Hooked on a Thought: Rumination and Neural Response to Peer Exclusion in Adolescent Girls

• In Event: Peer Exclusion in Childhood and Adolescence: Multi-level Mechanisms and Risk for Depression

Abstract

Introduction: Adolescent girls show increased sensitivity to peer exclusion relative to girls of other ages and boys (Guyer et al., 2009; Silk et al., 2012; Somerville, 2013). Neurobiological theories suggest changes in social context and maturation of social-information processing brain systems contribute to girls’ increased sensitivity to exclusion, creating a vulnerability in adolescence for social-affective difficulties. A factor that might explain variances in neural sensitivity to peer exclusion is rumination, the tendency to focus repetitively on the sources and outcomes of emotional distress without seeking to resolve the problems contributing to the distress. Although evidence indicates that girls with greater rumination show heightened physiological responses to social threats (Aldao et al., 2014; Stone et al., 2016), it is unknown whether rumination relates to neural sensitivity to peer exclusion. The current study aims to examine whether greater rumination is associated with greater neural sensitivity to peer exclusion in girls.

Hypothesis: Based on the previous literature on the neural correlates of rumination, we hypothesized that girls with greater levels of rumination would show heightened activity in the brain regions implicated in emotional distress (i.e., subgenual anterior cingulate cortex (sgACC)) and self-referential processing (i.e., medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC), posterior cingulate cortex (PCC)/precuneus), and heightened sgACC connectivity with MPFC and PCC/precuneus.

Study Population: Participants were 116 adolescent girls aged 17 years enrolled in the Pittsburgh Girls Study of Emotion.

Method: Girls completed the Perfectionism Inventory-Rumination subscale (Hill et al., 2004), a measure of obsessive worry about past errors, less than perfect performance, or future mistakes, and measures of rejection sensitivity and depressive symptoms. Girls also completed the Chatroom fMRI task, which involved rating likeability of 60 ostensible peers for an online interaction and learning if those peers selected them for the interaction or not, or if peers had no chance to rate them (NR). Whole-brain activity and sgACC connectivity during exclusion (vs. NR) were regressed on rumination, controlling for rejection sensitivity and depressive symptoms, variables known to be highly correlated with rumination and associated with neural responses to exclusion.

Results: Girls with greater levels of rumination did not show heightened sgACC activity to peer exclusion, but they did show heightened precuneus activity to peer exclusion (Figure 1). Girls with greater levels of rumination showed reduced connectivity between the sgACC and MPFC as well as precuneus during peer exclusion (Figure 2). An exploratory whole-brain analysis revealed rumination is associated with greater activity in the inferior parietal gyrus, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, and supplementary motor area when experiencing peer exclusion.

Conclusion: Girls with greater levels of rumination showed heightened neural sensitivity to peer exclusion within brain areas implicated in the construction of self-concept, inference of others’ minds, and allocation of working memory and attention. Moreover, girls with greater rumination showed reduced neural connectivity patterns indicative of a reduced ability to protect the self from social threats. These results highlight neural mechanisms that may contribute to the link between rumination and peer exclusion at an age of elevated risk for depression and negative affect in girls.

Authors

• Leehyun Yoon, University of California, Davis
  Presenting Author

• Erika E Forbes, University of Pittsburgh

• Alison E. Hipwell, University of Pittsburgh

• Kate Keenan, University of Chicago

• Amanda E Guyer, University of California - Davis