Neural sensitivity to social reward predicts links between social behavior and loneliness in youth during the COVID-19 pandemic

Neural reward network sensitivity in youth is proposed to differentially impact the effects of social environments on social outcomes. The COVID-19 pandemic provided an opportunity to test this hypothesis within a context of diminished in-person social interaction. We examined whether neural sensitivity to interactive social reward moderates the relationship between a frequency of interactive or passive social activity and social satisfaction. Survey reports of frequency of interactions with friends, passive social media use, and loneliness and social satisfaction were gathered in 2020 during mandated precautions limiting in-person contact. A subset of participants (age = 10-17) previously participated in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study examining social-interactive reward during a simulated peer interaction (survey n = 76; survey + fMRI n = 40). We found evidence of differential response to social context, such that youth with higher neural reward sensitivity showed a negative association between a frequency of interactive connections with friends and a combined loneliness and social dissatisfaction component (LSDC) score, whereas those with lower sensitivity showed the opposite effect. Further, high reward sensitivity was associated with greater LSDC as passive social media use increased, whereas low reward sensitivity showed the opposite. This indicates that youth with greater sensitivity to social-interactive reward may be more susceptible to negative effects of infrequent contact than their low reward-sensitive counterparts, who instead maintain social well-being through passive viewing of social content. These differential outcomes could have implications for supporting youth during times of major social disruption as well as ensuring mental health and well-being more broadly.