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Beginning college involves changes that can increase one's vulnerability to loneliness and associated negative outcomes. Parent and friend relationships are potential protective factors against loneliness given their positive association with adjustment. The present longitudinal study, with data collection at baseline, 1 month, and 2 months later, assessed the comparative effects of self-reported parent and friend relationship quality on loneliness in first-year college students (N = 101; 80 female, Mage = 18.36). At baseline, parent and friend relationship quality were negatively associated with loneliness. Longitudinal data revealed that friend relationship quality interacted with time, such that its effects on loneliness attenuated over the course of 2 months. By contrast, parent relationship quality continued to predict lower loneliness 2 months post-baseline. These results highlight the importance of close relationships and suggest that targeting relationship quality could be effective in helping youth transition to college.

The ability to regulate emotions is key to goal attainment and well-being. Although much has been discovered about neurodevelopment and the acquisition of emotion regulation, very little of this work has leveraged information encoded in whole-brain networks. Here we employed a network neuroscience framework to parse the neural underpinnings of emotion regulation skill acquisition, while accounting for age, in a sample of children and adolescents (N = 70, 34 female, aged 8-17 years). Focusing on three key network metrics-network differentiation, modularity, and community number differences between active regulation and a passive emotional baseline-we found that the control network, the default mode network, and limbic network were each related to emotion regulation ability while controlling for age. Greater network differentiation in the control and limbic networks was related to better emotion regulation ability. With regards to network community structure (modularity and community number), more communities and more crosstalk between modules (i.e., less modularity) in the control network were associated with better regulatory ability. By contrast, less crosstalk (i.e., greater modularity) between modules in the default mode network was associated with better regulatory ability. Together, these findings highlight whole-brain connectome features that support the acquisition of emotion regulation in youth.

Understanding adolescent decision-making is significant for informing basic models of neurodevelopment as well as for the domains of public health and criminal justice. System-based theories posit that adolescent decision-making is guided by activity amongst reward and control processes. While successful at explaining behavior, system-based theories have received inconsistent support at the neural level, perhaps because of methodological limitations. Here, we used two complementary approaches to overcome said limitations and rigorously evaluate system-based models. Using decision-level modeling of fMRI data from a risk-taking task in a sample of 2000+ decisions across 51 human adolescents (25 females, mean age = 15.00 years), we find support for system-based theories of decision-making. Neural activity in lateral prefrontal cortex and a multivariate pattern of cognitive control both predicted a reduced likelihood of risk-taking, whereas increased activity in the nucleus accumbens predicted a greater likelihood of risk-taking. Interactions between decision-level brain activity and age were not observed. These results garner support for system-based accounts of adolescent decision-making behavior.SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT:Adolescent decision-making behavior is of great import for basic science, and carries equally consequential implications for public health and criminal justice. While dominant psychological theories seeking to explain adolescent decision-making have found empirical support, their neuroscientific implementations have received inconsistent support. This may be partly due to statistical approaches employed by prior neuroimaging studies of system-based theories. We used brain modeling-an approach that predicts behavior from brain activity-of univariate and multivariate neural activity metrics to better understand how neural components of psychological systems guide decision behavior in adolescents. We found broad support for system-based theories such that neural systems involved in cognitive control predicted a reduced likelihood to make risky decisions, whereas value-based systems predicted greater risk-taking propensity.

