Peer feedback affects adolescents' behaviors, cognitions and emotions. We examined neural circuitry underlying adolescents' emotional response to peer feedback using a functional neuroimaging paradigm whereby, 36 adolescents (aged 9-17 years) believed they would interact with unknown peers postscan. Neural activity was expected to vary based on adolescents' perceptions of peers and feedback type. Ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (vlPFC) activity was found when adolescents indicated how they felt following feedback (acceptance or rejection) from peers of low vs high interest. Greater activation in both cortical (e.g. superior temporal gyrus, insula, anterior cingulate) and subcortical (e.g. striatum, thalamus) regions emerged in response to acceptance vs rejection feedback. Response to acceptance also varied by age and gender in similar regions (e.g. superior temporal gyrus, fusiform, insula), with greater age-related increases in activation to acceptance vs rejection for females than males. Affective response to rejection vs acceptance did not yield significantly greater neural activity in any region. vlPFC response suggests cognitive flexibility in reappraising initial perceptions of peers following feedback. Striatal response suggests that acceptance is a potent social reward for adolescents, an interpretation supported by more positive self-reported affective response to acceptance than rejection from high- but not low-interest peers.

Objective Behavioral inhibition is an early childhood temperament recently associated with altered striatal response in adolescence to incentives of increasing magnitudes. Since early childhood behavioral inhibition is also associated with risk for adolescent social phobia, a similar pattern of striatal activation may manifest in social phobia. The present study compares striatal function in healthy adolescents, adolescents with social phobia, and adolescents with generalized anxiety disorder. Method Blood-oxygen-level-dependent signal in striatal regions was examined in 58 medication-free adolescents—14 with social phobia, 18 with generalized anxiety disorder but not social phobia, and 26 with no psychiatric disorder—matched on sex, age, puberty, IQ, and socioeconomic status. During functional magnetic resonance imaging, participants responded to incentive cues depicting potential monetary gains or losses of varying magnitudes. Results While anticipating incentives of increasing magnitude, adolescents with social phobia showed increasingly heightened caudate and putamen activation at a level greater than that seen in the healthy comparison and generalized anxiety disorder groups. The generalized anxiety disorder group showed a unique valence-specific putamen response relative to the healthy comparison or social phobia group. Both patient groups displayed more complex patterns in the nucleus accumbens than in the caudate or putamen. Conclusions Caudate and putamen hypersensitivity to incentives of increasing magnitudes characterizes adolescent social phobia, relative to activation in this region in adolescents with generalized anxiety disorder as well as healthy adolescents. Thus, these findings resemble the pattern previously found in adolescents with early childhood behavioral inhibition, thereby implicating similar neural responses to anticipation of incentives in both early childhood behavioral inhibition and adolescent social phobia.

Behavioral inhibition, a temperament identifiable in infancy, is associated with heightened withdrawal from social encounters. Prior studies raise particular interest in the striatum, which responds uniquely to monetary gains in behaviorally inhibited children followed into adolescence. Although behavioral manifestations of inhibition are expressed primarily in the social domain, it remains unclear whether observed striatal alterations to monetary incentives also extend to social contexts. In the current study, imaging data were acquired from 39 participants (17 males, 22 females; ages 16–18 years) characterized since infancy on measures of behavioral inhibition. A social evaluation task was used to assess neural response to anticipation and receipt of positive and negative feedback from novel peers, classified by participants as being of high or low interest. As with monetary rewards, striatal response patterns differed during both anticipation and receipt of social reward between behaviorally inhibited and noninhibited adolescents. The current results, when combined with prior findings, suggest that early-life temperament predicts altered striatal response in both social and nonsocial contexts and provide support for continuity between temperament measured in early childhood and neural response to social signals measured in late adolescence and early adulthood.