•Adolescent psychosocial stress prospectively predicted neural response to potential rewards.•Low parental warmth predicted increased reward response in the mPFC, striatum, and amygdala.•Peer ...victimization predicted decreased reward response in the mPFC.•Stress-related neural response to potential rewards was correlated with depressive symptoms.•Results support reward-focused neurodevelopmental models of depression in girls.
Developmental models of psychopathology posit that exposure to social stressors may confer risk for depression in adolescent girls by disrupting neural reward circuitry. The current study tested this hypothesis by examining the relationship between early adolescent social stressors and later neural reward processing and depressive symptoms. Participants were 120 girls from an ongoing longitudinal study of precursors to depression across adolescent development. Low parental warmth, peer victimization, and depressive symptoms were assessed when the girls were 11 and 12 years old, and participants completed a monetary reward guessing fMRI task and assessment of depressive symptoms at age 16. Results indicate that low parental warmth was associated with increased response to potential rewards in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), striatum, and amygdala, whereas peer victimization was associated with decreased response to potential rewards in the mPFC. Furthermore, concurrent depressive symptoms were associated with increased reward anticipation response in mPFC and striatal regions that were also associated with early adolescent psychosocial stressors, with mPFC and striatal response mediating the association between social stressors and depressive symptoms. These findings are consistent with developmental models that emphasize the adverse impact of early psychosocial stressors on neural reward processing and risk for depression in adolescence.
Reappraisal (reconstruing emotional experiences to alter their impact) and suppression (inhibiting emotionally expressive behavior) are emotion-regulation strategies with important implications for ...depression. While reappraisal generally predicts lower depressive symptoms, suppression generally predicts higher depressive symptoms. Because cultural factors can influence the processes involved in these links and because adolescence-especially for ethnic minority youth-brings particular emotional challenges, it's critical to investigate these links among Mexican-origin adolescents. However, research examining emotion regulation among Mexican-origin individuals is scarce and generally limited to cross-sectional designs. Thus, we examined prospective associations between reappraisal and suppression (assessed at age 17) and 2 facets of depressive symptoms (anhedonia and general distress) over 3 years (assessed at ages 16, 18, and 19) among 228 Mexican-origin adolescents. Latent growth curve models indicated that reappraisal was associated with lower anhedonia at baseline (age 16) and lower anhedonia over time, whereas suppression predicted greater anhedonia at baseline but not change over time. Consistent with the Mexican cultural value of simpatía, which emphasizes expressing positive emotions and inhibiting negative emotions, suppression of positive emotions was associated with greater anhedonia over time whereas suppression of negative emotions was associated with lower anhedonia over time. However, neither associated with anhedonia at baseline. Reappraisal and suppression were not associated with distress symptoms, and no effects were moderated by familism, household income, gender, or child nativity. The anhedonia results suggest that the benefits of reappraisal extend to Mexican-origin adolescents, but the effects of suppression may depend upon emotional valence in this group.
Background
Girls’ depressive symptoms typically increase in adolescence, with individual differences in course and severity being key risk factors for impaired emotional functioning in young ...adulthood. Given the continued brain white matter (WM) maturation that occurs in adolescence, the present study tested whether structural connectivity patterns in late adolescence are associated with variation in the course of depression symptom severity throughout adolescence.
Method
Participants were girls (N = 115) enrolled in a multiyear prospective cohort study of risk for depression. Initial depression severity (intercept) at age 10 and change in severity (linear slope) across ages 10–19 were examined in relation to WM tractography collected at age 19. Network‐based statistic analyses were used to identify clusters showing variation in structural connectivity in association with depressive symptom intercept, slope, and their interaction.
Results
Higher initial depressive severity and steeper positive slope (separately) were associated with greater structural connectivity between temporal, subcortical socioaffective, and occipital regions. Intercept showed more connectivity associations than slope. The interaction effect indicated that higher initial symptom severity and a steeper negative slope (i.e., alleviating symptoms) were related to greater connectivity between cognitive control regions. Moderately severe symptoms that worsened over time were followed by greater connectivity between self‐referential and cognitive regions (e.g., posterior cingulate and frontal gyrus).
Conclusions
Higher depressive symptom severity in early adolescence and increasing symptom severity over time may forecast structural connectivity differences in late adolescence, particularly in pathways involving cognitive and emotion‐processing regions. Understanding how clinical course relates to neurobiological correlates may inform new treatment approaches to adolescent depression.