Humans make decisions across a variety of social contexts. Though social decision-making research has blossomed in recent decades, surprisingly little is known about whether social decision-making preferences are consistent across different domains. We conducted an exploratory study in which participants made choices about 2 types of close others: parents and friends. To elicit decision making preferences, we pit the interests in parents and friends against one another. To assess the consistency of preferences for close others, decision making was assessed in three domains-risk taking, probabilistic learning, and self-other similarity judgments. We reasoned that if social decision-making preferences are consistent across domains, participants ought to exhibit the same preference in all three domains (i.e., a parent preference, based on prior work), and individual differences in preference magnitude ought to be conserved across domains within individuals. A combination of computational modeling, random coefficient regression, and traditional statistical tests revealed a robust parent-over-friend preference in the risk taking and probabilistic learning domains but not the self-other similarity domain. Preferences for parent-over-friend in the risk-taking domain were strongly associated with similar preferences in the probabilistic learning domain but not the self-other similarity domain. These results suggest that distinct and dissociable value-based and social-cognitive computations underlie social decision making. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Data analysis workflows in many scientific domains have become increasingly complex and flexible. Here we assess the effect of this flexibility on the results of functional magnetic resonance imaging by asking 70 independent teams to analyse the same dataset, testing the same 9 ex-ante hypotheses1. The flexibility of analytical approaches is exemplified by the fact that no two teams chose identical workflows to analyse the data. This flexibility resulted in sizeable variation in the results of hypothesis tests, even for teams whose statistical maps were highly correlated at intermediate stages of the analysis pipeline. Variation in reported results was related to several aspects of analysis methodology. Notably, a meta-analytical approach that aggregated information across teams yielded a significant consensus in activated regions. Furthermore, prediction markets of researchers in the field revealed an overestimation of the likelihood of significant findings, even by researchers with direct knowledge of the dataset2-5. Our findings show that analytical flexibility can have substantial effects on scientific conclusions, and identify factors that may be related to variability in the analysis of functional magnetic resonance imaging. The results emphasize the importance of validating and sharing complex analysis workflows, and demonstrate the need for performing and reporting multiple analyses of the same data. Potential approaches that could be used to mitigate issues related to analytical variability are discussed.

Variability is a fundamental feature of human brain activity that is particularly pronounced during development. However, developmental neuroimaging research has only recently begun to move beyond characterizing brain function exclusively in terms of magnitude of neural activation to incorporate estimates of variability. No prior neuroimaging study has done so in the domain of emotion regulation. We investigated how age and affective experiences relate to spatial and temporal variability in neural activity during emotion regulation. In the current study, 70 typically developing youth aged 8 to 17 years completed a cognitive reappraisal task of emotion regulation while undergoing functional MRI. Estimates of spatial and temporal variability during regulation were calculated across a network of brain regions, defined a priori, and were then related to age and affective experiences. Results showed that increasing age was associated with reduced spatial and temporal variability in a set of frontoparietal regions (e.g., dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, superior parietal lobule) known to be involved in effortful emotion regulation. In addition, youth who reported less negative affect during regulation had less spatial variability in the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, which has previously been linked to cognitive reappraisal. We interpret age-related reductions in spatial and temporal variability as implying neural specialization. These results suggest that the development of emotion regulation is undergirded by a process of neural specialization and open a host of possibilities for incorporating neural variability into the study of emotion regulation development. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

It is widely accepted that the ability to effectively regulate one's emotions is a cornerstone of physical and mental health. As such, it should come as no surprise that the number of neuroimaging studies focused on emotion regulation and associated processes has increased exponentially in the past decade. To date, neuroimaging research on this topic has examined two distinct but complementary features of emotion regulation - the capacity to effectively utilize a strategy to regulate emotion and to a lesser extent, the tendency to choose to regulate. However, theoretical accounts of emotion regulation have only recently begun to distinguish capacity from tendency. In the present review, we provide a novel framework for conceptualizing these two intertwined, yet distinct, facets of emotion regulation. First we characterize brain regions that support emotion generation and are thus targeted by emotion regulation. Next, we synthesize findings from the dozens of neuroimaging studies that have examined emotion regulation capacity, focusing in particular on the most commonly studied emotion regulation strategy - reappraisal. Finally, we discuss emerging neuroimaging research examining state and trait regulatory tendencies. We conclude by integrating findings from neuroimaging research on emotion regulation capacity and tendency and suggest ways that this integrated model can inform basic and translational neuroscientific research on emotion regulation.

Young adulthood is a developmental phase when individuals must navigate a changing social milieu that involves considering how their decisions affect close others such as parents and peers. To date, no empirical work has directly evaluated how young adults weigh these relationships against one another. We conducted a preregistered experiment in which we pitted outcomes for parents against outcomes for friends. Participants ( N = 174, ages 18-30 years) played two runs of the Columbia Card Task-one in which gains benefited a parent and losses were incurred by a friend and another in which the opposite was true. We also tested whether age, relationship quality, and reward type earned for parents and friends (simulated vs. real) acted as moderating influences on parent-friend prioritization. Results showed that individuals were more likely to make decisions that benefited a parent at the expense of a friend. Relationship quality and reward type moderated this effect, whereas age did not.

