Caregiving-related early adversities (crEAs) are potent risk factors for the development of internalizing psychopathology (e.g., depression, anxiety). Alterations to the dopaminergic mesocorticolimbic system, which supports the construction of reward-related experiences, are commonly observed following crEA exposure and are thought to mediate this risk. Indeed, many internalizing disorders are characterized by disruptions in how reward-related information is represented and used to guide affective and motivational states. Critically, the effects of crEA on mesocorticolimbic functioning may be shaped by input from peripheral systems, such as the gut microbiome, though such bottom-up signaling has been markedly understudied in humans. The Teen Bugs study was thus developed to identify gut microbiome-dependent metabolic pathways linking crEA exposure to mesocorticolimbic functioning and internalizing symptoms in adolescents, a group that experiences a disproportionate incidence of psychopathology relative to other age groups and is underrepresented in the gut microbiome literature. Adolescents aged 12-15 years, with and without histories of crEA exposure, will be followed across three timepoints over five years. At each timepoint, participants will complete a semi-structured clinical interview, a reward-guided decision-making task, and self-report questionnaires assessing mental health, previous caregiving experiences, reward-related behaviors, as well as developmental and lifestyle factors. Participants will also undergo multimodal neuroimaging that leverages MRI-based proxy markers of dopaminergic neurobiology and provide stool and blood samples for metagenomic and metabolomic profiling, respectively. This integrative design has the potential to clarify developmentally salient mechanisms that may serve as novel therapeutic targets for youth most at risk of, or already experiencing, internalizing psychopathology.

Individuals possess stable repertoires of emotion regulation strategies, but little is known about how these trait-like patterns relate to momentary affective experiences in daily life. In this study, N=113 individuals completed a trait-level emotion regulation questionnaire at baseline and then participated in a 14-day ecological momentary assessment (EMA) protocol capturing positive affect, negative affect, stress, and use of five emotion regulation strategies (reappraisal, suppression, distraction, selective attention, situation selection). Repertoires were operationalized in four ways: using three scalar indices that captured quantitative differences in questionnaire derived regulatory patterns and a fourth method relying on typological groupings that captured qualitative differences in repertoire construction. Hierarchical Bayesian modeling revealed broader, more extensive repertoire engagement was associated with lower negative affect and stress in daily life. All repertoire indices showed little conclusive evidence of moderating momentary regulation affect linkages. These findings suggest repertoire breadth confers modest affective benefits in daily life.

Institutionalization is a profound form of early adversity that is associated with increased risk for internalizing disorders, which most commonly have their onset during adolescence. Developmental models emphasize how differences in childhood learning contribute to avoidance behaviors, a core pathway linking adversity to internalizing disorders. Yet, little empirical research has tested this theory. 43 previously institutionalized (PI; 12.1-22.8 years) and 47 comparison (9.9-22.9 years) youth completed an aversive learning task while undergoing fMRI. The task involved an escapable stimulus reinforced with an aversive sound (CS+r), the same stimulus without reinforcement (CS+nr), and an escapable stimulus that was never reinforced (CS-). Internalizing symptoms were measured using the parent-report Revised Child Anxiety and Depression Scales. Functional connectivity between the nucleus accumbens (NAcc) and amygdala was elevated among the PI versus comparison youth across stimuli (p = .036). Exploratory analyses found that NAcc-amygdala connectivity was elevated among the PI youth during early adolescence relative to late adolescence (p = .009). Institutionalization may impact neurodevelopment in ways that increase responsiveness of threat neurocircuitry across threatening and safe stimuli. Differences in NAcc-amygdala functional connectivity may attenuate with age following adoption.

Vocal communication (e.g., pitch) can shape inferences about speakers and the content of their messages. Yet, it’s unknown how such communication impacts the effectiveness of social support. We examined the role of support givers’ vocal pitch in three dyadic datasets (N1 = 39; N2 = 39; N3 = 59; friend pairs) where participants recorded scripted reappraisals (i.e., reinterpretations) of aversive stimuli to support a friend with regulating emotion. Using Bayesian statistics, we found cumulative evidence that when support givers used higher pitch in delivering these reappraisals, targets of support experienced less negative affect. Targets of support also reported greater relationship satisfaction with support givers who used higher pitch during reappraisal. These data consisted primarily of women friend pairs, with preliminary results indicating that these associations may not hold in men friendships. These results highlight acoustic features of verbal communication as a promising frontier for strengthening social ties and emotional wellbeing.

