Feeling left out: depressed adolescents may atypically recruit emotional salience and regulation networks during social exclusion

Abstract

Depression is associated with negative attention and attribution biases and maladaptive emotion responsivity and regulation, which adversely impact self-evaluations and interpersonal relationships. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we investigated the neural substrates of these impairments. We compared neural activity recruited by 126 clinically depressed and healthy adolescents (ages 11–17 years) during social exclusion (Exclusion > Inclusion) using Cyberball. Results revealed significant interaction effects within left anterior insula (AI)/inferior frontal gyrus and left middle temporal gyrus. Insula hyperresponsivity was associated with peer exclusion for depressed adolescents but peer inclusion for healthy adolescents. In additional, healthy adolescents recruited greater lateral temporal activity during peer exclusion. Complementary effect size analyses within independent parcellations offered converging evidence, as well as highlighted medium-to-large effects within subgenual/ventral anterior cingulate cortex and lateral prefrontal, lateral temporal and lateral parietal regions implicated in emotion regulation. Depressogenic neural patterns were associated with negative self-perceptions and negative information processing biases. These findings suggest a neural mechanism underlying cognitive biases in depression, as reflected by emotional hyperresponsivity and maladaptive regulation/reappraisal of negative social evaluative information. This study lends further support for salience and central executive network dysfunction underlying social threat processing, and in particular, highlights the anterior insula as a key region of disturbance in adolescent depression.

Differential Susceptibility to Parenting in Adolescent Girls: Moderation by Neural Sensitivity to Social Cues

“…However, the current research suggests that if youth have an alternative nurturing social environment (e.g., a supportive family), they may be able to overcome the maladaptive outcomes often associated with this neural sensitivity and even transform it into a protective factor. This idea is supported by research showing that certain regions implicated in social‐affective processing (including the dACC, sgACC, and insula) are responsive to bivalenced (i.e., both negative and positive) social feedback (Jankowski et al., ; Schriber & Guyer, ), and that heightened activation in these regions can predict both healthy and unhealthy developmental outcomes (for a review, see Schriber & Guyer, ).…”

“…Rather than selecting regions that robustly activate during Cyberball, and that may therefore not show individual differences, our aim was to focus on regions that may differentiate sensitive and insensitive individuals. For instance, these regions consistently show activation during Cyberball that correlates with individual differences such as time spent with peers (Masten, Telzer, Fuligni, Lieberman, & Eisenberger, ), chronic peer rejection (Will, van Lier, Crone, & Güroğlu, ), and depression (Jankowski et al., ; Masten et al., ).…”

Neural substrates for anticipation and consumption of social and monetary incentives in depression

“…For instance, it is found that while depressed individuals show decreased striatal response to monetary reward (Forbes et al ., 2006), they exhibit increased amygdala response to social reward (social acceptance; Davey et al ., 2011). Furthermore, depressed individuals have greater activation for social punishment in brain areas including the ventral lateral pre-frontal cortex (VLPFC), insula and subgenual anterior cingulate cortex (sgACC), all regions of the ‘social pain’ network (Silk et al ., 2014; Rudolph et al ., 2016; Kumar et al ., 2017; Jankowski et al ., 2018). In contrast, reduced reactivity across multiple brain regions including pre-frontal regions, parietal cortex, amygdala and putamen have been observed for monetary losses in individuals with depression (Knutson et al ., 2008; Schiller et al ., 2013).…”

Cerebral responses to self-initiated action during social interactions

“…Studies also have explored the neural processes of specific social interactions or emotions, such as interpretation of ambiguous social cues (Davis, Neta, Kim, Moran, & Whalen, 2016), sense of fairness and justice (Klapwijk et al, 2016), guilt and shame (Whittle, Liu, Bastin, Harrison, & Davey, 2016), hostility (Nakagawa et al, 2017), and retaliation (Emmerling et al, 2016), and how cerebral responses to social interaction vary with individual traits in approach and inhibition (Radke et al, 2016). Other work elucidated the neural processes of depression in relation to social threat processing (Jankowski et al, 2018) and the effects of mindfulness on the management of social rejection (Martelli, Chester, Warren Brown, Eisenberger, & Nathan DeWall, 2018). These findings provide important clues to the biological underpinnings of various dimensions of social interaction.…”