The role of self-referential and social processing in the relationship between pubertal status and difficulties in mental health and emotion regulation in adolescent girls in the UK

Adolescence is marked by the onset of puberty, which is associated with an increase in mental health difficulties, particularly in girls. Social and self-referential processes also develop during this period: adolescents become more aware of others' perspectives, and judgements about themselves become less favourable. In the current study, data from 119 girls (from London, UK) aged 9-16 years were collected at two-time points (between 2019 and 2021) to investigate the relationship between puberty and difficulties in mental health and emotion regulation, as well as the role of self-referential and social processing in this relationship. Structural equation modelling showed that advanced pubertal status predicted greater mental health and emotion regulation difficulties, including depression and anxiety, rumination and overall difficulties in emotion regulation, and in mental health and behaviour. Advanced pubertal status also predicted greater perspective-taking abilities and negative self-schemas. Exploratory analyses showed that negative self-schemas mediated the relationships between puberty and rumination, overall emotion regulation difficulties, and depression (although these effects were small and would not survive correction for multiple comparisons). The results suggest that advanced pubertal status is associated with higher mental health and emotion regulation problems during adolescence and that negative self-schemas may play a role in this association. RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS: This study investigates the relationship between puberty, mental health, emotion regulation difficulties, and social and self-referential processing in girls aged 9-16 years. Advanced pubertal status was associated with worse mental health and greater emotion regulation difficulties, better perspective-taking abilities and negative self-schemas. Negative self-schemas may play a role in the relationships between advanced pubertal status and depression, and advanced pubertal status and emotion regulation difficulties, including rumination.

Do adolescents use choice to learn about their preferences? Development of value refinement and its associations with depressive symptoms in adolescence

Independent decision making requires forming stable estimates of one's preferences. We assessed whether adolescents learn about their preferences through choice deliberation and whether depressive symptoms disrupt this process. Adolescents aged 11-18 (N = 214; participated 2021-22; Female: 53.9%; White/Black/Asian/Mixed/Arab or Latin American: 26/21/19/9/8%) rated multiple activities, chose between pairs of activities and re-rated those activities. As expected, overall, participants uprated chosen and downrated unchosen activities (dz = .20). This value refinement through choice was not evident in younger participants but emerged across adolescence. Contrary to our predictions, depressive symptoms were associated with greater value refinement. Despite this, more depressed adolescents reported lower value certainty and choice confidence. The cognitive processes through which choice deliberation shapes preference develop over adolescence, and are disrupted in depression.

Children are full of optimism, but those rose-tinted glasses are fading-Reduced learning from negative outcomes drives hyperoptimism in children

Believing that good things will happen in life is essential to maintain motivation and achieve highly ambitious goals. This optimism bias, the overestimation of positive outcomes, may be particularly important during childhood when motivation must be maintained in the face of negative outcomes. In a learning task, we have thus studied the mechanisms underlying the development of optimism bias. Investigating children (8-9 year-olds), early (12-13 year-olds) and late adolescents (16-17 year-olds), we find a consistent optimism bias across age groups. However, children were particularly hyperoptimistic, with the optimism bias decreasing with age. Using computational modelling, we show that this was driven by a reduced learning from worse-than-expected outcomes, and this reduced learning explains why children are hyperoptimistic. Our findings thus show that insensitivity to bad outcomes in childhood helps to prevent taking on an overly realistic perspective and maintain motivation.

I know better! Emerging metacognition allows adolescents to ignore false advice

Adolescents aspire for independence. Successful independence means knowing when to rely on one's own knowledge and when to listen to others. A critical prerequisite thus is a well‐developed metacognitive ability to accurately assess the quality of one's own knowledge. Little is known about whether the strive to become an independent decision maker in adolescence is underpinned by the necessary metacognitive skills. Here, we demonstrate that metacognition matures from childhood to adolescence (N = 107) and that this process coincides with greater independent decision‐making. We show that adolescents, in contrast to children, take on others’ advice less often, but only when the advice is misleading. Finally, we demonstrate that adolescents’ reduced reliance on others’ advice is explained by their increased metacognitive skills, suggesting that a developing ability to introspect may support independent decision‐making in adolescence.

Children perform extensive information gathering when it is not costly

Humans often face decisions where little is known about the choice options. Gathering information prior to making a choice is an important strategy to improve decision making under uncertainty. This is of particular importance during childhood and adolescence, when knowledge about the world is still limited. To examine how much information youths gather, we asked 107 children (8-9 years, N = 30), early (12-13 years, N = 41) and late adolescents (16-17 years, N = 36) to perform an information sampling task. We find that children gather significantly more information before making a decision compared to adolescents, but only if it does not come with explicit costs. Using computational modelling, we find that this is because children have reduced subjective costs for gathering information. Our findings thus demonstrate how children overcome their limited knowledge and neurocognitive constraints by deploying excessive information gathering, a developmental feature that could inform aberrant information gathering in psychiatric disorders.

Postdecision Evidence Integration and Depressive Symptoms

Background: Metacognition, or the ability to reflect on one's own thoughts, may be important in the development of depressive symptoms. Recent work has reported that depressive symptoms were associated with lower metacognitive bias (overall confidence) during perceptual decision making and a trend toward a positive association with metacognitive sensitivity (the ability to discriminate correct and incorrect decisions). Here, we extended this work, investigating whether confidence judgments are more malleable in individuals experiencing depressive symptoms. We hypothesized that depressive symptoms would be associated with greater adjustment of confidence in light of new evidence presented after a perceptual decision had been made. Methods: Participants (N = 416) were recruited via Amazon Mechanical Turk. Metacognitive confidence was assessed through two perceptual decision-making tasks. In both tasks, participants made a decision about which of two squares contained more dots. In the first task, participants rated their confidence immediately following the decision, whereas in the second task, participants observed new evidence (always in the same direction as initial evidence) before rating their confidence. Participants also completed questionnaires measuring depressive symptoms and self-esteem. Analysis: Metacognitive bias was calculated as overall mean confidence, whereas metacognitive sensitivity was calculated using meta-d' (a response-bias free measure of how closely confidence tracks task performance) in the first task. Postdecision evidence integration (PDEI) was defined as the change in confidence following postdecision evidence on the second task. Results: Participants with more depressive symptoms made greater confidence adjustments (i.e., greater PDEI) in light of new evidence (β = 0.119, p = 0.045), confirming our main hypothesis. We also observed that lower overall confidence was associated with greater depressive symptoms, although this narrowly missed statistical significance (β = -0.099, p = 0.056), and we did not find an association between metacognitive sensitivity (meta-d') and depressive symptoms. Notably, self-esteem was robustly associated with overall confidence (β = 0.203, p < 0.001), which remained significant when controlling for depressive symptoms. Conclusions: We found that individuals with depressive symptoms were more influenced by postdecisional evidence, adjusting their confidence more in light of new evidence. Individuals with low self-esteem were less confident about their initial decisions. This study should be replicated in a clinically depressed sample.