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.
