Prosocial development in adolescence Crone, Eveline A.; Achterberg, Michelle
Current opinion in psychology,
April 2022, 2022-04-00, Letnik:
44
Journal Article
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In this review, we describe the development of prosocial behavior in adolescence as a critical inflection period for social adjustment. Experimental research using prosocial giving tasks demonstrates ...that adolescents differentiate more between recipients and contexts, suggesting increasing ingroup-outgroup differentiation during adolescence. We also demonstrate that social brain development during adolescence is partly driven by environmental influences, further underlining adolescence as a critical period for social development. The COVID-19 pandemic has had and will have long-term effects on the current generation of adolescents, for which we describe both the risks, resilience factors, and opportunities for engaging in prosocial acts of kindness.
While animal studies have demonstrated a unique reproduction-related neuroplasticity, little is known on the effects of pregnancy on the human brain. Here we investigated whether pregnancy is ...associated with changes to resting state brain activity, white matter microstructure, neural metabolite concentrations and grey matter architecture using a comprehensive pre-conception cohort study. We show that pregnancy leads to selective and robust changes in neural architecture and neural network organization, which are most pronounced in the Default Mode Network. These neural changes correlated with pregnancy hormones, primarily third-trimester estradiol, while no associations were found with other factors such as osmotic effects, stress and sleep. Furthermore, the changes related to measures of maternal-fetal bonding, nesting behavior and the physiological responsiveness to infant cues, and predicted measures of mother-infant bonding and bonding impairments. These findings suggest there are selective pregnancy-related modifications in brain structure and function that may facilitate peripartum maternal processes of key relevance to the mother-infant dyad.
The ability to delay gratification increases considerably across development. Here, we test the hypothesis that this impulse control capacity is driven by increased maturation of frontostriatal ...circuitry using a fiber-tracking approach combined with longitudinal imaging. In total, 192 healthy volunteers between 8 and 26 years underwent diffusion tensor imaging scanning and completed a delay-discounting task twice, separated by a 2-year interval. We investigated dynamic associations between frontostriatal white matter (WM) integrity and delay of gratification skills. Moreover, we examined the predictive value of frontostriatal WM integrity for future delay of gratification skills. Results showed that delay discounting increases with age in a quadratic fashion, with greatest patience during late adolescence. Data also indicated nonlinear development of frontostriatal WM, with relative fast development during childhood and early adulthood and--on average--little change during mid-adolescence. Furthermore, the positive association between age and delay discounting was further increased in individuals with higher WM integrity of the frontostriatal tracts. Predictive analysis showed that frontostriatal WM development explained unique variance in current and future delay of gratification skills. This study adds to a descriptive relation between WM integrity and delay of gratification by showing that maturation of frontostriatal connectivity predicts changes in delay of gratification skills. These findings have implications for studies examining deviances in impulse control by showing that the developmental path between striatum and prefrontal cortex may be an important predictor for when development goes astray.
During the transition from childhood to adulthood, individuals generally show increased patience and become better in delaying gratification. The exact neural correlates of delay of gratification, however, remain poorly understood. By measuring both frontostriatal white matter (WM) integrity and delay of gratification skills at two time points, we were able to provide links for our understanding of the neural mechanisms underlying this type of impulse regulation capacity. We demonstrate that the ability to delay gratification improves between childhood and young adulthood and this improvement is predicted by the integrity of frontostriatal WM connections. This study adds to a descriptive relation between WM quality and delay of gratification by showing that maturation of frontostriatal connectivity predicts improvements in delay of gratification skills.
An important task for adolescents is to form and maintain friendships. In this three-wave biannual study, we used a longitudinal neuroscience perspective to examine the dynamics of friendship ...stability. Relative to childhood and adulthood, adolescence is marked by elevated ventral striatum activity when gaining self-serving rewards. Using a sample of participants between the ages of eight and twenty-eight, we tested age-related changes in ventral striatum response to gaining for stable (n = 48) versus unstable best friends (n = 75) (and self). In participants with stable friendships, we observed a quadratic developmental trajectory of ventral striatum responses to winning versus losing rewards for friends, whereas participants with unstable best friends showed no age-related changes. Ventral striatum activity in response to winning versus losing for friends further varied with friendship closeness for participants with unstable friendships. We suggest that these findings may reflect changing social motivations related to formation and maintenance of friendships across adolescence.
