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Background Parent-adolescent interactions, particularly parental criticism and praise, have previously been identified as factors relevant to self-concept development and, when negative, to adolescent depression. Yet, whether adolescents with depression show aberrant emotional and neural reactivity to parental criticism and praise is understudied. Methods Adolescents with depression (n = 20) and healthy controls (n = 59) received feedback supposedly provided by their mother or father in the form of negative ('untrustworthy'), neutral ('chaotic'), and positive ('respectful') personality evaluations while in an MRI-scanner. After each feedback word, adolescents reported their mood. Beforehand, adolescents had rated whether these personality evaluations matched their self-views. Results In both groups, mood decreased after criticism and increased after praise. Adolescents with depression reported blunted mood responses after praise, whereas there were no mood differences after criticism. Neuroimaging analyses revealed that adolescents with depression (v. healthy controls) exhibited increased activity in response to criticism in the subgenual anterior cingulate cortex, temporal pole, hippocampus, and parahippocampal gyrus. Praise consistent with adolescents' self-views improved mood independent of depression status, while criticism matching self-views resulted in smaller mood increases in adolescents with depression (v. healthy controls). Exploratory analyses indicated that adolescents with depression recalled criticism (v. praise) more. Conclusions Adolescents with depression might be especially attentive to parental criticism, as indexed by increased sgACC and hippocampus activity, and memorize this criticism more. Together with lower positive impact of praise, these findings suggest that cognitive biases in adolescent depression may affect how parental feedback is processed, and may be fed into their self-views.

Eye contact improves mood, facilitates connectedness, and is assumed to strengthen the parent–child bond. Adolescent depression is linked to difficulties in social interactions, the parent–child bond included. Our goal was to elucidate adolescents’ affective and neural responses to prolonged eye contact with one’s parent in nondepressed adolescents (HC) and how these responses are affected in depressed adolescents. While in the scanner, 59 nondepressed and 19 depressed adolescents were asked to make eye contact with their parent, an unfamiliar peer, an unfamiliar adult, and themselves by using videos of prolonged direct and averted gaze, as an approximation of eye contact. After each trial, adolescents reported on their mood and feelings of connectedness, and eye movements and BOLD-responses were assessed. In HCs, eye contact boosted mood and feelings of connectedness and increased activity in inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), temporal pole, and superior frontal gyrus. Unlike HCs, eye contact did not boost the mood of depressed adolescents. While HCs reported increased mood and feelings of connectedness to the sight of their parent versus others, depressed adolescents did not. Depressed adolescents exhibited blunted overall IFG activity. These findings show that adolescents are particularly sensitive to eye contact and respond strongly to the sight of their parents. This sensitivity seems to be blunted in depressed adolescents. For clinical purposes, it is important to gain a better understanding of how the responsivity to eye contact in general and with their parents in particular, can be restored in adolescents with depression.

Objective: There is a bidirectional link between social anxiety symptoms and enhanced self- esteem responsivity to social evaluation. Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) based interventions have been found to effectively increase self-esteem and alleviate anxiety symptoms, however, the psychological mechanisms behind their efficacy remain unknown. This study examined whether a brief CBT-based exercise facilitates a boosting and a protective effect on momentary self-esteem in response to social feedback across individuals on a subclinical social anxiety spectrum. Method: 43 participants (Mage=23.37, SDage=2.73) were divided into a treatment (N=22) and a control (N=21) group. Participants completed two runs of the social evaluation task, one before either completing a treatment (CBT-based) or a control (journey visualization) exercise and one after the exercise. Results: An inverse relationship between average self-esteem and social anxiety was only found in the treatment group. Increased self-esteem fluctuations were related to higher social anxiety only after the control intervention. A repeated mixed linear model revealed that self-esteem increased after approval and decreased after disapproval. The CBT-based exercise did not boost self-esteem, however, there is an indication that it facilitated a more stable self-esteem in response to social feedback. The effect did not differ across a subclinical social anxiety spectrum. Conclusions: This pilot study did not find compelling evidence suggesting that the retrieval of positive self-knowledge lies behind the efficacy of self-esteem treatments. However, it lays foundations and proposes modifications for future research investigating working mechanisms of self-esteem treatments.

This study investigated associations between exposure to emotional neglect during childhood and self-esteem fluctuations in response to social feedback in young adulthood. While childhood emotional neglect is linked to the development of low self-esteem, it is unclear how it affects self-esteem stability in response to social feedback. To examine this, 76 participants (Mage = 22; 60 women) reported on childhood emotional neglect experiences, self-esteem, and completed an experimental social evaluation task both in a baseline self-esteem state and after either boosting or diminishing self-esteem through an independent manipulation of relational value. Young adults reporting more neglect had both lower trait and state self-esteem. Childhood emotional neglect did not affect self-esteem fluctuations in response to social feedback. Neither in a baseline nor an experimentally boosted or diminished self-esteem state. Interestingly, state self-esteem in participants reporting higher levels of neglect decreased less after the independent self-esteem diminishing manipulation compared to those reporting lower neglect. While more research is needed, these results suggest that childhood emotional neglect may not moderate self-esteem instability in response to social feedback but may impact self-esteem instability in other situations more akin to neglect.

Testosterone has been associated with economically egoistic and materialistic behaviors, but -defensibly driven by reputable status seeking- also with economically fair, generous and cooperative behaviors. Problematically, social status and economic resources are inextricably intertwined in humans, thus testosterone's primal motives are concealed. We critically addressed this issue by performing a placebo-controlled single-dose testosterone administration in young women, who played a game of bluff poker wherein concerns for status and resources collide. The profit-maximizing strategy in this game is to mislead the other players by bluffing randomly (independent of strength of the hand), thus also when holding very poor cards (cold bluffing). The profit-maximizing strategy also dictates the players in this poker game to never call the other players' bluffs. For reputable-status seeking these materialistic strategies are disadvantageous; firstly, being caught cold bluffing damages one's reputation by revealing deceptive intent, and secondly, not calling the other players' bluffs signals submission in blindly tolerating deception. Here we show that testosterone administration in this game of bluff poker significantly reduces random bluffing, as well as cold bluffing, while significantly increasing calling. Our data suggest that testosterone in humans primarily motivates for reputable-status seeking, even when this elicits behaviors that are economically disadvantageous.