Adolescence is marked by elevated levels of negative affect (NA) and is a crucial period for the development of emotion regulation (ER). To date, relatively little is known about how adolescents' daily use of different ER strategies (ERS) is associated with momentary affective experiences. To elucidate these dynamics, we investigated whether (a) within-person differences in using different ERS were related to momentary NA and positive affect, (b) ER variability (operationalized as between-strategy variability) was related to momentary affect, and (c) stressor intensity was a moderator herein. Data from two ecological momentary assessment studies were used: NStudy1 = 89 Dutch adolescents (48% females, data collected in 2019) and NStudy2 = 266 Belgian adolescents (42% females, data collected in 2021). Momentary affect and ERS use were measured eight times per day during 1 week (Study 1) or five times during 2 weeks (Study 2). Within-person associations were estimated using a series of univariate autoregressive (Lag-1) dynamic structural equation models. Results show that, of all the ERS examined, only distraction was associated with lower levels of momentary NA and higher levels of positive affect across both studies, whereas the opposite associations were found for rumination. Contrary to expectations, ER variability was associated with lower levels of momentary NA only when stressor intensity was low but with higher levels of NA when stressor intensity was high. Overall, findings have noteworthy implications for future research on affect dynamics in adolescents and reveal a more nuanced picture about the benefits of ER variability in daily life. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Early adolescence may be an important period for developing sensitivity to uncooperative behavior. With this functional magnetic resonance imaging study, we examined longitudinal changes in trusting behavior and their neural correlates in regions of interest (ROIs) selected a priori: the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC), left anterior insula (AI), bilateral ventral striatum, and right dorsal striatum. Participants played the investor in a Trust Game with an uncooperative trustee (an anthropomorphic cartoon) three times, with one year between each wave. We preregistered our hypotheses and analytic plan. In total, 160 scan sessions of 77 participants (age at wave 1: M=13.89) were included in the analyses. First, we examined changes in trusting behavior involving an uncooperative other, and showed that participants’ investments decreased with wave. Next, we examined whether the investment and repayment phase yielded enhanced activity in the ROIs. In each phase we observed increased activity in the mPFC, dACC, and dorsal striatum, but no effects were found in the bilateral ventral striatum (and AI did not reach significance after multiple comparisons correction). Finally, we examined whether ROI activity changed with wave. During the repayment phase, dorsal striatum activity increased with wave (although this finding did not survive Bonferroni correction, it closely approached our threshold for significance). Together, these results indicate that young adolescents become increasingly responsive to uncooperative behavior; that trust behavior robustly enhanced activity in brain regions previously related to trust and decision-making in social context; and increased involvement of dorsal striatum across early adolescence.

Prior studies demonstrated heightened ventral striatal (VS) activity in response to reward in adolescence, but little is known about how reward sensitivity interacts with parent attachment to predict outcomes in young adulthood. In this pre-registered, four-wave, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study (n = 299 at T1), we examined whether heightened neural and behavioural reward sensitivity across adolescence makes individuals more susceptible to the influence of parent attachment on alcohol use, prosocial behaviour, and wellbeing in young adulthood. Participants played an fMRI gambling task that involved winning or losing money for themselves or a friend yielding a measure of adolescent neural reward sensitivity in VS. Subsequently, data on alcohol use, prosocial behaviour, and wellbeing were collected in young adulthood. Following differential susceptibility theory, we hypothesized for better and worse scenarios for young adults who exhibited higher reward sensitivity as adolescents compared to their peers with lower reward sensitivity. Results showed that avoidant parent-adolescent attachment in adolescence was negatively associated with wellbeing in young adulthood seven years later. We confirmed the adolescent peak in reward sensitivity in the VS, although VS activity did not function as a neurobiological susceptibility marker. Greater VS activity in response to a reward for a friend, however, was associated with less prosociality towards an unknown peer in young adulthood. This suggests that VS activity for close others is an index for ingroup-outgroup differentiation. Together these findings highlight how social experiences and brain development during adolescence may have prolonged impact on socioemotional outcomes later in life.

