The Impact of Puberty and Social Anxiety on Amygdala Activation to Faces in Adolescence

Abstract

Adolescence is associated with the onset of puberty, shifts in social and emotional behavior and an increased vulnerability to social anxiety disorder. These transitions coincide with changes in amygdala response to social and affective stimuli. Utilizing an emotional face-matching task, we examined amygdala response to peer-aged neutral and fearful faces in relation to puberty and social anxiety in a sample of 60 adolescent females between the ages of 8 and 15 years. We observed amygdala activation in response to both neutral and fearful faces compared to the control condition but did not observe differential amygdala activation between fearful and neutral faces. Right amygdala activity in response to neutral faces was negatively correlated with puberty and positively correlated with social anxiety, and these effects were statistically independent. Puberty and social anxiety did not relate to amygdala activation in response to fearful faces. These findings suggest that emotional differentiation between fearful and neutral faces may arise during later pubertal development and may result from decreasing sensitivity to neutral faces rather than increasing sensitivity to threatening faces. Furthermore, these findings highlight the importance of considering individual differences in social anxiety when examining the neural response to social stimuli in adolescents.