated by varying the proportion of conflict trials in an emotional Stroop task. In Experiment 1, emotional target faces with congruent, incongruent or non-word distractor labels were used to assess proactive control in younger and older adults. To investigate whether the effects of emotion are consistent across different stimulus types, emotional target words with congruent, incongruent or obscured distractor faces were used in Experiment 2. Data from this study showed that older adults successfully deployed proactive control when needed and that task-relevant emotion affected cognitive control similarly in both age groups. It was also found that the effects of emotion on cognitive performance were qualitatively different for faces and words, with facilitating effects being observed for happy faces and for negative words. Overall, these results suggest that the effects of emotion and age on proactive control depend on the task at hand and the chosen stimulus set.

The effect of social preference on academic diligence in adolescence

In the current study, we were interested in whether adolescents show a preference for social stimuli compared with non-social stimuli in the context of academic diligence, that is, the ability to expend effort on tedious tasks that have long-term benefits. Forty-five female adolescents (aged 11-17) and 46 female adults (aged 23-33) carried out an adapted version of the Academic Diligence Task (ADT). We created two variations of the ADT: a social ADT and non-social ADT. Individuals were required to freely split their time between an easy, boring arithmetic task and looking at a show-reel of photographs of people (in the social ADT) or landscapes (in the non-social ADT). Individuals also provided enjoyment ratings for both the arithmetic task and the set of photographs they viewed. Adolescents reported enjoying the social photographs significantly more than the non-social photographs, with the converse being true for adults. There was no significant difference in the time spent looking at the social photographs between the adolescents and adults. However, adults spent significantly more time than adolescents looking at the non-social photographs, suggesting that adolescents were less motivated to look at the non-social stimuli. Further, the correlation between self-reported enjoyment of the pictures and choice behaviour in the ADT was stronger for adults than for adolescents in the non-social condition, revealing a greater discrepancy between self-reported enjoyment and ADT choice behaviour for adolescents. Our results are discussed within the context of the development of social cognition and introspective awareness between adolescence and adulthood.

Age and Gender Effects in Sensitivity to Social Rewards in Adolescents and Young Adults

Adolescence is a sensitive period for socio-cultural processing and a vast literature has established that adolescents are exceptionally attuned to the social context. Theoretical accounts posit that the social reward of social interactions plays a large role in adolescent sensitivity to the social context. Yet, to date it is unclear how sensitivity to social reward develops across adolescence and young adulthood and whether there are gender differences. The present cross-sectional study (N = 271 participants, age 11-28 years) examined age and gender effects in self-reported sensitivity to different types of social rewards. In order to achieve this aim, the Dutch Social Reward Questionnaire for Adolescents was validated. Findings revealed that each type of social reward was characterized by distinct age and gender effects. Feeling rewarded by gaining positive attention from others showed a peak in late adolescence, while enjoying positive reciprocal relationships with others showed a linear increase with age. Enjoying cruel behavior toward others decreased with age for girls, while boys showed no changes with age and reported higher levels across ages. Reward from giving others control showed a mid-adolescent dip, while enjoying group interactions did not show any changes with age. Taken together, the results imply that the social reward of social interactions is a nuanced and complex construct, which encompasses multiple components that show unique effects with age and gender. These findings enable us to gain further traction on the ubiquitous effects of the social context on decision-making in adolescent's lives.

Type 1 diabetes and working memory processing of emotional faces

Several executive functions decline with the development of type-1 diabetes (T1D), particularly working memory (WM). In adults, WM ensures efficient cognitive processing by focusing on task-relevant information while suppressing distractors. It has been well documented that WM can be influenced by emotional stimuli, which may facilitate the retention of information, interfere with uptake, or even affect its capacity. We evaluated the effect of T1D on visual WM processing using emotional faces as stimuli, in young patients with satisfactory clinical evolution, and matched controls without T1D. All subjects performed a 2-back task detecting facial identity using neutral, happy or fearful faces in a block design for fMRI. Behavioral performance was similar with the exception that patients responded significantly slower. Most importantly, between-group differences were found in patterns of brain activation. In comparison, more widespread brain activation -predominantly prefrontal- was found in the participants with T1D when processing neutral faces, while a decrease was observed when processing happy and fearful ones. Statistical contrasts demonstrated significantly-different activation patterns between groups when processing emotional faces, as controls exhibited greater activation in the cuneus, posterior cortex and parahippocampal gyrus, while the patients showed greater activation in the prefrontal structures. Results may reflect compensatory efforts made to minimize the deleterious effects of disease development on attention allocation processes and the operational efficiency of WM. The results suggest that emotional parameters should be periodically assessed in individuals with T1D in order to anticipate the emergence of attention and WM impairment.