This study examined the extent to which adolescent peer victimization predicted acute inflammatory responses to stress, and whether both resting parasympathetic nervous system (PNS) activity and PNS stress reactivity moderated this association. 83 adolescents (Mage = 14.89, SDage = 0.52, 48

Abstract Background The COVID-19 pandemic substantially influenced adolescents lives and possibly also their cognitive and mental health outcomes. In our longitudinal study, we investigated possible changes in adolescents’ academic achievement and internalizing problems across two academic years during the COVID-19 pandemic. Specifically, we examined whether adolescents’ friendship quality buffers against possible changes in academic achievement and internalizing problems during the pandemic. Methods Our study sample consisted of Dutch young adolescents aged 11–16 (NT1 = 250) who filled out questionnaires on their friendship quality and internalizing problems during four data collection points across two academic years. Timepoint 1 (T1; November 2019) was before the COVID-19 pandemic, and the subsequent data collection points during the COVID-19 pandemic (T2: May/June 2020, T3: November/December 2020, T4: May/June 2021). Academic achievement was measured with school records of report grades. We conducted linear mixed models to analyze the data. Results Our findings showed that academic achievement decreased over time, and internalizing problems increased over time across two years during the COVID-19 pandemic. Furthermore, we found that adolescents with better (i.e., higher positive and lower negative) friendship quality had fewer internalizing problems. This significant relationship between better friendship quality and fewer internalizing problems held across all timepoints (pre-pandemic and during the COVID-19 pandemic). Conclusion Together, our findings provide insights into the adverse effects that the COVID-19 pandemic has had on adolescents’ academic achievement (decrease over time) and internalizing problems (increase over time), which could be considered by future governmental policies on lockdowns and restrictions during a crisis, such as the pandemic. Additionally, our results provided support for the general significance of friendship quality for adolescents’ mental health (i.e., internalizing problems).

One of the major goals for research on adolescent development is to identify the optimal conditions for adolescents to grow up in a complex social world and to understand individual differences in these trajectories. Based on influential theoretical and empirical work in this field, achieving this goal requires a detailed understanding of the social context in which neural and behavioral development takes place, along with longitudinal measurements at multiple levels (e.g., genetic, hormonal, neural, behavioral). In this perspectives article, we highlight the promising role of team science in achieving this goal. To illustrate our point, we describe meso (peer relations) and micro (social learning) approaches to understand social development in adolescence as crucial aspects of adolescent mental health. Finally, we provide an overview of how our team has extended our collaborations beyond scientific partners to multiple societal partners for the purpose of informing and including policymakers, education and health professionals, as well as adolescents themselves when conducting and communicating research.

Learning which of our behaviors benefit others contributes to forming social relationships. An important period for the development of (pro)social behavior is adolescence, which is characterized by transitions in social connections. It is, however, unknown how learning to benefit others develops across adolescence and what the underlying cognitive and neural mechanisms are. In this functional neuroimaging study, we assessed learning for self and others (i.e., prosocial learning) and the concurring neural tracking of prediction errors across adolescence (ages 9-21, N = 74). Participants performed a two-choice probabilistic reinforcement learning task in which outcomes resulted in monetary consequences for themselves, an unknown other, or no one. Participants from all ages were able to learn for themselves and others, but learning for others showed a more protracted developmental trajectory. Prediction errors for self were observed in the ventral striatum and showed no age-related differences. However, prediction error coding for others showed an age-related increase in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex. These results reveal insights into the computational mechanisms of learning for others across adolescence, and highlight that learning for self and others show different age-related patterns.

Physiological synchrony (PS) refers to the degree to which physiological measures of multiple individuals uniformly change (Palumbo et al., 2017). In a controlled laboratory study, we found that physiological synchrony reflects selective attention: The electroencephalogram (EEG), heart rate and electrodermal activity (EDA) of participants showed similar changes when they paid attention to similar aspects of an auditory stimulus (Stuldreher et al., 2020). PS may also be informative of attentional engagement in educational settings. Dikker et al. (2017) found that students’ EEG was more synchronized with each other when they were more, rather than less engaged during a semi-regular biology class. However, lessons were adapted specifically to the study and EEG sensors are still considered to be rather obtrusive. In the current work, we use data of two earlier conducted studies to assess PS in EDA and heart rate among students during regular classes. As a first step in probing whether PS in peripheral measures might be used for monitoring attention in secondary school education, we compared PS between students in the same versus different classrooms, and aimed to distinguish students attending the same class from students attending different classes.

An important task for adolescents is to form and maintain friendships. In this three-wave biannual study, we used a longitudinal neuroscience perspective to examine the dynamics of friendship stability. Relative to childhood and adulthood, adolescence is marked by elevated ventral striatum activity when gaining self-serving rewards. Using a sample of participants between the ages of eight and twenty-eight, we tested age-related changes in ventral striatum response to gaining for stable ( n = 48) versus unstable best friends ( n = 75) (and self). In participants with stable friendships, we observed a quadratic developmental trajectory of ventral striatum responses to winning versus losing rewards for friends, whereas participants with unstable best friends showed no age-related changes. Ventral striatum activity in response to winning versus losing for friends further varied with friendship closeness for participants with unstable friendships. We suggest that these findings may reflect changing social motivations related to formation and maintenance of friendships across adolescence.