The current prevailing approaches to analyzing task fMRI data in developmental cognitive neuroscience are brain connectivity and mass univariate task-based analyses, used either in isolation or as part of a broader analytic framework (e.g., BWAS). While these are powerful tools, it is somewhat surprising that multi-voxel pattern analysis (MVPA) is not more common in developmental cognitive neuroscience given its enhanced ability to both probe neural population codes and greater sensitivity relative to the mass univariate approach. Omitting MVPA methods might represent a missed opportunity to leverage a suite of tools that are uniquely poised to reveal mechanisms underlying brain development. The goal of this review is to spur awareness and adoption of MVPA in developmental cognitive neuroscience by providing a practical introduction to foundational MVPA concepts. We begin by defining MVPA and explain why examining multi-voxel patterns of brain activity can aid in understanding the developing human brain. We then survey four different types of MVPA: Decoding, representational similarity analysis (RSA), pattern expression, and voxel-wise encoding models. Each variant of MVPA is presented with a conceptual overview of the method followed by practical considerations and subvariants thereof. We go on to highlight the types of developmental questions that can be answered by MPVA, discuss practical matters in MVPA implementation germane to developmental cognitive neuroscientists, and make recommendations for integrating MVPA with the existing analytic ecosystem in the field.

Humans frequently make decisions that impact close others. Prior research has shown that people have stable preferences regarding such decisions and maintain rich, nuanced mental representations of their close social partners. Yet, if and how such mental representations shape social decisions preferences remains to be seen. Using a combination of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and natural language processing, this study investigated how neural and linguistic representations of close others relate to social decision-making. After nominating a parent and friend, male and female participants (N = 63) rated their characteristics while undergoing fMRI and made hypothetical social decisions involving said parent and friend. Neural representations of parents and friends, relative to the self, were linked to social decision preferences. Specifically, greater neural similarity between self and parent in the temporoparietal junction and nucleus accumbens was associated with a preference for parents, while greater self-friend similarity in the medial prefrontal cortex was associated with friend preference. In a follow-up study, linguistic analysis of written descriptions of close others from an independent sample of males and females (N = 1,641) revealed that social decision preferences could be reliably predicted from semantic features of the text. High correspondence between neural and linguistic data in the imaging sample further strengthened the association with social decision preferences. These findings help elucidate the neural and linguistic underpinnings of social decision-making, emphasizing the critical role of mental representations in guiding choices involving familiar others.

The hippocampus supports episodic memories in development, and yet how the brain stabilizes these memories determines their long-term accessibility. This study examined how episodic memories formed in development are stabilized and whether early-life experiences influence the neural mechanisms involved. Using fMRI and multivariate analyses, we tracked neural reinstatement of newly learned item-location-context associations in youth (N = 49; age mean = 11.68 years). Hippocampus and visual cortex activity during encoding predicted later memory success. Crucially, spontaneous reinstatement in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) during post-encoding rest also predicted memory. In a second sample (N = 32, age mean = 12.86 years) with early adversity, differential recruitment of the precuneus and visual cortex during encoding, and angular gyrus during reinstatement, was observed. These findings suggest that hippocampus and mPFC contribute to developmental memory stabilization in ways consistent with mature function, while differences in memory accessibility across developmental experiences arise from broader network adaptations.

