Abstract
Childhood adversity (CA) increases the risk of subsequent mental health problems. Adolescent social support (from family and/or friends) reduces the risk of mental health problems after CA. However, the mechanisms of this effect remain unclear, and we speculate that they are manifested on neurodevelopmental levels. Therefore, we investigated whether family and/or friendship support at ages 14 and 17 function as intermediate variables for the relationship between CA before age 11 and affective or neural responses to social rejection feedback at age 18. We studied 55 adolescents with normative mental health at age 18 (26 with CA and therefore considered "resilient"), from a longitudinal cohort. Participants underwent a Social Feedback Task in the magnetic resonance imaging scanner. Social rejection feedback activated the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex and the left anterior insula. CA did not predict affective or neural responses to social rejection at age 18. Yet, CA predicted better friendships at age 14 and age 18, when adolescents with and without CA had comparable mood levels. Thus, adolescents with CA and normative mood levels have more adolescent friendship support and seem to have normal mood and neural responses to social rejection.
Highlights
Over half of the Western population has been exposed to at least one type of childhood adversity (CA; US National Comorbidity Replication Survey; Greif Green et al, 2010)
As a previous report on this sample (Dalgleish et al, 2017) found that the “negative more than neutral” contrast revealed a significant responsivity in the left acceptance responsivity (AI) and the bilateral dACC, we restricted our analyses to those two brain areas
Our findings showed that CA is associated with less negative mood responses to social rejection feedback, albeit this was a of CA and family support on the brain (Mean R2 = .015) were both nonsignificant but had negligible effects
Summary
Over half of the Western population has been exposed to at least one type of childhood adversity (CA; US National Comorbidity Replication Survey; Greif Green et al, 2010). We investigated here whether early and/or late adolescent family and friendship support function as intermediate variables for the relationship between CA and (affective and/or neural) responsivity to later social rejection.
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