Early caregiving adversity (ECA) is associated with elevated psychological symptomatology. While neurobehavioral ECA research has focused on socioemotional and cognitive development, ECA may also increase risk for "low-level" sensory processing challenges. However, no prior work has compared how diverse ECA exposures differentially relate to sensory processing, or, critically, how this might influence psychological outcomes. We examined sensory processing challenges in 183 8-17-year-old youth with and without histories of institutional (orphanage) or foster caregiving, with a particular focus on sensory over-responsivity (SOR), a pattern of intensified responses to sensory stimuli that may negatively impact mental health. We further tested whether sensory processing challenges are linked to elevated internalizing and externalizing symptoms common in ECA-exposed youth. Relative to nonadopted comparison youth, both groups of ECA-exposed youth had elevated sensory processing challenges, including SOR, and also had heightened internalizing and externalizing symptoms. Additionally, we found significant indirect effects of ECA on internalizing and externalizing symptoms through both general sensory processing challenges and SOR, covarying for age and sex assigned at birth. These findings suggest multiple forms of ECA confer risk for sensory processing challenges that may contribute to mental health outcomes, and motivate continuing examination of these symptoms, with possible long-term implications for screening and treatment following ECA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Early adversity, including institutional orphanage care, is associated with the development of internalizing disorders. Previous research suggests that institutionalization can disrupt emotion regulation processes, which contribute to internalizing symptoms. However, no prior work has investigated how early orphanage care shapes emotion regulation strategy usage (e.g., cognitive reappraisal, expressive suppression) and whether the said strategy usage contributes to internalizing symptoms. This study probed emotion regulation strategy usage and internalizing symptoms in a sample of 36 previously institutionalized and 58 comparison youth. As hypothesized, previously institutionalized youth exhibited higher rates of internalizing symptoms than comparison youth, and more frequent use of suppression partially accounted for the relationship between early institutional care and elevated internalizing symptoms. Contrary to our initial hypotheses, reappraisal use did not buffer previously institutionalized or comparison youth against internalizing symptoms. Our findings highlight the potential utility of targeting emotion regulation strategy usage in adversity‐exposed youth in future intervention work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Maternal presence has marked effects on adolescent neurocognition during risk taking, influencing teenagers to make safer decisions. However, it is currently unknown whether maternal buffering changes over the course of adolescence itself, and whether its effects are robust to individual differences in family relationship quality. In the current longitudinal study, 23 adolescents completed a risk‐taking task under maternal presence during an fMRI scan before and after the transition to high school. Behavioral results reveal that adolescent risk taking increased under maternal presence across a one‐year period. At the neural level, we found that adolescents reporting higher family conflict showed longitudinal increases in functional coupling between the anterior insula (AI) and ventral striatum (VS) when making safe decisions in the presence of their mother, which was associated with increased real‐world risk taking. These findings show that individual differences in family relationship quality undermine effective development of AI‐VS connectivity resulting in increased risk taking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Numerous studies have established that the social context greatly affects adolescent risk taking. However, it remains unexplored whether adolescents' decision‐making behaviors change when they take risks that affect other individuals such as a parent. In the current study, we sought to investigate how the social context influences risky decisions when adolescents' behavior affects their family using a formalized risk‐taking model. Sixty‐three early adolescents (Mage = 13.3 years; 51% female) played a risk‐taking task twice, once during which they could make risky choices that only affected themselves and another during which their risky choices only affected their parent. Results showed that adolescents reporting high family conflict made more risky decisions when taking risks for their parent compared to themselves, whereas adolescents reporting low family conflict made fewer risky decisions when taking risks for their parent compared to themselves. These findings are the first to show that adolescents change their decision‐making behaviors when their risks affect their family and have important implications for current theories of adolescent risk taking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Adolescent decision-making is highly sensitive to input from the social environment. In particular, adult and maternal presence influence adolescents to make safer decisions when encountered with risky scenarios. However, it is currently unknown whether maternal presence confers a greater advantage than mere adult presence in buffering adolescent risk taking. In the current study, 23 adolescents completed a risk-taking task during an fMRI scan in the presence of their mother and an unknown adult. Results reveal that maternal presence elicits greater activation in reward-related neural circuits when making safe decisions but decreased activation following risky choices. Moreover, adolescents evidenced a more immature neural phenotype when making risky choices in the presence of an adult compared to mother, as evidenced by positive functional coupling between the ventral striatum and medial prefrontal cortex. Our results underscore the importance of maternal stimuli in bolstering adolescent decision-making in risky scenarios. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]