Abstract
Functional neuroimaging results need to replicate to inform sound models of human social cognition and its neural correlates. Introspection, the capacity to reflect on one's thoughts and feelings, is one process required for normative social cognition and emotional functioning. Engaging in introspection draws on a network of brain regions including medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), posterior cingulate cortex (PCC), middle temporal gyri (MTG), and temporoparietal junction (TPJ). Maturation of these regions during adolescence mirrors the behavioral advances seen in adolescent social cognition, but the neural correlates of introspection in adolescence need to replicate to confirm their generalizability and role as a possible mechanism. The current study investigated whether reflecting upon one's own feelings of sadness would activate and replicate similar brain regions in two independent samples of adolescents. Participants included 156 adolescents (50% female) from the California Families Project and 119 adolescent girls from the Pittsburgh Girls Study of Emotion. All participants completed the Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (ERQ) and underwent a functional magnetic resonance imaging scan while completing the same facial emotion‐processing task at age 16–17 years. Both samples showed similar whole‐brain activation patterns when engaged in sadness introspection and when judging a nonemotional facial feature. Whole‐brain activation was unrelated to ERQ scores in both samples. Neural responsivity to task manipulations replicated in regions recruited for socio‐emotional (mPFC, PCC, MTG, TPJ) and attention (dorsolateral PFC, precentral gyri, superior occipital gyrus, superior parietal lobule) processing. These findings demonstrate robust replication of neural engagement during sadness introspection in two independent adolescent samples.
Highlights
Replication is critical to developing solid conceptual models of human behavior and its neural correlates
Using a region of interest (ROI) approach, we have shown that dorsomedial activity during sadness introspection when viewing sad faces was related to depression severity 1 year later and to self-reported emotion regulation (Vilgis et al, 2018)
We did not find a significant attention × facial emotion interaction effect in the Pittsburgh Girls Study of Emotion (PGS-E) sample, we examined whether the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC) and right IFG clusters observed in the California Families Project (CFP) sample would show a similar pattern in the Pittsburgh Girls Study (PGS)-E sample
Summary
Replication is critical to developing solid conceptual models of human behavior and its neural correlates. Surprisingly few examples of direct replication of functional neuroimaging results have been published (Poldrack et al, 2017). The scarcity of such replication efforts is evident in social cognitive neuroscience research using child and adolescent samples. Few direct replications exist, examinations of resting state networks have shown generally stable patterns of blood oxygen-level-dependent (BOLD) signal activation and meta-analyses of task-based activation patterns have identified reliable neural correlates for various psychological processes measured using cognitive tasks (Gilmore, Diaz, Wyble, & Yarkoni, 2017). The current study sought to address this need by identifying whole-brain neural activation during a social cognition task involving emotion introspection in one sample of adolescents and testing whether the pattern replicated in an independent second sample of adolescents
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