Anxiety and depression increase in prevalence during the teenage years. Adolescence is considered a sensitive period for the development of internalizing disorders, due in part to the dramatic changes in body, brain, and behaviour that occur at this time. Shifting interactions between limbic and executive function networks during adolescence may underlie maladaptive processing of positive and negative stimuli. For instance, typically-developing youth typically show enhanced amygdala and reduced prefrontal response to emotional stimuli. In contrast, youth with anxiety and depression show heightened activation to negative or threatening stimuli in both regions, and reduced amygdala response to positive stimuli. These neural patterns translate to heightened processing of threat cues, but reduced response to reward—both of which are hallmarks of anxiety and depression. Alterations in social information processing in the brain may have effects on behaviour and associated psychosocial well-being. Early intervention to ameliorate deficits in social information processing may be effective in preventing the long-term consequences of pediatric affective disorders.
Loneliness in adolescents is associated with the recognition of vocal fear and friendliness
During the teenage years, adolescents typically begin forming complex social networks and spending more time with friends than with their parents. However, not all teenagers experience the same level of social connection at this age. Feelings of loneliness can be hard to manage, and may impact the way in which teenagers interpret social information. Previous research has shown that lonely individuals are highly attuned to social information, including both cues of social threat and signals of affiliation. Relatedly, loneliness has been linked to better recognition of negative emotions conveyed by others’ facial expressions. However, little is known about whether loneliness has similar associations with the interpretation of non-facial information, such as others’ tone of voice. To answer this question, we asked 11- to 18-year-old adolescents to report on their feelings of loneliness and to complete a vocal emotion recognition task, in which they were asked to select the emotion they thought was being conveyed in recordings of emotional voices. Contrary to our expectations, we found that loneliness was linked to poorer recognition of fear (a negative emotion), but better recognition of friendliness (an affiliative expression), in others’ voices. We speculated that differences from previous findings may stem from the differential timecourse over which vocal emotion unfolds: though negative cues may initially grab listeners’ attention, lonely individuals’ tendency to avoid threat may interfere with their accurate interpretation of this type of social cue. This work provides some evidence that youth’s cognitive response to social information is likely relevant to their social experiences, but highlights the importance of extending our assessment of social information processing to non-facial modalities.
More details about this work can be found here: https://tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02699931.2019.1682971
Morningstar, M., Nowland, R., Dirks, M.A., & Qualter, P. (2019). Links between feelings of loneliness and the recognition of vocal socio-emotional expressions in adolescents. Cognition & Emotion. doi: 10.1080/02699931.2019.1682971
Age-related changes in adolescents’ neural connectivity and activation when hearing vocal prosody
The ability to understand others' emotional state based on their tone of voice (vocal emotional prosody) develops throughout adolescence. Does neural activation to vocal prosody also change with age during the teenage years? We asked 8 to 19 year-old youth to complete a vocal emotion recognition task, in which they had to identify speakers' intended emotion based on their prosody, while in the MRI scanner. Age was associated with greater functional activation in regions of the frontal lobe often associated with language processing and emotional categorization. Further, age was linked to greater structural and functional connectivity between these frontal regions and the temporal-parietal junction, an area crucial for social cognition. These maturational changes were associated with greater accuracy in identifying the intended emotion in others' voices, suggesting that these neurodevelopmental processes may be supporting the growth of vocal emotion recognition skills during adolescence.
Neural responses to teenagers' faces depend on age and relative closeness to peers
In our new paper, we investigated whether the extent of teenagers’ social re-orientation towards peers was associated with their neural response to adolescents’ emotional faces. We asked 8- to 19-year-old youth to report on their closeness to their parents and to their friends, and to identify the emotions in teenage faces while undergoing fMRI. Compared to younger teenagers, older adolescents reported being closer to their peers than to their parents. In addition, responses in the ‘social’ and ‘reward’ related areas of the brain differed depending on teenagers’ age and relative closeness to their peers. Our findings suggest that the formation of close peer relationships during the teenage years may be accompanied by changes in neural response to social information.
