1-062 - Social Neuroscience of Social Rejection and Links to Psychopathology

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Integrative Statement

During adolescence, a dramatic increase in the salience of peers coincides with maturational changes in brain function. Exposure to peer victimization during adolescence is a potentially traumatic social stressor that confers significant emotional costs. Yet little is known about the mechanisms by which peer victimization “gets under the skin” to instill long-term risk. This symposium integrates data from four studies that use developmental social neuroscience methods to examine how peer victimization sensitizes the developing brain. The first presentation introduces a novel task with EEG to assess neural response to social acceptance and rejection and demonstrates that social feedback evokes event-related potentials in youth. The final 3 presentations use fMRI to compare brain function during discrete aspects of social processing in adolescents with or without childhood victimization. Presentation 2 shows that anticipating unpredictable peer feedback engages brain regions implicated in salience and threat detection to a greater degree among victimized adolescents, and this activity is associated with social anxiety. Presentation 3 finds that heightened neural sensitivity in the social pain network during social exclusion is associated with greater risk for depression in adolescents with a history of chronic peer victimization. Presentation 4 demonstrates that chronically rejected adolescents engage neural circuits implicated in cognitive control to a greater degree when they respond in a pro-social way to peers who had previously excluded them. Together, results demonstrate that victimized adolescents have altered neural response to social stimuli, and provide evidence suggesting these alterations contribute to the expression of anxiety and depression.

Sub Unit

• Developmental Psychopathology

Chairs

• Eva H Telzer, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

• Johanna M Jarcho, National Institutes of Health

Individual Presentations

• Kinder: A Novel Task to Assess Neural Response to Social Acceptance Versus Rejection - Presenting Author: Jennifer N. Bress, Stony Brook University; Greg Hajcak Proudfit, Stony Brook University

• Dysregulated Neural Response to Social Evaluation In Bullied Adolescents - Presenting Author: Johanna M Jarcho, National Institutes of Health; Megam Davis, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign; Ellen Leibenluft, National Institute of Mental Health; Nathan A Fox, Univ of Maryland; Daniel S Pine, National Institute of Mental Health; Eric Nelson, NIMH, Natl Institutes of Health

• Social Pain in the Context of Peer Victimization: Implications for Depression - Presenting Author: Karen D. Rudolph, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; Michelle Miernicki, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; Wendy Troop-Gordon, North Dakota State University; Eva H Telzer, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

• Neural Correlates of Forgiving but not Punishing Social Exclusion Vary as a Function of Chronic Childhood Peer Rejection - Presenting Author: Geert-Jan Will, University of Leiden; Eveline Crone, Leiden University; Pol van Lier, Vu University Amsterdam; Berna Guroglu, Leiden University