Measuring psychophysiological signals of adolescents using unobtrusive wearable sensors may contribute to understanding the development of emotional disorders. This study investigated the feasibility of measuring high quality physiological data and examined the validity of signal processing in a school setting. Among 86 adolescents, a total of more than 410 h of electrodermal activity (EDA) data were recorded using a wrist-worn sensor with gelled electrodes and over 370 h of heart rate data were recorded using a chest-strap sensor. The results support the feasibility of monitoring physiological signals at school. We describe specific challenges and provide recommendations for signal analysis, including dealing with invalid signals due to loose sensors, and quantization noise that can be caused by limitations in analog-to-digital conversion in wearable devices and be mistaken as physiological responses. Importantly, our results show that using toolboxes for automatic signal preprocessing, decomposition, and artifact detection with default parameters while neglecting differences between devices and measurement contexts yield misleading results. Time courses of students' physiological signals throughout the course of a class were found to be clearer after applying our proposed preprocessing steps.

Humans have a strong need for social connections, which provide social security and a feeling of social acceptance. Across adolescence, peers emerge as important social interaction partners to fulfill the need for social connections. In her dissertation, Elisabeth Schreuders highlights adolescence as a sensitive period for pursuing personal goals and social development through interactions with different familiar peers, particularly friends.Neural reward-related processes and neural processes underlying prosocial behavior were examined using longitudinal and ecologically valid research designs. The findings show involvement of changes in ventral striatum reward sensitivity from early to mid-adolescence in the motivation to pursue personally valued goals, including stable friendships. It was furthermore found that adults who to a lesser extent adhered to the social norm of behaving in a prosocial manner toward friends yielded greater activity in the supplementary motor area and anterior insula. Additionally, exploratory analyses showed that mid-adolescents with greater social competence yielded greater activity in several brain areas implicated in prosocial decision-making involving friends, including the putamen and superior parietal lobule. Together, these findings highlight adolescence as a sensitive period for self and social development, in which social motivations are reflected in interactions with different types of peers.

Adolescence is a critical period for social orientation to peers and for developing social skills in interactions with peers. In the current study we examined the neural correlates of prosocial decisions for friends and disliked peers, and their links with participants' friendship quality and empathy as indices of social competence. Participants' friends and disliked peers were identified using sociometric nominations. Mid-adolescents (M-age = 14.6; N = 50) distributed coins between themselves and another player in a set of allocation games where they could make prosocial or selfish decisions for their friends and disliked peers, as well as for neutral and unfamiliar peers. Participants made the most prosocial decisions for friends and the least prosocial decisions for disliked peers. Prosocial decisions for friends yielded activity in the putamen and posterior middle temporal gyrus (pMTG) when compared to prosocial decisions for disliked peers, and in the superior parietal lobule (SPL) and precentral gyrus when compared to prosocial decisions for unfamiliar peers. Selfish decisions for friends and decisions for disliked peers did not result in heightened neural activity. Exploratory analyses of the associations between these neural activation patterns and measures of social competence revealed that putamen activity related negatively to negative friendship quality and that empathic personal distress related positively to SPL and precentral gyrus activity. Together, the findings illustrated that the SPL, precentral gyrus, pMTG, and putamen may be involved in promoting the continuation of friendships, and that social competence may modulate these neural mechanisms.

BackgroundCross‐sectional studies report relations between externalizing behavior and structural abnormalities in cortical thickness of prefrontal regions and volume reductions in subcortical regions. To understand how these associations emerge and develop, longitudinal designs are pivotal.MethodIn the current longitudinal study, a community sample of children, adolescents and young adults (N = 271) underwent magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) in three biennial waves (680 scans). At each wave, aspects of externalizing behavior were assessed with parent‐reported aggression and rule‐breaking scores (Child Behavior Checklist), and self‐reported aggression scores (Buss‐Perry Aggression Questionnaire). Regions of interest (ROIs) were selected based on prior research: dorsolateral prefrontal (dlPFC), orbitofrontal (OFC), anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), insula, and parahippocampal cortex, as well as subcortical regions. Linear mixed models were used to assess the longitudinal relation between externalizing behavior and structural brain development. Structural covariance analyses were employed to identify whether longitudinal relations between ROIs (maturational coupling) were associated with externalizing behavior.ResultsLinear mixed model analyses showed a negative relation between parent‐reported aggression and right hippocampal volume. Moreover, this longitudinal relation was driven by change in hippocampal volume and not initial volume of hippocampus at time point 1. Exploratory analyses showed that stronger maturational coupling between prefrontal regions, the limbic system, and striatum was associated with both low and high externalizing behavior.ConclusionsTogether, these findings reinforce the hypothesis that altered structural brain development coincides with development of more externalizing behavior. These findings may guide future research on normative and deviant development of externalizing behavior.

