Neural Dynamic Responses of Monetary and Social Reward Processes in Adolescents

Abstract

Adolescence is an essential developmental period characterized by reward-related processes. The current study investigated the development of monetary and social reward processes in adolescents compared with that in children and adults; furthermore, it assessed whether adolescents had different levels of sensitivity to various types of rewards. Two adapted incentive delay tasks were employed for each participant, and event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded. The behavioral results showed that both monetary and social rewards could motivate response speed, and participants were more accurate under the monetary reward condition than under the social reward condition. The behavioral performances of individuals increased with age. For the ERP data, the cue-P3, target-P2, target-P3 and feedback-related negativity (FRN) components were investigated to identify reward motivation, emotional arousal, attention allocation and feedback processing. Children and adolescents showed higher motivation (larger cue-P3) to rewards than adults. Adolescents showed larger emotional responses to rewards; that is, they had larger target-P2 amplitudes than adults and shorter target-P2 latencies than children. Children showed stronger emotional reactivity for monetary rewards than for social rewards. All age groups had stronger attentional control (larger target-P3) under the monetary reward condition than under the social reward condition. The present study sheds light on the neurodevelopment of reward processes in children, adolescents and adults and shows that various reward process stages demonstrate different age-related and reward-type-related characteristics.

Processing of increased frequency of social interaction in social anxiety disorder and borderline personality disorder

“…More precisely, the P2 amplitude has been related to the emotional evaluation of rewards 27,28 . This has been confirmed in recent studies across different experimental paradigms [29][30][31] . The P2 amplitude has also been related to other processes such as feature detection and allocation of attentional resources [32][33][34] as well as emotional evaluation of stimuli 35,36 .…”

The influence of reward anticipation on conflict control in children and adolescents: Evidences from hierarchical drift-diffusion model and event-related potentials

“…Several studies have compared the neural responses to social and monetary rewards ( Demurie et al, 2011 , Demurie et al, 2012 , Ethridge et al, 2017 , Ethridge and Weinberg, 2018 , Izuma et al, 2008 , Lin et al, 2012 , Rademacher et al, 2010 , Saxe and Haushofer, 2008 , Wang et al, 2017 , Wang et al, 2020 ). We previously investigated how social and monetary rewards affected a simple two-choice process (a triangle with left hand response, a square with right hand response) in children, adolescents, and adults ( Wang et al, 2017 , Wang et al, 2020 ). We found that both monetary and social rewards could speed up participants’ responses, and their reaction time (RT) decreased with the enhancement of the reward magnitude.…”

The role of chronotype and reward processing in understanding social hierarchies in adolescence

“…Studies that have compared directly social and nonsocial reward responses report that adolescents rated social rewards as more subjectively motivating than monetary rewards (Wang et al., 2017). In the same paradigm, electrophysiological signals of response speed and cognitive control correlated only under conditions of social reward, interpreted as increased sensitivity and attentional engagement to social reward cues in the adolescent group (Wang et al., 2020). Longitudinal neuroimaging research on effects of incentives on inhibitory control show substantial individual differences in terms of whether incentives will improve or impair performance, and the brain circuitry underpinning performance is shown to follow a protracted developmental trajectory into adulthood (Paulsen et al., 2015).…”