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.
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.
