Sage Journals: Discover world-class research

Abstract

In the present study, we examined the relationship between developmental modulation of socioaffective brain systems and adolescents’ preoccupation with social evaluation. Child, adolescent, and adult participants viewed cues indicating that a camera was alternately off, warming up, or projecting their image to a peer during the acquisition of behavioral-, autonomic-, and neural-response (functional MRI) data. Believing that a peer was actively watching them was sufficient to induce self-conscious emotion that rose in magnitude from childhood to adolescence and partially subsided into adulthood. Autonomic arousal was uniquely heightened in adolescents. These behavioral patterns were paralleled by emergent engagement of the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) and striatum-MPFC connectivity during adolescence, which are thought to promote motivated social behavior in adolescence. These findings demonstrate that adolescents’ self-consciousness is related to age-dependent sensitivity of brain systems critical to socioaffective processes. Further, unique interactions between the MPFC and striatum may provide a mechanism by which social-evaluation contexts influence adolescent behavior.

Keywords

adolescence embarrassment evaluation fMRI medial prefrontal cortex self-consciousness social adolescent development social cognition brain

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Alexander

G. E.

DeLong

M. R.

Strick

P. L.

(1986). Parallel organization of functionally segregated circuits linking basal ganglia and cortex. Annual Review of Neuroscience, 9, 357–381.

Amodio

D. M.

Frith

C. D.

(2006). Meeting of minds: The medial prefrontal cortex and social cognition. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 7, 268–277.

Andreassi

J. L.

(2006). Electrodermal activity and behavior psychophysiology: Human behavior and physiological response (5th ed., pp. 259–288). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

Asato

M. R.

Terwilliger

Woo

Luna

(2010). White matter development in adolescence: A DTI study. Cerebral Cortex, 20, 2122–2131.

Blakemore

S. J.

(2008). The social brain in adolescence. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 9, 267–277.

Brown

(2004). Adolescents’ relationship with peers. In Lerner

Steinberg

(Eds.), Handbook of adolescent psychology (2nd ed., pp. 363–394). New York, NY: Wiley.

Cairns

R. B.

Leung

M.-C.

Buchanan

Cairns

B. D.

(1995). Friendships and social networks in childhood and adolescence: Fluidity, reliability, and interrelations. Child Development, 66, 1330–1345.

Casey

B. J.

Tottenham

Liston

Durston

(2005). Imaging the developing brain: What have we learned about cognitive development? Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 9, 104–110.

Cox

R. W.

(1996). AFNI: Software for analysis and visualization of functional magnetic resonance neuroimages. Computers and Biomedical Research, 29, 162–173.

10.

Crone

E. A.

Dahl

R. E.

(2012). Understanding adolescence as a period of social-affective engagement and goal flexibility. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 13, 636–650.

11.

Dawson

M. E.

Schell

A. M.

Filion

D. L.

(2001). The electrodermal system. In Cacioppo

J. T.

Tassinary

L. G.

Berntson

G. G.

(Eds.), Handbook of psychophysiology (pp. 53–84). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

12.

Dumontheil

Apperly

I. A.

Blakemore

S. J.

(2010). Online usage of theory of mind continues to develop in late adolescence. Developmental Science, 13, 331–338.

13.

Elkind

Bowen

(1979). Imaginary audience behavior in children and adolescents. Developmental Psychology, 15, 38–44.

14.

Friston

K. J.

Buechel

Fink

G. R.

Morris

Rolls

Dolan

R. J.

(1997). Psychophysiological and modulatory interactions in neuroimaging. NeuroImage, 6, 218–229.

15.

Gardner

Steinberg

(2005). Peer influence on risk taking, risk preference, and risky decision making in adolescence and adulthood: An experimental study. Developmental Psychology, 41, 625–635.

16.

Jones

R. M.

Somerville

L. H.

Ruberry

E. J.

Libby

Glover

Voss

H. U.

. . . Casey

B. J.

(2011). Behavioral and neural properties of social reinforcement learning. Journal of Neuroscience, 31, 13039–13045.