As social creatures, our relationships with other people have tremendous downstream impacts on health and wellbeing. However, we still know surprisingly little about how our social interactions regulate how we think and feel through life’s challenges. Getting help from other people to change how one thinks about emotional events – known as “social reappraisal” – can be more effective in down-regulating negative affect than reappraising on one’s own, but it is unknown whether this regulatory boost from social support persists when people face the same events alone in the future. In a pre-registered study of 120 young adults (N = 60 same-gender dyads, gender split sample) involving in-lab emotion regulation tasks and a follow-up task online approximately 1 day later, we found that participants responded less negatively to aversive images that were socially regulated (i.e., reappraised with the help of a friend) both immediately and over time, as compared to images that had been previously solo regulated (i.e., reappraised on one’s own) or not regulated (i.e., passively viewed). Interestingly, the regulatory boost from social support observed both in the lab and at follow-up was driven by women dyads. This work highlights one important mechanism explaining how support from others can facilitate emotional wellbeing: by changing peoples’ lasting impressions of distressing events, interactions with others can help prepare them to cope with future exposure to those events on their own, underscoring how valuable others’ perspectives can be when navigating ongoing emotional stressors.

Adolescence is a period of rapid biobehavioral change, characterized in part by increased neural maturation and sensitivity to one’s environment. In this review, we aim to demonstrate that self-regulation skills are tuned by adolescents’ social, cultural, and socioeconomic contexts. We discuss adjacent literatures that demonstrate the importance of experience-dependent learning for adolescent development: environmental contextual influences and training paradigms that aim to improve regulation skills. We first highlight changes in prominent limbic and cortical regions—like the amygdala and medial prefrontal cortex—as well as structural and functional connectivity between these areas that are associated with adolescents’ regulation skills. Next, we consider how puberty, the hallmark developmental milestone in adolescence, helps instantiate these biobehavioral adaptations. We then survey the existing literature demonstrating the ways in which cultural, socioeconomic, and interpersonal contexts drive behavioral and neural adaptation for self-regulation. Finally, we highlight promising results from regulation training paradigms that suggest training may be especially efficacious for adolescent samples. In our conclusion, we highlight some exciting frontiers in human self-regulation research as well as recommendations for improving the methodological implementation of developmental neuroimaging studies and training paradigms.

Learning safe versus dangerous cues is crucial for survival. During development, parents can influence fear learning by buffering their children's stress response and increasing exploration of potentially aversive stimuli. Rodent findings suggest that these behavioral effects are mediated through parental presence modulation of the amygdala and medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC). Here, we investigated whether similar parental modulation of amygdala and mPFC during fear learning occurs in humans. Using a within-subjects design, behavioral (final N = 48, 6-17 years, mean = 11.61, SD = 2.84, 60% females/40% males) and neuroimaging data (final N = 39, 6-17 years, mean = 12.03, SD = 2.98, 59% females/41% males) were acquired during a classical fear conditioning task, which included a CS+ followed by an aversive noise (US; 75% reinforcement rate) and a CS-. Conditioning occurred once in physical contact with the participant's parent and once alone (order counterbalanced). Region of interest analyses examined the unconditioned stress response by BOLD activation to the US (vs. implicit baseline) and learning by activation to the CS+ (vs. CS-). Results showed that during US presentation, parental presence reduced the centromedial amygdala activity, suggesting buffering of the unconditioned stress response. In response to learned stimuli, parental presence reduced mPFC activity to the CS+ (relative to the CS-), although this result did not survive multiple comparisons' correction. These preliminary findings indicate that parents modulate amygdala and mPFC activity during exposure to unconditioned and conditioned fear stimuli, potentially providing insight into the neural mechanisms by which parents act as a social buffer during fear learning. RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS: This study used a within-participant experimental design to investigate how parental presence (vs. absence) affects youth's neural responses in a classical fear conditioning task. Parental presence reduced the youth's centromedial amygdala activation to the unconditioned stimulus (US), suggesting parental buffering of the neural unconditioned response (UR). Parental presence reduced the youth's mPFC activation to a conditioned threat cue (CS+) compared to a safety cue (CS-), suggesting possible parental modulation of fear learning.