The present study used cross-lagged panel analyses to test longitudinal associations among emotion regulation, prefrontal cortex (PFC) function, and depression severity in adolescent girls. The ...ventromedial and dorsomedial PFC (vmPFC and dmPFC) were regions of interest given their roles in depression pathophysiology, self-referential processing, and emotion regulation. At ages 16 and 17, seventy-eight girls completed a neuroimaging scan to assess changes in vmPFC and dmPFC activation to sad faces, and measures of depressive symptom severity and emotion regulation. The 1-year cross-lagged effects of dmPFC activity at age 16 on expressive suppression at age 17 and depressive symptomatology at age 17 were significant, demonstrating a predictive relation between dmPFC activity and both suppression and depressive severity.
Exposure to threat increases the risk for internalizing problems in adolescence. Deficits in integrating bodily cues into representations of emotion are thought to contribute to internalizing ...problems. Given the role of the medial prefrontal cortex in regulating bodily responses and integrating them into representations of emotional states, coordination between activity in the medial prefrontal cortex and autonomic nervous system responses may be influenced by past threat exposure with consequences for the emergence of internalizing problems. A sample of 179 Mexican-origin adolescents (88 female) reported on neighborhood and school crime, peer victimization, and discrimination when they were 10-16 years old. At age 17, participants underwent a functional neuroimaging scan during which they viewed pictures of emotional faces while respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) and skin conductance responses were measured. Adolescents also reported symptoms of internalizing problems. Greater exposure to threats across adolescence was associated with more internalizing problems. Threat exposure was also associated with stronger negative coupling between the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and RSA. Stronger negative ventromedial prefrontal cortex-RSA coupling was associated with fewer internalizing problems. These results suggest the degree of coordinated activity between the brain and parasympathetic nervous system is both enhanced by threat experiences and decreased in adolescents with more internalizing problems.
Provision of small-quantity lipid-based nutrient supplements (SQ-LNSs) during early life improves growth and development. In the International Lipid-Based Nutrient Supplements DYAD–Ghana trial, ...prenatal and postnatal SQ-LNS reduced social–emotional difficulties at age 5 y, with greater effects among children in less-enriched home environments.
We aimed to investigate the effect of prenatal and postnatal SQ-LNS on children's social–emotional problems at age 9–11 y.
In 2009–2011, 1320 pregnant women ≤20 wk gestation were randomly assigned to receive the following daily until 6 mo postpartum: 1) iron and folic acid until delivery, then placebo, 2) multiple micronutrients (MMNs), or 3) SQ-LNS (20 g/d). Children in group 3 received SQ-LNS from 6 to 18 mo. In 2021, we evaluated children's social–emotional outcomes with 6 assessment tools that used caregiver, teacher, and/or self-report to measure socioemotional difficulties, conduct problems, temperament, mood, anxiety, and emotion management.
We assessed outcomes in 966 children, comprising 79.4% of 1217 participants eligible for re-enrolment. No significant differences were found between the SQ-LNS and control (non-LNS groups combined) groups. Few children (<2%) experienced high parent-reported social–emotional difficulties at 9–11 y, in contrast to the high prevalence at age 5 in this cohort (25%). Among children in less-enriched early childhood home environments, the SQ-LNS group had 0.37 SD (−0.04 to 0.82) lower self-reported conduct problems than the control group (P-interaction = 0.047).
Overall positive effects of SQ-LNS on social–emotional development previously found at age 5 y are not sustained to age 9–11 y; however, there is some evidence of positive effects among children in less-enriched environments. The lack of effects may be owing to low prevalence of social–emotional problems at preadolescence, resulting in little potential to benefit from early nutritional intervention at this age in this outcome domain. Follow-up during adolescence, when social-emotional problems more typically onset, may yield further insights.