The relation between brain development across adolescence and adolescent risky behavior has attracted increasing interest in recent years. It has been proposed that adolescents are hypersensitive to ...reward because of an imbalance in the developmental pattern followed by the striatum and prefrontal cortex. To date, it is unclear if adolescents engage in risky behavior because they overestimate potential rewards or respond more to received rewards and whether these effects occur in the absence of decisions. In this study, we used a functional magnetic resonance imaging paradigm that allowed us to dissociate effects of the anticipation, receipt, and omission of reward in 10- to 12-year-old, 14- to 15-year-old, and 18- to 23-year-old participants. We show that in anticipation of uncertain outcomes, the anterior insula is more active in adolescents compared with young adults and that the ventral striatum shows a reward-related peak in middle adolescence, whereas young adults show orbitofrontal cortex activation to omitted reward. These regions show distinct developmental trajectories. This study supports the hypothesis that adolescents are hypersensitive to reward and adds to the current literature in demonstrating that neural activation differs in adolescents even for small rewards in the absence of choice. These findings may have important implications for understanding adolescent risk-taking behavior.
This study examined how perspective taking and sensitivity to social rewards predict giving to friends, classmates, and strangers in adolescence. Five hundred and twenty adolescents aged 12–17 years ...completed questionnaires on perspective taking and social rewards and played three Dictator Games in which they divided coins between themselves and a friend, classmate, and stranger. We found that, irrespective of age, adolescents donated most to a friend, less to their classmate, and least to a stranger, and females donated more than males. Individual differences in perspective taking and social reward sensitivity moderated how much adolescents donated, especially to strangers. These findings suggest that perspective taking and sensitivity to social rewards influence giving behavior in adolescence, especially to unknown others.
Adolescents growing up in the 21st century face novel challenges that affect today’s adolescents differently compared with previous generations. Adolescents’ prosocial values and social engagement ...can contribute in unique ways to combatting societal challenges. Participatory research provides tools to transform adolescents’ prosocial motivations into drivers for societal change.
Adolescents growing up in the 21st century face novel challenges that affect today’s adolescents differently compared with previous generations. Adolescents’ prosocial values and social engagement can contribute in unique ways to combatting societal challenges. Participatory research provides tools to transform adolescents’ prosocial motivations into drivers for societal change.
Empathy plays a crucial role in healthy social functioning and in maintaining positive social relationships. In this study, 1250 children and adolescents (10-15 year olds) completed the newly ...developed Empathy Questionnaire for Children and Adolescents (EmQue-CA) that was tested on reliability, construct validity, convergent validity, and concurrent validity. The EmQue-CA aims to assess empathy using the following scales:
, and
. A Principal Components Analysis, which was directly tested with a Confirmatory Factor Analysis, confirmed the proposed three-factor model resulting in 14 final items. Reliability analyses demonstrated high internal consistency of the scales. Furthermore, the scales showed high convergent validity, as they were positively correlated with related scales of the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (Davis, 1983). With regard to concurrent validity, higher empathy was related to more attention to others' emotions, higher friendship quality, less focus on own affective state, and lower levels of bullying behavior. Taken together, we show that the EmQue-CA is a reliable and valid instrument to measure empathy in typically developing children and adolescents aged 10 and older.
Adolescence is a time of many cognitive and social‐affective changes that are important for rapid behavioral adjustment to a variety of environmental demands and social contexts. Performance ...monitoring is one of the most important processes for behavioral adjustment; it allows individuals to evaluate outcomes of actions and change behavior accordingly. Neuroimaging studies have demonstrated that dorsal and ventral subregions of the medial frontal cortex are differentially engaged in performance monitoring, depending on the cognitive or social‐affective dimensions of a task. Based on a review of neuroimaging, ERP, and heart rate studies, the implications of these modality‐dependent contributions are discussed for the development of performance monitoring in adolescence.
While it is well understood that the brain experiences changes across short-term experience/learning and long-term development, it is unclear how these two mechanisms interact to produce ...developmental outcomes. Here we test an interactive model of learning and development where certain learning-related changes are constrained by developmental changes in the brain against an alternative development-as-practice model where outcomes are determined primarily by the accumulation of experience regardless of age. Participants (8–29 years) participated in a three-wave, accelerated longitudinal study during which they completed a feedback learning task during an fMRI scan. Adopting a novel longitudinal modeling approach, we probed the unique and moderated effects of learning, experience, and development simultaneously on behavioral performance and network modularity during the task. We found nonlinear patterns of development for both behavior and brain, and that greater experience supported increased learning and network modularity relative to naïve subjects. We also found changing brain-behavior relationships across adolescent development, where heightened network modularity predicted improved learning, but only following the transition from adolescence to young adulthood. These results present compelling support for an interactive view of experience and development, where changes in the brain impact behavior in context-specific fashion based on developmental goals.
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