P.2.025 - Age differences in social preference

Abstract

Starting with puberty and ending with adult independence, adolescence is a time of significant biological and social change that is characterised by dynamic brain development and interactions with the social environment [1]. Adolescence has been proposed as a period of hyper sensitivity to the social environment [2] and a sensitive period for the onset of mental health problems [3]. Evidence has shown that adolescents are particularly sensitive to their social surroundings. It is therefore surprising to find a paucity of data reporting whether or not typically developing adolescents have a preference for social stimuli over non-social stimuli, such as objects and landscapes. We developed an experiment to test the hypothesis that adolescents would be more likely to spend more time than adults choosing to look at social (vs. non-social) stimuli, in preference to an academic diligence task. Participants were adolescents (aged 11-16) and adults (23-30), recruited from the greater London area. Individuals were ineligible if currently taking any psychoactive medication or with a history of neurological or psychiatric disorder. Demographic, social reward and autism quotient questionnaires were administered, followed by the Academic Diligence Task; ADT. In the ADT, participants are given the option to engage in a basic and boring maths task for up to 10 minutes. Participants are told that practicing basic maths skills makes you a better problem solver. Participants are told that at any point they can stop doing maths and switch over to a less boring task – looking at pleasant and rewarding photographs. There were two conditions: social (the photographs were of people interacting) or non-social (the photographs were of landscapes). The order of conditions was counterbalanced between participants. The dependent variable was the ratio of time participants spent doing boring maths versus looking at rewarding photographs, and the design was a 2x2 factorial, with age group (adolescents vs adults) as the between subjects factor and condition (social vs non-social) as the within subjects factor. A repeated measures mixed model ANOVA (age group; condition) was conducted on the data. We predicted a significant interaction between age group and condition, with adolescents spending less time engaging with maths (than adults) when given the option to look at social stimuli, whilst both adolescents and adults would spend an equal amount of time playing maths when given the option to look at non-social stimuli. We also tested the prediction that individuals who report higher levels of autistic traits would show less preference towards the social stimuli and would be spend more time than individuals with low levels of autistic traits engaging with the maths task. We made the prediction that adolescents would spend less time on the maths task when given the option to look at social stimuli (compared to non-social stimuli) because this period of development represents a time of heightened sensitivity to peer evaluation [4] and sociocultural processing [5], thus orientating adolescence to social stimuli.