Vocal communication (e.g., pitch) can shape inferences about speakers and the content of their messages. Yet, it’s unknown how such communication impacts the effectiveness of social support. We examined the role of support givers’ vocal pitch in three dyadic datasets (N1 = 39; N2 = 39; N3 = 59; friend pairs) where participants recorded scripted reappraisals (i.e., reinterpretations) of aversive stimuli to support a friend with regulating emotion. Using Bayesian statistics, we found cumulative evidence that when support givers used higher pitch in delivering these reappraisals, targets of support experienced less negative affect. Targets of support also reported greater relationship satisfaction with support givers who used higher pitch during reappraisal. These data consisted primarily of women friend pairs, with preliminary results indicating that these associations may not hold in men friendships. These results highlight acoustic features of verbal communication as a promising frontier for strengthening social ties and emotional wellbeing.

BACKGROUND: Previous institutionalization (PI) is a unique form of early life adversity that is associated with increased risk for psychopathology, especially internalizing disorders. Onset of internalizing disorders is most common during adolescence. Developmental models emphasize differences in childhood learning, and corresponding avoidance behaviors, as a core pathway linking adversity to internalizing disorders yet little empirical research has tested this theory. METHODS: During functional magnetic resonance imaging, 43 PI (12.1 to 22.8 years) and 47 comparison (9.9 to 22.9 years) youth completed an aversive learning task. The task involved an escapable stimulus reinforced with an aversive sound (CS+r), the same escapable stimulus without reinforcement (CS+nr), or an escapable stimulus that was never reinforced (CS-). Internalizing symptoms were measured using the parent-report Revised Child Anxiety and Depression Scales.RESULTS: Functional connectivity between the nucleus accumbens (NAcc) and amygdala was elevated among the PI versus comparison youth, specifically for the CS- (p=.035). PI youth showed elevated connectivity for the CS- regardless of symptoms, whereas comparison youth showed elevated connectivity at higher but not lower levels of symptoms (p=.027). Elevated connectivity for the CS- was more evident among the PI group during early adolescence relative to late adolescence (p=.007).CONCLUSIONS: NAcc-amygdala functional connectivity, a circuit which has previously been implicated in escape from threat, is elevated during safety learning among PI adolescents. Differences in NAcc-amygdala functional connectivity may attenuate with age following adoption. Institutionalization may impact neurodevelopment in ways that increase generalization of threat appraisals to safe stimuli, thereby increasing risk for developing psychopathology.

Exposure to early life adversity (ELA) is hypothesized to sensitize threat-responsive neural circuitry. This may lead individuals to overestimate threat in the face of ambiguity, a cognitive-behavioral phenotype linked to poor mental health. The tendency to process ambiguity as threatening may stem from difficulty distinguishing between ambiguous and threatening stimuli. However, it is unknown how exposure to ELA relates to neural representations of ambiguous and threatening stimuli, or how processing of ambiguity following ELA relates to psychosocial functioning. The current fMRI study examined multivariate representations of threatening and ambiguous social cues in 41 emerging adults (aged 18 to 19 years). Using representational similarity analysis, we assessed neural representations of ambiguous and threatening images within affective neural circuitry and tested whether similarity in these representations varied by ELA exposure. Greater exposure to ELA was associated with greater similarity in neural representations of ambiguous and threatening images. Moreover, individual differences in processing ambiguity related to global functioning, an association that varied as a function of ELA. By evidencing reduced neural differentiation between ambiguous and threatening cues in ELA-exposed emerging adults and linking behavioral responses to ambiguity to psychosocial wellbeing, these findings have important implications for future intervention work in at-risk, ELA-exposed populations.

Background: Reward and threat processes work together to support adaptive learning during development. Adolescence is associated with increasing approach behavior (e.g., novelty-seeking, risk-taking) but often also coincides with emerging internalizing symptoms, which are characterized by heightened avoidance behavior. Peaking engagement of the nucleus accumbens (NAcc) during adolescence, often studied in reward paradigms, may also relate to threat mechanisms of adolescent psychopathology.Methods: 47 typically developing adolescents (9.9-22.9 years) completed an aversive learning task during functional magnetic resonance imaging, wherein visual cues were paired with an aversive sound or no sound. Task blocks involved an escapable aversively reinforced stimulus (CS+r), the same stimulus without reinforcement (CS+nr), or a stimulus that was never reinforced (CS-). Parent-reported internalizing symptoms were measured using Revised Child Anxiety and Depression Scales.Results: Functional connectivity between the NAcc and amygdala differentiated the stimuli, such that connectivity increased for the CS+r (p = .023) but not for the CS+nr and CS-. Adolescents with greater internalizing symptoms demonstrated greater positive functional connectivity for the CS- (p = .041).Conclusions: Adolescents show heightened NAcc-amygdala functional connectivity during escape from threat. Higher anxiety and depression symptoms are associated with elevated NAcc-amygdala connectivity during safety, which may reflect poor safety versus threat discrimination.

