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Differential Susceptibility to Interpersonal Stress in Adolescent Girls: Contribution of Neural Sensitivity to Social Evaluation

Thu, March 23, 3:15 to 4:45pm, Salt Palace Convention Center, Floor: 2, Meeting Room 251 E

Abstract

Adolescence is a time of elevated risk for depression, particularly among girls, in part because of increased exposure to interpersonal stress. However, only a minority of adolescent girls develop depression. According to differential susceptibility (DS) theory, individual differences in biological systems responsive to social cues contribute to divergent developmental outcomes. Specifically, biological sensitivity to social cues may be adaptive in some contexts but maladaptive in others depending on the nature of the social environment to which youth are exposed. This study examined whether sensitivity in brain regions involved in salience detection and social processing might function as a susceptibility factor. Specifically, we examined whether processing of negative social feedback moderated the association between interpersonal stress exposure and depressive symptoms in adolescent girls.
We explored the proposed model in 86 adolescent girls (Mage=17.06, SD=.53). Neural sensitivity to social feedback was assessed during an ecologically-valid functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) task in which youth received feedback ostensibly indicating whether peers agreed with their preferences in several adolescent-relevant domains. To measure activation in regions hypothesized to play a role in processing negative social feedback (feedback that peers disagreed with their preferences), we examined activation to the receipt of negative, relative to positive, feedback in several anatomically-defined a priori regions of interest involved in salience detection (anterior cingulate cortex [ACC], amygdala, insula) and social information processing (medial prefrontal cortex [mPFC], posterior cingulate cortex [PCC], precuneus, superior temporal sulcus [STS], temporoparietal junction [TPJ]). Semi-structured interviews assessed interpersonal stress exposure and depressive symptoms.
Multiple regressions revealed significant stress x neural activation interactions involving the ACC, amygdala, mPFC, and precuneus, and a marginally significant interaction involving the STS (Table 1). Simple slopes analyses revealed that interpersonal stress significantly predicted more depressive symptoms among girls with low (1 SD below the mean) relative to high (1 SD above the mean) activation in these regions (Figure 1). We also examined the Proportion of Interaction (POI; proportion of area to the right of the crossover) and Proportion Affected (PA; proportion of girls in our sample whose scores fell to the right of the crossover); values closer to .5 suggest relatively even proportions of youth benefit from more or less neural sensitivity, supporting a DS interpretation. The POI indexes were .65 (ACC), .86 (amygdala), .77 (mPFC), and .59 (precuneus). The PA indexes were .45 (ACC), .63 (amygdala), .53 (mPFC), and .42 (precuneus).
Together these results support the DS model that elevated activation is harmful for some youth and helpful for others. More intensive neural processing of negative (vs. positive) social feedback may confer elevated risk for depression in low stress contexts, in which heightened social sensitivity may be unnecessary and lead to rumination, but may protect against depression in more interpersonally stressful environments, potentially by allowing girls to adapt their behavior or seek out more supportive peer environments. In line with DS theory, these findings highlight the role of neural sensitivity to social feedback as a susceptibility factor that may be alternatively risky or adaptive depending on social context.

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