Adolescence is a time in which rates of depression increase dramatically. Only 2% of children experience depression, but 15-20% of adolescents do! This suggests that adolescence is a time of heightened risk for the emergence of depressive symptoms.
There are many changes in adolescence that could explain this phenomenon. First, teens are very sensitive to social feedback from their peers. Their brains show heightened response to signs of rejection, in regions of the brain involved in processing emotional and social information. Teens who struggle with depression show atypical response to rejection in these brain regions, and there is some indication that youth who are at familial risk for depression (i.e., aren’t currently depressed but have a parent who has been) do as well. Does this pattern of neural response explain why some youth at risk for depression develop later symptoms?
We set out to test this question by recruiting three groups of teenage girls who were at different levels of risk for depression. Because depression is heritable, people whose parents had or have a diagnosis of depression are at higher risk of developing depression themselves. This doesn’t mean that they will develop depression, but they could be more likely to. Our three groups were:
- Girls who were not currently depressed, and did not have parents who had been/were depressed (“low risk” group)
- Girls who were not currently depressed, but who had at least 1 parent with a current or past diagnosis of depression (“high risk” group)
- Girls who were currently depressed (“depressed” group)
All groups completed a “Chatroom” game while they were in an MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) scanner. During this game, participants saw photos of two other teenagers with whom they could choose to discuss various topics. The other teenagers also made these decisions: they decided whether to chat with the participant (acceptance) or not (rejection). If participants were rejected by the other teen, a big red X would appear on their photo! If they were accepted, their photo was surrounded by a green border to indicate they had been selected. Of course, the game was rigged so that participants would get the same amount of accepting vs. rejecting feedback from these fictitious peers over time. In our analyses, we looked at how participants’ brains responded to rejection and acceptance. We examined a) whether the three different risk groups showed different patterns of neural response to being rejected or accepted by peers in the Chatroom game, and b) whether those patterns explained (mediated) the link between their risk status and depressive symptoms 6 and 12 months later.
What did we find?
First, being accepted by fictitious teenagers in the Chatroom task (compared to being rejected) elicited activation in several regions of the social brain! These included the anterior insula, the medial prefrontal cortex, and the ventral striatum. Activation in the right insula, as well as in the right temporo-parietal junction (a.k.a., the “TPJ”: an area of the brain typically involved in social cognition), was highest in the high risk girls, for both acceptance and rejection. This means that these girls, who weren’t themselves experiencing depression but were at higher familial risk for depression, showed greater activation to the task overall than the other groups of girls! In contrast, girls in the depressed group showed blunted response to being accepted in the subgenual anterior cingulate cortex—a region that often shows atypical response to emotional stimuli in people experiencing depression. For girls experiencing depression, being selected to chat with a peer didn’t create the amount of activation in that region that other groups were showing!
Did these patterns matter for later depression symptoms? Greater right TPJ activation to rejection (like that seen in the high risk group) was associated with less depressive symptoms in the high risk girls… but more TPJ response to acceptance was linked to greater later symptoms! This pattern of neural response explained some of the association between risk group and later symptoms. We were surprised by this finding, because we thought that responding more (at a neural level) to peer rejection might put someone more at risk of depressive symptoms, especially if they were already experiencing depression or at risk for it. That wasn’t the case! Our findings instead suggest that greater response to rejection in the TPJ might be representing an adaptive process that protects against later symptoms in girls at higher risk for depression. But, high TPJ activation to acceptance might signal some “overprocessing” of positive peer feedback, in ways that may predict later struggles with depression.
Our findings tell us that our brains process social feedback from peers in nuanced ways. How youth’s brains responded to being rejected or accepted by peers seemed to interact with their depression risk to predict their psychological well-being in the future. Additional research is needed to understand this phenomenon, but our findings have important implications for interventions: it might be important to consider how youth at risk for depression are perceiving, interpreting, and dealing with both peer acceptance and rejection.
Read more about our study
and findings:
Stroud, L.R., Morningstar, M., Vergara-Lopez, C., Bublitz, M.H., Lee, S.Y., Sanes, J.N., Dahl, R.E., Silk, J.S., Nelson, E.E., & Dickstein, D.P. (2023). Neural activation to peer acceptance and rejection in relation to concurrent and prospective depression risk in adolescent girls. Biological Psychology, 181, 108618. doi: 10.1016/j.biopsycho.2023.108618