This trial was registered at clinicaltrials.gov as NCT00970866. https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/record/NCT00970866
Poverty is a chronic stressor associated with disruptions in psychophysiological development during adolescence. This study examined associations of chronic poverty and income changes experienced ...from pre- to mid-adolescence with hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis stress responses in late adolescence. Participants (N = 229) were adolescents of Mexican-origin (48.7% female). Household income (converted to income-to-needs ratios) was assessed annually when children were 10–16 years old. At 17 years, adolescents completed Cyberball, a social exclusion simulation task while undergoing a functional magnetic resonance imaging scan. Saliva samples were collected prior to and five times over a 50-minute period following the scan, from which salivary cortisol was assayed. Results showed that differential trajectories of poverty from ages 10–16 predicted HPA axis activity at age 17. Relative to others, distinct HPA suppression (hyporeactivity) was demonstrated by youth who started adolescence in deep poverty and were still living in poverty at age 16 despite experiencing some income gains. Youth from more economically secure families evinced typical cortisol increases following the lab stressor. These results suggest that subsequent HPA functioning varies as a function of economic status throughout adolescence, and that efforts to increase family income may promote healthy HPA functioning for youths in the most impoverished circumstances.
•Changes in income-to-needs from age 10–16 predicted Mexican-origin youths’ HPA activity.•Hypoactivity displayed by those who experienced poverty despite some income gains.•Those who did not experience poverty displayed more typical reactivity.•Increasing income may promote healthy HPA functioning for Mexican-origin youth.
Neuroimaging studies suggest that altered brain responses to food-related cues in reward-sensitive regions characterize individuals who experience binge-eating episodes. However, the absence of ...longitudinal data limits the understanding of whether reward-system alterations increase vulnerability to binge eating, as theorized in models of the development of this behavior.
Adolescent girls (N = 122) completed a functional magnetic resonance imaging monetary reward task at age 16 years as part of an ongoing longitudinal study. Self-report of binge eating was assessed using the Eating Attitudes Test at ages 16 and 18 years. Regression analyses examined concurrent and longitudinal associations between the blood–oxygenation-level-dependent response to anticipating and winning monetary rewards and the severity of binge eating while controlling for age 16 depressive symptoms and socioeconomic status.
Greater ventromedial prefrontal cortex and caudate responses to winning money were correlated with greater severity of binge eating concurrently but not prospectively.
This study is the first to examine longitudinal associations between reward responding and binge eating in community-based, mostly low–socioeconomic status adolescent girls. Ventromedial prefrontal cortex response to reward outcome—possibly reflecting an enhanced subjective reward value—appears to be a state marker of binge-eating severity rather than a predictor of future severity.
Loneliness becomes more prevalent as youth transition from childhood into adolescence. A key underlying process may be the puberty‐related increase in biological stress reactivity, which can alter ...social behavior and elicit conflict or social withdrawal (fight‐or‐flight behaviors) in some youth, but increase prosocial (tend‐and‐befriend) responses in others. In this article, we propose an integrative theoretical model that identifies the social, personality, and biological characteristics underlying individual differences in social–behavioral responses to stress. This model posits a vicious cycle whereby youth who respond to stress with fight‐or‐flight tendencies develop increasing and chronic levels of loneliness across adolescence, whereas youth who display tend‐and‐befriend behaviors may be buffered from these consequences. Based on research supporting this model, we propose multiple avenues for intervention to curtail the prevalence of loneliness in adolescence by targeting key factors involved in its development: social relationships, personality, and stress‐induced behavioral and biological changes.
Altered activity within reward-related neural regions, including the ventral striatum (VS) and medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), is associated with concurrent problematic substance use. The aims of ...the present study were (a) to identify patterns of reward-related neural activity that prospectively predicted changes in alcohol use 2 years after magnetic resonance imaging in a sample of adolescents, and (b) to examine whether these patterns differed by sex. We also tested whether depression symptoms or impulsivity mediated associations between neural activity and future alcohol use.
Participants were 262 adolescents (129 male and 133 female) of Mexican origin who completed the Monetary Incentive Delay task during a functional magnetic resonance imaging scan at age 16. Participants reported on their alcohol use at ages 16 and 18.
Results indicated that different patterns of reward-related neural activity predicted future increases in alcohol use for male and female adolescents. In boys, higher VS activity during reward anticipation and average ventral mPFC activity during reward feedback predicted increases in alcohol use from age 16 to 18 years; in girls, higher dorsal mPFC activity and blunted VS activity during reward anticipation predicted increases in alcohol use from age 16 to 18 years. Depression symptoms or impulsivity did not mediate these associations.
The results suggest that different pathways of risk may lead to problematic alcohol use for adolescent boys and girls. These sex differences in neural risk pathways have important implications for prevention and intervention approaches targeting Mexican-origin youth.
PDF
