Probing Social Threat and Reward through Social Media Interactions: fMRI Task Development in Adolescents

• In Event: Methodological Innovations to Advance the Science of Social Media Use and Adolescent Development and Well-being

Abstract

Alterations in affective processing of social threat and reward information are potential transdiagnostic factors contributing to the development of psychopathology in adolescence (Dillon et al., 2014; Silk et al., 2012). Moreover, social media is now one of the main settings in which peer social interactions occur (Twenge, Martin, & Spitzburg, 2019). Features unique to social media, such as dynamic, public, and quantifiable indicators of peer status, may fundamentally transform and amplify the emotional salience of peer interactions (Nesi, Choukas-Bradley, & Prinstein, 2018). However, we currently lack the research tools to study teen neural processing of peer threat and reward within the unique context of social media. The purpose of the current study was to create a novel fMRI task, called Teen Brain Online (TBO), to measure teen brain response to peer reward (i.e., acceptance) and threat (i.e., rejection) that integrates key elements of popular social media sites. The task is designed to display both participant and peer photos in a scrolling social media feed. The number of likes for each photo is manipulated across 3 conditions: a rejection/threat condition (i.e., participant receives low number of likes), acceptance/reward condition (high number of likes), and neutral condition (participant photos are ostensibly not viewed by many peers). We also administered an existing peer interaction task, called Chatroom Interact. We currently have preliminary pilot data from 6 healthy adolescent participants (ages 13-17), and plan to have data from 15 youth total. Our data so far show that youth rated the novel TBO task as more realistic than the Chatroom task (7.83 vs. 4.83 on a 10-point scale, 10 = more realistic). Youth also rated feeling good (M=4.23) during the reward condition, relatively bad during the threat condition (M=2.93), and neutral during the neutral condition (M=3.01) on a scale from 1 (feeling very bad) to 5 (feeling very good). Moreover, youth exhibited greater activation in relevant brain regions during reward vs. threat conditions (as depicted in Fig. 6 for which t-statistic >3; cohen’s d>2), including regions within an affective/motivational network (e.g., bilateral insula, nucleus accumbens), executive function network (e.g., medial prefrontal cortex, orbitofrontal cortex, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex), and perceptual network (e.g., fusiform area, temporal regions; see also Fig.7). We found a similar pattern of findings for the reward vs. neutral condition. Findings also suggest differences in brain activation between threat vs. neutral; youth on average exhibited decreased activation in reward related regions such as the nucleus accumbens and ventrolateral prefrontal cortex. Overall, preliminary data suggest that the novel TBO task is feasible and acceptable to youth and a very realistic representation of their social media experiences. Data also suggest obtaining likes via the TBO task is a powerful event associated with a strong neural response in youth. Finally, youth gave specific positive feedback and suggestions for improving the task. The development of this innovative fMRI task will give researchers the capability to obtain measures of neural response to salient peer threat and reward experiences typical of unique real-world social media contexts.

Authors

• Caroline Oppenheimer
  Presenting Author

• Helmet Karim, University of Pittsburgh

• Sophia Choukas-Bradley, University of Delaware

• Jamie L Hanson, University of Pittsburgh

• Jennifer S. Silk, University of Pittsburgh