Salience network response to changes in emotional expressions of others is heightened during early adolescence: relevance for social functioning

Abstract

Adolescence is a unique developmental period when the salience of social and emotional information becomes particularly pronounced. Although this increased sensitivity to social and emotional information has frequently been considered with respect to risk behaviors and psychopathology, evidence suggests that increased adolescent sensitivity to social and emotional cues may confer advantages. For example, greater sensitivity to shifts in the emotions of others is likely to promote flexible and adaptive social behavior. In this study, a sample of 54 children and adolescents (age 8–19 years) performed a delayed match-to-sample task for emotional faces while undergoing fMRI scanning. Recruitment of the anterior cingulate and anterior insula when the emotion of the probe face did not match the emotion held in memory followed a quadratic developmental pattern that peaked during early adolescence. These findings indicate meaningful developmental variation in the neural mechanisms underlying sensitivity to changes in the emotional expressions. Across all participants, greater activation of this network for changes in emotional expression was associated with less social anxiety and fewer social problems. These results suggest that the heightened salience of social and emotional information during adolescence may confer important advantages for social behavior, providing sensitivity to others' emotions that facilitates flexible social responding.

Moderate social sensitivity in a risky context supports adaptive decision making in adolescence: evidence from brain and behavior

“…Sensitivity to social cues, and in particular to changing emotional expressions, is key in navigating the social world ( Neta and Whalen, 2011 ). Greater social sensitivity to facial expressions has been linked to less social anxiety and fewer social problems ( Rosen et al , 2017 ). In this study, we assessed social sensitivity based on task behavior, as the extent to which adolescents adjusted their risky decision-making based on how quickly the facial expression changed from happy to angry.…”

“…At the neural level, we expected that moderate social sensitivity would be related to enhanced tracking of the changes in emotional expression in affective, social cognition and cognitive control regions during risky decision-making, as prior work suggests that these brain regions are involved in attuning to social cues and flexible social behavior ( Nelson and Guyer, 2011 ; Somerville, 2013 ; Rosen et al , 2017 ). We expected to find a curvilinear effect in these regions, such that compared to moderate levels of social sensitivity, low and high levels of social sensitivity would result in less neural tracking of the changes in emotional expression in these regions.…”

Importance of investing in adolescence from a developmental science perspective

“…Influential reviews have described adolescence as a period of "social reorientation" 4,9,12,73 , which includes increases in sensitivity to social evaluation and the importance of social status and popularity 18 . The adolescent social reorientation is thought to be associated with changes in neural systems involved in the development of social cognition 74 -especially affective responses to social acceptance and social rejection 75,76 and neural changes that are thought to enhance the motivational salience of engaging with peers 77 , which may motivate behavior and serve to enhance learning. (While acknowledging this increasing salience of peer relationships, the quality of family relationships continues to be a significant influence on adolescent development and health, and provides a compelling example of bidirectional influences between social and biological development.)…”

The Complex Emotion Expression Database: A validated stimulus set of trained actors

“…The vast majority of empirical work investigating the developmental, behavioral, and neural mechanisms supporting the perception and recognition of facial expressions is focused on basic expressions (e.g., [2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9]). These expressions provide signals about a specific set of universal emotions, including: anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise [10].…”