Sensitivity to Peer Rejection in the Scanner and in Daily Life: Links to Depression Risk

• In Event: 1-016 - Neural Systems Underlying Processing of Social Threat and Reward in Adolescence: Implications for Affective Disorders

Integrative Statement

Introduction: Girls with a shy/inhibited temperament are at high risk for developing depressive symptoms during adolescence. Enhanced sensitivity to social threats in the environment, such as potential rejection from peers, may contribute to the development of depression among shy and fearful girls during adolescence, a developmental period marked by increased salience of social evaluation. We used an ecologically valid virtual peer interaction neuroimaging task and Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA) of peer interactions to examine whether neural response to social rejection and real-world daily experience of social threat from peers independently and/or jointly contribute to symptoms of depression in early adolescence.
Methods: Participants were 57 females ages 11-13, two thirds of whom were temperamentally shy/fearful as assessed via parent report on the Early Adolescent Temperament Questionnaire. Youth completed a cell-phone EMA protocol for 16 days (52 samples). At each sampling point, participants reported on a recent negative interaction with a peer and indicated whether or not they felt socially threatened during the interaction by endorsing the presence or absence of social threat evaluations (e.g., “I felt criticized”; “I felt disliked or rejected”). Participants completed neuroimaging on a 3T Siemens scanner during the Chatroom Interact Task (Silk et al., 2014), in which they were led to believe they were chosen or rejected by unknown peers in an online chatroom. Using SPM 12, bold activation across the whole-brain (voxel-wise p<.001, cluster-level p<.05 FWE) was assessed for reject>control trials and parameter estimates from significant clusters were tested in moderation models using PROCESS.
Results: Analyses revealed a significant cluster in the caudate for reject>control [x,y,z=-2,12,12; k=440; Z=5.29]. Activation in this cluster was significantly correlated with daily social threat (r=.40, p<.001). Controlling for age, race, and SES, there was a significant main effect of social threat in daily life (p<.001) and a significant interaction between caudate activation and daily social threat on depressive symptoms (∆R2=.08, F(1,50)=5.14, p=.028). Youth with caudate activation at the mean and 1SD above the mean showed a significant positive association between social threat in daily life and symptoms of depression (mean: p=.013, 1SD above: p<.001). For youth with caudate activation 1SD below the mean, no significant association between social threat and depression was found.
Discussion: Findings support the theory that sensitivity to social threat may predispose shy and fearful youth to developing symptoms of depression during early adolescence. This includes both subjective perceptions of being negatively evaluated by peers during daily experiences and underlying neural reactivity to simulated social rejection in the caudate, a region involved in habit learning and detecting reward and punishment. Brain and behavioral indices of social threat were moderately correlated, suggesting that greater caudate response to social threat contributes to greater detection of social threat in the environment (or vice versa). Girls were at highest risk for depressive symptoms when both caudate response and daily perceptions of threat from peers were high, perhaps reflecting a history of rejection. This brain-behavior interaction likely leads to mutual reinforcement of threat detection habits in daily social interactions.

Authors

• Jennifer Silk, University of Pittsburgh
  Presenting Author

• Stefanie L Sequeira, University of Pittsburgh
  Non-Presenting Author

• Neil P. Jones, University of Pittsburgh
  Non-Presenting Author

• Erika Forbes, University of Pittsburgh
  Non-Presenting Author

• Cecile D Ladouceur, University of Pittsburgh
  Non-Presenting Author