Skipping Breakfast Affects the Early Steps of Cognitive Processing

Abstract. It has been generally accepted that skipping breakfast adversely affects cognition, mainly disturbing the attentional processes. However, the effects of short-term fasting upon brain functioning are still unclear. We aimed to evaluate the effect of skipping breakfast on cognitive processing by studying the electrical brain activity of young healthy individuals while performing several working memory tasks. Accordingly, the behavioral results and event-related brain potentials (ERPs) of 20 healthy university students (10 males) were obtained and compared through analysis of variances (ANOVAs), during the performance of three n-back working memory (WM) tasks in two morning sessions on both normal (after breakfast) and 12-hour fasting conditions. Significantly fewer correct responses were achieved during fasting, mainly affecting the higher WM load task. In addition, there were prolonged reaction times with increased task difficulty, regardless of breakfast intake. ERP showed a significant voltage decrement for N200 and P300 during fasting, while the amplitude of P200 notably increased. The results suggest skipping breakfast disturbs earlier cognitive processing steps, particularly attention allocation, early decoding in working memory, and stimulus evaluation, and this effect increases with task difficulty.

Altered Working Memory Processing of Emotion in Adolescents with Dysphoric Symptomatology: An Eye Tracking Study

It has been suggested that altered processing of emotion during cognitive control plays an important role in the etiology of depressive symptoms. The current study investigates the influence of emotional stimuli on working memory (WM) in adolescents with dysphoric symptomatology (DS). Twenty-five adolescents with DS and 40 adolescents with no dysphoric symptomatology (NDS) completed a memory-guided eye movement task. This task assessed the influence of irrelevant affective information on WM processes during high and low cognitive load. Latency analyses showed that, in the high load WM condition, negative distractors disturbed WM performance in adolescents with NDS, but not in adolescents with DS. Accuracy analyses revealed that adolescents with NDS had higher accuracy rates in the presence of positive distractors relative to negative and neutral distractors, and in comparison to adolescents with DS. The findings indicated altered WM performance in the context of emotional distractors in adolescents with DS and may contribute to theoretical knowledge and early prevention of youth depression.

Working Memory With Emotional Distraction in Monolingual and Bilingual Children

Extensive work has demonstrated the benefits of bilingualism on executive functioning (EF) across the lifespan. Concurrently, other research has shown that EF is related to emotion regulation (ER), an ability that is integral to healthy socio-emotional development. However, no research to date has investigated whether bilingualism-related advantages in EF can also be found in emotional contexts. The current study examined the performance of 93 children who were 9-years old, about half of whom were bilingual, on the Emotional Face N-Back Task, an ER task used to assess the interference effect of emotional processing on working memory. Bilingual children were more accurate than monolingual children in both 1-back and 2-back conditions but were significantly slower than monolingual children on the 2-back condition. There were significant effects of emotional valence on reaction time, but these did not differ across language groups. These results confirm previous research showing better EF performance by bilinguals, but no differences in ER were found between language groups. Findings are discussed in the context of our current understanding of the ER literature with potential implications for previously unexplored differences between monolingual and bilingual children.

The impact of happy and angry faces on working memory in depressed adolescents

Recent cognitive models suggest that the ability to control emotional information in working memory (WM) may be implicated in the etiology and maintenance of depression. However, few studies have examined the effects of processing relevant and irrelevant emotional stimuli on WM performance in depressed adolescents. In the current study, depressed adolescents (n = 27) and healthy adolescents (n = 49) completed two versions of an emotional n-back task: a low WM load (0-back) task and a high WM load (2-back) task. In the emotion-relevant condition participants were asked to attend to the emotional expression of an angry, happy, or neutral face, whereas in the emotion-irrelevant condition participants were asked to attend to the gender of the face. The results showed a WM improvement for happy faces in the emotion-relevant condition and a WM impairment for happy faces in the emotion-irrelevant condition for healthy adolescents but not for depressed adolescents. No biases toward angry faces were found. These results demonstrate that depressed adolescents do not show a preferential processing of angry faces but rather fail to show a positivity bias as seen in healthy adolescents. This supports the theoretical notion that a depressive disorder is characterized by a blunted reactivity toward positive information and may provide new insights into the underlying mechanisms of youth depression.

When Emotions Matter: Focusing on Emotion Improves Working Memory Updating in Older Adults

Research indicates that emotion can affect the ability to monitor and replace content in working memory, an executive function that is usually referred to as updating. However, it is less clear if the effects of emotion on updating vary with its relevance for the task and with age. Here, 25 younger (20–34 years of age) and 25 older adults (63–80 years of age) performed a 1-back and a 2-back task, in which they responded to younger, middle-aged, and older faces showing neutral, happy or angry expressions. The relevance of emotion for the task was manipulated through instructions to make match/non-match judgments based on the emotion (i.e., emotion was task-relevant) or the age (i.e., emotion was task-irrelevant) of the face. It was found that only older adults updated emotional faces more readily compared to neutral faces as evidenced by faster RTs on non-match trials. This emotion benefit was observed under low-load conditions (1-back task) but not under high-load conditions (2-back task) and only if emotion was task-relevant. In contrast, task-irrelevant emotion did not impair updating performance in either age group. These findings suggest that older adults can benefit from task-relevant emotional information to a greater extent than younger adults when sufficient cognitive resources are available. They also highlight that emotional processing can buffer age-related decline in WM tasks that require not only maintenance but also manipulation of material.

