The stimuli drive the response: An fMRI study of youth processing adult or child emotional face stimuli

Abstract

Effective navigation of the social world relies on the correct interpretation of facial emotions. This may be particularly important in formative years. Critically, literature examining the emergence of face processing in youth (children and adolescents) has focused on the neural and behavioral correlates of processing adult faces, which are relationally different from youth participants, and whose facial expressions may convey different meaning than faces of their peers. During a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scan, we compared concurrent neural and behavioral responses as youth (N=25) viewed validated, emotionally varied (i.e., anger, fear, happy, and neutral) adult and child face stimuli. We observed that participants made fewer errors when matching adult, compared to child, face stimuli, and that while similar brain regions were involved in processing both adult and child faces, activation in the face processing neural network was greater for adult than child faces. This was true across emotions, and also when comparing neutral adult versus neutral child faces. Additionally, a valence by stimuli-type effect was observed within the amygdala. That is, within adult face stimuli, negative and neutral face stimuli elicited the largest effects, whereas within child face stimuli, happy face stimuli elicited the largest amygdala effects. Thus, heightened engagement of the amygdala was observed for happy child and angry adult faces, which may reflect age-specific salience of select emotions in early life. This study provides evidence that the relational age of the perceived face influences neural processing in youth.