The tendency to interpret ambiguous stimuli as threatening has been associated with a range of anxiety disorders. Responses to ambiguity may be particularly relevant to mental health during the transition from adolescence to adulthood ("emerging adulthood"), when individuals encounter unfamiliar challenges and navigate novel social situations. However, it remains unclear whether neural representations of ambiguity relate to risk for anxiety. The present study sought to examine whether multivariate representations of ambiguity - and their similarity to representations of threat - relate to appraisals of ambiguity or anxiety in a sample of emerging adults. Participants (N = 41) viewed threatening (angry), nonthreatening (happy), and ambiguous (surprised) facial stimuli while undergoing fMRI. Outside of the scanner, participants were presented with the same stimuli and categorized the ambiguous faces as positive or negative. Using representational similarity analyses (RSA), we investigated whether the degree of pattern similarity in responses to ambiguous, nonthreatening, and threatening faces within the amygdala related to appraisals of ambiguous stimuli and anxiety symptomatology. We found that individuals who evidenced greater similarity (i.e., less differentiation) in neural representations of ambiguous and nonthreatening faces within the left amygdala reported lower concurrent anxiety. Additionally, triallevel pattern similarity predicted subsequent appraisals of ambiguous stimuli. These findings provide insight into how neural representations of ambiguity relate to risk or resilience for the development of anxiety.

Emotion regulation (ER) strategies and beliefs about emotions (implicit theories of emotions; ITE) may shape psychosocial outcomes during turbulent times, including the transition to adulthood and college while encountering stressors. The normative stressors associated with these transitions were compounded by the COVID-19 pandemic, providing a novel opportunity to examine how emerging adults (EAs) cope with sustained stressors. Stress exposures can heighten existing individual differences and serve as “turning points” that predict psychosocial trajectories. This pre-registered study ( https://osf.io/k8mes ) of 101 EAs (18–19 years old) examined whether ITE (believing emotions can change or not; incremental vs. entity beliefs) and ER strategy usage (cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression usage) predicted changes in anxiety symptomatology and feelings of loneliness across five longitudinal assessments (across a 6-month period) before and during the initial months of the COVID-19 pandemic. On average, EAs’ anxiety decreased after the pandemic outbreak but returned to baseline over time, while loneliness remained relatively unchanged across time. ITE explained variance in anxiety across time over and above reappraisal use. Conversely, reappraisal use explained variance in loneliness over and above ITE. For both anxiety and loneliness, suppression use resulted in maladaptive psychosocial outcomes across time. Thus, interventions that target ER strategies and ITE may ameliorate risk and promote resilience in EAs who experience increased instability.

BACKGROUND:The interval between adolescence and adulthood, 'emerging adulthood' (EA), lays the foundation for lifelong health and well-being. To date, there exist little empirical data - particularly in the neurobiological domain - to establish markers of risk and resilience during the transition to adulthood. This gap in the literature is concerning given the numerous forms of psychiatric illness that emerge or worsen during this period.METHODS:In this review, we focus on two strands of research with distinct importance for EA: reward sensitivity, and tolerance of ambiguity. We begin by placing these domains in a framework that considers the unique developmental goals of EA and then synthesize emerging neurobiological research on how these domains develop during EA. We then consider their role in common mental health problems that occur during this interval as well as how social support may moderate outcomes. Finally, we offer recommendations for advancing research to understand developmental process and outcomes in EA.FINDINGS AND CONCLUSIONS:Few longitudinal studies specifically address emerging adult development and the milestones that characterize this interval. Data on neurobiological development are similarly sparse. Understanding neurobiological development during this window and its links to key adjustment outcomes is crucial for optimizing outcomes.