Although the majority of our social interactions are with people we know, few studies have investigated the neural correlates of sharing valuable resources with familiar others. Using an ecologically valid research paradigm, this functional magnetic resonance imaging study examined the neural correlates of prosocial and selfish behavior in interactions with real-life friends and disliked peers in young adults. Participants (N = 27) distributed coins between themselves and another person, where they could make selfish choices that maximized their own gains or prosocial choices that maximized outcomes of the other. Participants were more prosocial toward friends and more selfish toward disliked peers. Individual prosociality levels toward friends were associated negatively with supplementary motor area and anterior insula activity. Further preliminary analyses showed that prosocial decisions involving friends were associated with heightened activity in the bilateral posterior temporoparietal junction, and selfish decisions involving disliked peers were associated with heightened superior temporal sulcus activity, which are brain regions consistently shown to be involved in mentalizing and perspective taking in prior studies. Further, activation of the putamen was observed during prosocial choices involving friends and selfish choices involving disliked peers. These findings provide insights into the modulation of neural processes that underlie prosocial behavior as a function of a positive or negative relationship with the interaction partner.

The onset of adolescence in humans is marked by hormonal changes that give rise to secondary sexual characteristics, noted as puberty. It has, however, proven challenging to unravel to what extent pubertal changes may have organizing effects on the brain beyond chronological age, as reported in animal studies. The present longitudinal study aimed to characterize the unique effects of age and puberty on subcortical brain volumes and included three waves of data collection at two-year intervals and 680 T1-weighted MRI scans of 271 participants (54% females) aged between 8 and 29 years old. Generalized additive mixed model procedures were used to assess the effects of age, self-report pubertal status and testosterone level on basal ganglia, thalamus, hippocampus, amygdala and cerebellum gray matter volumes. We observed age-related increases in putamen and pallidum volumes, and decreases in accumbens and thalamus volumes, all show larger volumes in boys than girls. Only the cerebellum showed an interaction effect of age by sex, such that males showed prolonged increases in cerebellar volume than females. Next, we showed that changes in self-report puberty status better described developmental change than chronological age for most structures in males, and for caudate, pallidum and hippocampal volumes in females. Furthermore, changes in testosterone level were related to development of pallidum, accumbens, hippocampus and amygdala volumes in males and caudate and hippocampal volumes in females. The modeling approach of the present study allowed us to characterize the complex interactions between chronological age and pubertal maturational changes, and the findings indicate puberty unique changes in brain structure that are sex specific.

It was examined how ventral striatum responses to rewards develop across adolescence and early adulthood and how individual differences in state‐ and trait‐level reward sensitivity are related to these changes. Participants (aged 8–29 years) were tested across three waves separated by 2 years (693 functional MRI scans) in an accelerated longitudinal design. The results confirmed an adolescent peak in reward‐related ventral striatum, specifically nucleus accumbens, activity. In early to mid‐adolescence, increases in reward activation were related to trait‐level reward drive. In mid‐adolescence to early adulthood decreases in reward activation were related to decreases in state‐level hedonic reward pleasure. This study demonstrates that state‐ and trait‐level reward sensitivity account for reward‐related ventral striatum activity in different phases of adolescence and early adulthood.

Although many neuroimaging studies have investigated adolescent risk taking, few studies have dissociated between decision-making under risk (known probabilities) and ambiguity (unknown probabilities). Furthermore, which brain regions are sensitive to individual differences in task-related and self-reported risk taking remains elusive. We presented 198 adolescents (11-24 years, an age-range in which individual differences in risk taking are prominent) with an fMRI paradigm that separated decision-making (choosing to gamble or not) and reward outcome processing (gains, no gains) under risky and ambiguous conditions, and related this to task-related and self-reported risk taking. We observed distinct neural mechanisms underlying risky and ambiguous gambling, with risk more prominently associated with activation in parietal cortex, and ambiguity more prominently with dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (PFC), as well as medial PFC during outcome processing. Individual differences in task-related risk taking were positively associated with ventral striatum activation in the decision phase, specifically for risk, and negatively associated with insula and dorsomedial PFC activation, specifically for ambiguity. Moreover, dorsolateral PFC activation in the outcome phase seemed a prominent marker for individual differences in task-related risk taking under ambiguity as well as self-reported daily-life risk taking, in which greater risk taking was associated with reduced activation in dorsolateral PFC. Together, this study demonstrates the importance of considering multiple risk-taking measures, and contextual moderators, in understanding the neural mechanisms underlying adolescent risk taking.