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Correspondence of Physical Pain Response and Neural Response to Social Rejection in Adolescent Girls

Thu, March 21, 9:30 to 11:00am, Baltimore Convention Center, Floor: Level 3, Room 322

Integrative Statement

Introduction: Adolescent girls show greater behavioral and neural sensitivity to peer rejection and acceptance relative to girls of other ages and boys (Guyer, et al., 2009). Receiving feedback that peers like or dislike you is common in adolescence and can serve as a context to characterize individual differences in sensitivity to such feedback. Research suggests social distress (e.g., peer rejection) is processed by some of the same brain regions that process physical pain (Eisenberger, 2011). Furthermore, response to pain has been consistently associated with depression among girls during preadolescence (Keenan et al., 2009). The current study tested the hypothesis that individual differences in physical pain response would be associated with neural response to social rejection and acceptance in “pain” processing circuitry including the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC), subgenual ACC (subACC), and anterior insula in adolescent girls.
Methods: Participants were 105 girls from the prospective longitudinal Pittsburgh Girls Study of Emotion (PGS-E). At age 12, girls completed a cold pressor task, during which the girl placed her dominant arm in a tank of cold water (arm submerged past wrist but below elbow). Girls were asked to keep their arm in the water for as long as possible but remove it if it became too uncomfortable. Participants verbally recorded their level of physical discomfort every 15 s using the Faces Pain Scale-Revised (Hicks, et al., 2001) yielding 12 pain ratings. Two indices of pain response were measured: pain tolerance (immersion time in seconds) and pain threshold (latency to highest pain rating over the 12 15-s interval pain ratings; 1-reached highest pain rating in first 15s to 12-reached highest pain rating in last 15s interval). At age 17, girls underwent fMRI during a social evaluation task. The Chatroom task involved rating likeability of 60 potential interactive partners and then receiving acceptance or rejection feedback involving whether those partners did or did not want to interact with them. Anatomical masks for regions of interest (ROI) identified as social pain circuitry, and activated in the Chatroom and similar tasks were created, including dACC, subACC and bilateral anterior insula (Masten et al., 2011; Gunther Moor et al., 2010; Guyer et al., 2012; Jarcho et al., 2016). Neural responses to four event types were extracted per ROI: liked/rejected (vs. liked/not rated), liked/accepted (vs. liked/not rated), unliked/rejected (vs. unliked/not rated), and unliked/accepted (vs. unliked/not rated).
Results: Lower pain threshold in early adolescence was associated with greater subACC response to being rejected by peers girls liked. Higher pain tolerance in early adolescence was associated with greater dACC and insula response to being accepted by peers girls did not like. Additional analyses including depression symptoms will be presented.
Discussion: As early as age 12, individual differences to a pain probe are associated with future neural responses to socially distressing outcomes by age 17. The present paper contributes initial clues toward characterizing neural and physical response system mechanisms linking pain, social distress, and depression across adolescence, a developmental period of elevated risk for depressive and somatic symptoms in girls.

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