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Abstract
Adolescence is a period of intensive development in body, brain, and behavior. Potentiated by changes in hormones and neural response to social stimuli, teenagers undergo a process of social re-orientation away from their caregivers and toward expanding peer networks. The current study examines how relative relational closeness to peers (compared to parents) during adolescence is linked to neural response to the facial emotional expressions of other teenagers. Self-reported closeness with friends (same- and opposite-sex) and parents (mother and father), and neural response to facial stimuli during fMRI, were assessed in 8- to 19-year-old typically developing youth (n = 40, mean age = 13.90 years old, SD = 3.36; 25 female). Youth who reported greater relative closeness with peers than with parents showed decreased activation in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) during stimulus presentation, which may reflect lessened inhibitory control or regulatory response to peer-aged faces. Functional connectivity between the dlPFC and dorsal striatum was greatest in older youth who were closer to peers; in contrast, negative coupling between these regions was noted for both younger participants who were closer to peers and older participants who were closer to their parents. In addition, the association between relative closeness to peers and neural activation in regions of the social brain varied by emotion type and age. Results suggest that the re-orientation toward peers that occurs during adolescence is accompanied by changes in neural response to peer-aged social signals in social cognitive, prefrontal, and subcortical networks.
Highlights
Adolescence is often considered a second sensitive period of development, because it is a time when dramatic changes in emotion, cognition, and behavior take place (Crone and Dahl, 2012)
There was a significant interaction between Relationship Type and Age, F(1, 37) = 15.66, p < 0.001, η2 = 0.30: parameter estimates suggested that closeness with peers increased with age (B = 0.07, β = 0.29, p = 0.07) and closeness with parents decreased with age (B = −0.07, β = −0.47, p < 0.01; see Figure 1)
There was an interaction of Relative Closeness and Age in the bilateral orbitofrontal cortex at midline (B-OFC), the left inferior and middle temporal gyrus (L-MTG), and right middle temporal gyrus (R-MTG; Table 2 and Figure 6)
Summary
Adolescence is often considered a second sensitive period of development, because it is a time when dramatic changes in emotion, cognition, and behavior take place (Crone and Dahl, 2012). Adolescence is the apex of an inverted U-shaped maturational curve for affective or motivational responses, but represents only an intermediary point in the linear trajectory of higher cognitive functions (Casey et al, 2010a; Smith et al, 2014). Prefrontal regions associated with cognitive regulation and the canalization of motivational responses continue to develop into adulthood, as does their neuromodulatory influence on subcortical affective systems (Steinberg, 2005; Crone, 2009; Casey et al, 2010b; Nelson and Guyer, 2011). Immature prefrontal regulation of reward- and affect-related responses may be contributing to the heightened salience attributed to peers and other emotional stimuli (Guyer et al, 2009; Nelson and Guyer, 2011; Schriber and Guyer, 2016). Potentiated motivational responses to developmentally relevant stimuli, such as social cues from other youth, may be an important mechanism that guides increases in engagement with peers (Larson and Richards, 1991; Nelson et al, 2016) during the teenage years
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