BACKGROUND Prolonged stress exposure is associated with alterations in cortisol output. The COVID-19 pandemic represented a stressor for many, including children. However, a high-quality caregiving environment may protect against psychological problems and possibly against elevations in cortisol. We examined adolescents' physiological stress responses to the pandemic and the role of attachment in two longitudinal samples from the Netherlands and the United States (https://aspredicted.org/HHY_8MK). METHODS Cortisol was assessed from hair samples before and during the pandemic, while attachment was self-reported prepandemic. Study 1 included a Dutch sample (N = 158; examined at ages 10 and later at 14 years old), whereas Study 2 included a US sample (N = 153; examined at ages 9-11 and again 2 years later) and an age-matched prepandemic sample (N = 29, 10-13 years old). Repeated-measures analyses of variance examined changes in cortisol from prepandemic to during the pandemic and the effect of attachment in each sample separately. RESULTS After accounting for age, both studies revealed nonsignificant changes in hair cortisol and a nonsignificant effect of attachment. A significant effect of sex emerged in Study 1, with Dutch girls showing a significant cortisol increase during the pandemic, which was not explained by puberty. CONCLUSION These findings suggest differential associations of the pandemic with hair cortisol increases by sex and country.

Although considerable research has demonstrated the importance of social relationships for well-being, limited work has assessed how people help regulate each other's emotions, a process called social emotion regulation. The present research utilized two experiments in 2020 (N₁ = 50, N₂ = 268) where people shared and responded to personal experiences to examine: (a) the kinds of regulatory support people offered others; (b) how people felt receiving different types of social feedback about their experiences; and (c) whether the support they offered others shaped how they felt receiving different feedback. When providing feedback to a confederate, participants varied in whether they chose to use validation, which affirms someone's feelings, or one of three types of social reappraisals, which help others change how they think about an emotional experience (i.e., temporal distancing: emphasizing how things change over time; positive focus: focusing on the bright side; and perspective taking: considering others' perspectives). Across studies, when participants received feedback about their own experiences, validation was the most comforting and preferred feedback. In Study 2, temporal distancing emerged as the most comforting, helpful, and preferrable type of social reappraisal and was the only reappraisal perceived as no less helpful than validation. Additionally, participants who provided social reappraisal to the confederate benefited most from receiving this type of support from others. Together, these results highlight the variability in how people use social emotion regulation strategies to support others and demonstrate how such differences in implementation, as well as individual differences in those receiving support, can shape social regulatory outcomes. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Early life stress (ELS) is common in the United States and worldwide, and contributes to the development of psychopathology in individuals with these experiences and their offspring. A growing body of research suggests that early life stress may contribute to adverse health partly through modulation of immune (and particularly inflammatory) responses. Therefore, increased maternal prenatal inflammation has been proposed as a mechanistic pathway by which the observed cross-generational effects of parental early life stress on child neuropsychiatric outcomes may be exerted. We examined associations between early life stress and molecular markers of inflammation (specifically pro-inflammatory gene expression and receptor-mediated transcription factor activity) and a commonly studied circulating marker of inflammation (C-Reactive Protein) in a diverse group of women in or near their third trimester of pregnancy, covarying for age, race/ethnicity, BMI, concurrent infection, concurrent perceived stress, and per capita household income. Mothers who experienced higher levels of early life stress had significantly increased pro-inflammatory (NF-κB) and decreased anti-viral (IRF) transcription factor activity. Transcripts that were up or down regulated in mothers with high ELS were preferentially derived from both CD16+ and CD16- monocytes. Early life stress was not associated with elevated CRP. Taken together, these findings provide preliminary evidence for an association between ELS and a pro-inflammatory transcriptional phenotype during pregnancy that may serve as a mechanistic pathway for cross-generational transmission of the effects of early life stress on mental and physical health.