Evidence for the triadic model of adolescent brain development: Cognitive load and task-relevance of emotion differentially affect adolescents and adults

In adults, cognitive control is supported by several brain regions including the limbic system and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) when processing emotional information. However, in adolescents, some theories hypothesize a neurobiological imbalance proposing heightened sensitivity to affective material in the amygdala and striatum within a cognitive control context. Yet, direct neurobiological evidence is scarce. Twenty-four adolescents (12-16) and 28 adults (25-35) completed an emotional n-back working memory task in response to happy, angry, and neutral faces during fMRI. Importantly, participants either paid attention to the emotion (task-relevant condition) or judged the gender (task-irrelevant condition). Behaviorally, for both groups, when happy faces were task-relevant, performance improved relative to when they were task-irrelevant, while performance decrements were seen for angry faces. In the dlPFC, angry faces elicited more activation in adults during low relative to high cognitive load (2-back vs. 0-back). By contrast, happy faces elicited more activation in the amygdala in adolescents when they were task-relevant. Happy faces also generally increased nucleus accumbens activity (regardless of relevance) in adolescents relative to adults. Together, the findings are consistent with neurobiological models of adolescent brain development and identify neurodevelopmental differences in cognitive control emotion interactions.

Social Reward Questionnaire-Adolescent Version and its association with callous-unemotional traits

During adolescence, social interactions are a potent source of reward. However, no measure of social reward value exists for this age group. In this study, we adapted the adult Social Reward Questionnaire, which we had previously developed and validated, for use with adolescents. Participants aged 11-16 (n = 568; 50% male) completed the Social Reward Questionnaire-Adolescent Version (SRQ-A), alongside measures of personality traits-five-factor model (FFM) and callous-unemotional (CU) traits-for construct validity purposes. A confirmatory factor analysis of the SRQ-A supported a five-factor structure (Comparative Fit Index = 0.90; Root Mean Square Error of Approximation = 0.07), equating to five questionnaire subscales: enjoyment of Admiration, Negative Social Potency, Passivity, Prosocial Interactions and Sociability. Associations with FFM and CU traits were in line with what is seen for adult samples, providing support for the meaning of SRQ-A subscales in adolescents. In particular, adolescents with high levels of CU traits showed an 'inverted' pattern of social reward, in which being cruel is enjoyable and being kind is not. Gender invariance was also assessed and was partially supported. The SRQ-A is a valid, reliable measure of individual differences in social reward in adolescents.

Altered neural function to happy faces in adolescents with and at risk for depression

BACKGROUND

There is accumulating evidence of alterations in neural circuitry underlying the processing of social-affective information in adolescent Major Depressive Disorder (MDD). However the extent to which such alterations are present in youth at risk for mood disorders remains unclear.

METHOD

Whole-brain blood oxygenation level-dependent task responses and functional connectivity using generalized psychophysiological interaction (gPPI) analyses to mild and intense happy face stimuli was examined in 29 adolescents with MDD (MDD; M age, 16.0, S.D. 1.2 years), 38 healthy adolescents at risk of a mood disorder, by virtue of having a parent diagnosed with either Bipolar Disorder (BD) or MDD (Mood-risk; M age 13.4, S.D. 2.5 years) and 43 healthy control adolescents, having parents with no psychiatric disorder (HC; M age 14.6, S.D. 2.2 years).

RESULTS

Relative to HC adolescents, Mood-risk adolescents showed elevated right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) activation to 100% intensity happy (vs. neutral) faces and concomitant lowered ventral putamen activity to 50% intensity happy (vs. neutral) faces. gPPI analyses revealed that MDD adolescents showed significantly lower right DLPFC functional connectivity with the ventrolateral PFC (VLPFC) compared to HC to all happy faces.

LIMITATIONS

The current study is limited by the smaller number of healthy offspring at risk for MDD compared to BD.

CONCLUSIONS

Because Mood-risk adolescents were healthy at the time of the scan, elevated DLPFC and lowered ventral striatal activity in Mood-risk adolescents may be associated with risk or resiliency. In contrast, altered DLPFC-VLPFC functional connectivity in MDD adolescents may be associated with depressed mood state. Such alterations may affect social-affective development and progression to a mood disorder in Mood-risk adolescents. Future longitudinal follow-up studies are needed to directly answer this research question.