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Adolescents’ Neural Response to Best Friends’ Positive Affect: Relevance to Gender, Risk-Taking, and Real-Life Experience

Wed, April 7, 1:10 to 2:40pm EDT (1:10 to 2:40pm EDT), Virtual

Abstract

As changes in the intensity, intimacy, and influence of peer relationships occur during adolescence, peer social contexts become a potent elicitor of adolescents’ affective experience and behavior. Peer contexts are the setting for the reward-driven behaviors and intense affective experiences for which adolescents are notorious. Adolescents’ sensitivity to pleasant experiences in these contexts, as indexed by neural response to peer positive affect, can reveal individual differences in tendencies toward the reward-related challenges and experiences of adolescence, such as affective symptoms, risky behavior, and enjoyment of social experiences. Moreover, when considering individual differences in these outcomes, neural response could moderate or mediate the role of gender differences. We examined whether adolescents’ neural response to their best friends’ positive affect during an ecologically valid interaction was related to affective symptoms or health-risk behavior, and whether it mediated gender differences in pleasant social experiences.

A sample of 70 typically developing community adolescents (age 14-19, 48.6% female) completed questionnaires on hypomanic symptoms (Hypomanic Personality Scale; Eckblad and Chapman, 1986), depressive symptoms (CES-D; Radloff, 1977), and health-risk behavior (Youth Risk Behavior Survey; CDC, 2015); 9-day, phone-based EMA of mood and social behavior; and a 10-minute discussion task focused on a pleasant experience with their best friend. Task behavior was coded using the Living in Family Environments system (Hops et al., 1995) and used to create personalized stimuli for the Best Friend functional magnetic resonance imaging task. During scanning, completed in a 3T Siemens Trio scanner, participants viewed and heard audio of their best friend and a same-gender unfamiliar adolescent expressing positive and neutral affect. SPM12 was used to process and analyze data, and the PROCESS macro was used to compute mediation.

Boys’ response to peer positive affect in affective circuitry was associated with hypomanic but not depressive symptoms. The combination of greater reciprocal positive affect behavior and greater response to peer positive affect in the left ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (VLPFC) was related to greater health-risk behavior across categories (i.e., substance use, unintentional injury, risky sexual behavior, violence, psychopathology). Compared with girls, boys reported that their happiest experience in the past hour occurred with classmates or teammates. Compared with boys, girls exhibited greater nucleus accumbens-precuneus functional connectivity to viewing their best friend vs. unfamiliar adolescent expressing positive affect. Functional connectivity between the nucleus accumbens and precuneus mediated the association of gender with the proportion of positive experiences in group social contexts (Figure 4).

Personalized peer social reward is a potent elicitor of adolescents’ neural response in social-affective circuitry. Neural response to peer social reward can elucidate the roles of gender differences and behavioral sensitivity to peers in adolescents’ affect and behavior. Regions processing reward (e.g., VLPFC), affective (anterior insula), and social information (precuneus) may serve to modulate or interact with these characteristics to explain adolescents’ vulnerability to psychopathology or health-risk behavior.

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