17.

Keltner

Haidt

(1999). Social functions of emotions at four levels of analysis. Cognition & Emotion, 13, 505–521.

18.

Krienen

F. M.

P. C.

Buckner

R. L.

(2010). Clan mentality: Evidence that the medial prefrontal cortex responds to close others. Journal of Neuroscience, 30, 13906–13915.

19.

Lenhart

Ling

Campbell

S. B.

Purcell

(2010). Teens and mobile phones. Pew Internet & American Life Project. Retrieved from http://pewinternet.org/Reports/2010/Teens-and-Mobile-Phones.aspx

20.

Mills

K. L.

Lalonde

Clasen

Giedd

J. N.

Blakemore

S.-J.

(2012). Developmental changes in the structure of the social brain in late childhood and adolescence. Social, Cognitive, and Affective Neuroscience. Advance online publication. doi:10.1093/scan/nss113

21.

Primus

R. J.

Kellogg

C. K.

(1989). Pubertal-related changes influence the development of environment-related social interaction in the male rat. Developmental Psychobiology, 22, 633–643.

22.

Rankin

J. L.

Lane

D. J.

Gibbons

F. X.

Gerrard

(2004). Adolescent self-consciousness: Longitudinal age changes and gender differences in two cohorts. Journal of Research on Adolescence, 14, 1–21.

23.

Robbins

T. W.

Everitt

B. J.

(1996). Neurobehavioural mechanisms of reward and motivation. Current Opinion in Neurobiology, 6, 228–236.

24.

Roy

Shohamy

Wager

T. D.

(2012). Ventromedial prefrontal-subcortical systems and the generation of affective meaning. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 16, 147–156.

25.

Sebastian

Burnett

Blakemore

S.-J.

(2008). Development of the self-concept during adolescence. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 12, 441–446.

26.

Seidner

L. B.

Stipek

D. J.

Feshbach

N. D.

(1988). A developmental analysis of elementary school children’s concepts of pride and embarrassment. Child Development, 59, 367–377.

27.

Shaw

Kabani

Lerch

J. P.

Eckstrand

Lenroot

Gotay

. . . Wise

S. P.

(2008). Neurodevelopmental trajectories of the human cerebral cortex. Journal of Neuroscience, 28, 3586–3594.

28.

Somerville

L. H.

Casey

B. J.

(2010). Developmental neurobiology of cognitive control and motivational systems. Current Opinion in Neurobiology, 20, 236–241.

29.

Somerville

L. H.

Jones

R. M.

Casey

B. J.

(2010). A time of change: Behavioral and neural correlates of adolescent sensitivity to appetitive and aversive environmental cues. Brain and Cognition, 72, 124–133.

30.

Somerville

L. H.

Kelley

W. M.

Heatherton

T. F.

(2010). Self-esteem modulates medial prefrontal cortical responses to evaluative social feedback. Cerebral Cortex, 20, 3005–3013.

31.

Steinberg

(2004). Risk taking in adolescence: What changes, and why? Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1021, 51–58.

32.

Steinberg

(2008). A social neuroscience perspective on adolescent risk-taking. Developmental Review, 28, 78–106.

33.

Steinberg

Morris

A. S.

(2001). Adolescent development. Annual Review of Psychology, 52, 83–110.

34.

Wang

Iannotti

R. J.

Nansel

T. R.

(2009). School bullying among adolescents in the United States: Physical, verbal, relational, and cyber. Journal of Adolescent Health, 45, 368–375.

35.

Westenberg

P. M.

Drewes

M. J.

Goedhart

A. W.

Siebelink

B. M.

Treffers

P. D. A.

(2004). A developmental analysis of self-reported fears in late childhood through mid-adolescence: Social-evaluative fears on the rise? Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 45, 481–495.

Supplementary Material

Please find the following supplemental material available below.

For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.

For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.

0.25 MB

0.00 MB