But do you think I’m cool?

Abstract

The current fMRI study investigated the neural foundations of evaluating oneself and others during early adolescence and young adulthood. Eighteen early adolescents (ages 11–14, M = 12.6) and 19 young adults (ages 22–31, M = 25.6) evaluated if academic, physical, and social traits described themselves directly (direct self-evaluations), described their best friend directly (direct other-evaluations), described themselves from their best friend’s perspective (reflected self-evaluations), or in general could change over time (control malleability-evaluations). Compared to control evaluations, both adolescents and adults recruited cortical midline structures during direct and reflected self-evaluations, as well as during direct other-evaluations, converging with previous research. However, unique to this study was a significant three-way interaction between age group, evaluative perspective, and domain within bilateral ventral striatum. Region of interest analyses demonstrated a significant evaluative perspective by domain interaction within the adolescent sample only. Adolescents recruited greatest bilateral ventral striatum during reflected social self-evaluations, which was positively correlated with age and pubertal development. These findings suggest that reflected social self-evaluations, made from the inferred perspective of a close peer, may be especially self-relevant, salient, or rewarding to adolescent self-processing – particularly during the progression through adolescence – and this feature persists into adulthood.

The neurobiology of self-knowledge in depressed and self-injurious youth

“…The subgenual ACC is thought to integrate emotional and cognitive signals into decision making processes, integrate conflictive information (Phillips et al, 2003b, c; Phillips et al, 2008), and to support implicit emotion regulation given its interconnections with limbic structures (Bush et al, 2000; Davis et al, 2005). Indeed, rMPFC activation has previously been identified during self-processing in typically-developing adolescents (Dégeilh et al, 2015; Jankowski et al, 2014). Thus, our findings replicate and extend prior research regarding psychologically healthy youth.…”

“…Specifically, processing information regarding the self reliably engages both anterior and posterior cortical midline structures (CMS), including rostral and perigenual anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), posterior cingulate cortex (PCC), precuneus and medial PFC, particularly medial BA10 (Ichikawa et al, 2011; Kircher et al, 2000). Additionally, dorsal ACC recruitment has been noted during social rejection or negative evaluation (Rotge et al, 2015), and when healthy adolescents engage in both direct (self perspective) and indirect (important others’ perspectives) self-referential processing (Jankowski et al, 2014; Pfeifer et al, 2009). Although limited in scope, existing research has shown that self-injuring youth and adults demonstrate hyperactivation of CMS regions (i.e., ACC, PCC) during emotionally distressing tasks (Davis et al, 2014; Plener et al, 2012), perhaps suggesting self-injurers’ atypical processing of self-related information during heightened emotional demand.…”

Forgetting the best when predicting the worst: Preliminary observations on neural circuit function in adolescent social anxiety

“…Beyond the comparison of adults and adolescents, we did not have a sufficiently large number of participants to isolate influences of these and other potentially important variables on the anxiety-brain function relationship. Mounting evidence suggests sex (Guyer, Caouette, Lee, & Ruiz, 2014; Guyer, Choate, Pine, & Nelson, 2012; Guyer et al, 2009; Lee et al, 2014) and pubertal stage (Jankowski, Moore, Merchant, Kahn, & Pfeifer, 2014; Klapwijk et al, 2013) based differences in brain and behavioral responses to social stimuli. We had insufficient power to test for interactions among sex, pubertal development, social anxiety, and age group.…”

The Development of Self and Identity in Adolescence: Neural Evidence and Implications for a Value‐Based Choice Perspective on Motivated Behavior

“…Most of this work has examined self-evaluation, typically by asking youth to judge whether various (often overtly positive or negative) traits and attributes describe them. Like adults, children and early adolescents use cortical and subcortical midline structures, in particular, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) and adjacent rostral/perigenual anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), more when evaluating themselves than when evaluating others (10-12; although this pattern can be attenuated with close others like adolescents' best friends 13,14). Even in clinical populations of children and adolescents, the vmPFC is usually more active during self-evaluations than in most control conditions.…”