Neural Response to Peer Feedback is Associated with Social Anxiety Severity in Adolescents

• In Event: 3-141 - Neural Reward Reactivity and Adolescent Psychopathology and Substance Use: fMRI and ERP Studies

Integrative Statement

The feedback negativity (FN) is a negative deflection in the event-related brain potential waveform that occurs approximately 250-300ms following presentation of feedback (Gehring & Willoughby, 2002). Some research on the functional significance of the FN has suggested that it reflects neural response to desired (e.g., Carlson, Foti, Mujica-Parodi, Harmon-Jones, & Hajcak, 2011; Foti, Weinberg, Dien, & Hajcak, 2011) and unexpected (Alexander & Brown, 2011) outcomes. Given the association between the FN and rewards, it is a neural measure of interest when conceptualizing risk for social anxiety disorder during adolescence. This developmental period is characterized by heightened sensitivity to reward, particularly in a social context (Smith, Steingberg, Strang, & Chein, 2015; Somerville et al., 2010). Alterations in response to social reward is one mechanism by which risk for maladaptive outcomes such as social anxiety may arise (Richey et al., 2014).

The present study examined the association of neural response to peer acceptance and rejection with social anxiety severity in a sample of 69 adolescents (ages 13-17). Participants (female, 50.7%; Latino, 56.5%/non-Latino White, 43.5%) completed a social feedback task (Kujawa et al., 2014) involving participation in rounds of a draft to determine who makes it onto a final team of six teenagers from a group of 12. After casting a vote, players were presented with: 1) fixation cross (2000-3000ms), 2) co-player’s profile (2000ms), 3) fixation cross (1000ms), and 4) a thumbs-up or thumbs-down image representing acceptance or rejection (1500ms). Participants viewed a total of 51 feedback stimuli over six voting rounds.

The continuous EEG was segmented into epochs -200ms-1000ms, relative to the onset of social feedback. FN relative to acceptance and rejection stimuli was extracted from electrode sites along fronto-central recording sites, baseline-corrected with respect to 200ms prior to the receipt of feedback. FN was defined as a mean amplitude from 200-300ms. Four categories of FN were extracted: 1) expected acceptance (i.e., acceptance feedback from co-player following an acceptance vote from participant), 2) unexpected acceptance (i.e., acceptance feedback from co-player following a rejection vote from participant), 3) expected rejection, and 4) unexpected rejection. It was hypothesized that unexpected outcomes would be more salient than expected and that for anxious youth, unexpected acceptance would represent an especially surprising outcome relative to expected acceptance. Thus, it was predicted that heightened neural response to unexpected acceptance would be associated with anxiety symptomatology.

Point-biserial correlations controlling for age, gender, and ethnicity showed a significant association between clinically-elevated social anxiety (i.e., score >50 on the SAS-A (LaGreca & Lopez, 1998)) and FN on unexpected acceptance trials (r=-.362, p=.008) and the difference score between expected acceptance and unexpected acceptance at FCz (r=.316, p=.022). Results suggest that adolescents with clinically-elevated social anxiety demonstrate enhanced neural response to unexpected acceptance and appear to differentiate more between expected and unexpected acceptance. These findings are in line with conceptualizations of the FN as a response to unexpected outcomes and highlight the importance of considering the interplay among cognitive biases, social expectations, and reward processing when defining risk for social anxiety during adolescence.

Authors

• Amy Rapp, UCLA
  Presenting Author

• Denise Chavira, UCLA
  Non-Presenting Author

• William J Gehring, University of Michigan
  Non-Presenting Author

• Jennie Grammer, UCLA
  Non-Presenting Author

• Gregory A Miller, UCLA
  Non-Presenting Author

• Patricia Tan, UCLA, Semel Institute
  Non-Presenting Author