Social goals in girls transitioning to adolescence: associations with psychopathology and brain network connectivity

Abstract

The motivation to socially connect with peers increases during adolescence in parallel with changes in neurodevelopment. These changes in social motivation create opportunities for experiences that can impact risk for psychopathology, but the specific motivational presentations that confer greater psychopathology risk are not fully understood. To address this issue, we used a latent profile analysis to identify the multidimensional presentations of self-reported social goals in a sample of 220 girls (9-15 years old, M = 11.81, SD = 1.81) that was enriched for internalizing symptoms, and tested the association between social goal profiles and psychopathology. Associations between social goals and brain network also were examined in a subsample of 138 youth. Pre-registered analyses revealed four unique profiles of social goal presentations in these girls. Greater psychopathology was associated with heightened social goals such that higher clinical symptoms were related to a greater desire to attain social competence, avoid negative feedback, and gain positive feedback from peers. The profiles endorsing these excessive social goals were characterized by denser connections among social-affective and cognitive control brain regions. These findings thus provide preliminary support for adolescent-onset changes in motivating factors supporting social engagement that may contribute to risk for psychopathology in vulnerable girls.

Stability of brain-behavior correlation patterns across measures of social support

“…It is worth noting that our particular multilayer implementation, and by extension our layer-based analysis, can be applied to any set of interrelated measures. Our application of multilayer modeling to perceived social support is motivated by work in neuroecology (Gonzalez et al, 2015; Coan et al, 2017; Pelletier-Baldelli et al, 2022; DeCross et al, 2022; Morawetz et al, 2020), but the implementation’s agnosticism toward the measures used speaks to its generality: it is a powerful tool for a wide variety of research questions. This approach can be used to investigate how brain connectivity varies across experiences in the physical or economic environment or across different behavioral or cognitive measures.…”

“…Because the HCP dataset includes only adults, we were limited in the developmental conclusions we can draw. Bigger effect sizes would be expected in adolescent populations in particular, since adolescent represents a critical period of rapid and high-stakes adaptation to the (especially social) environment (Rudolph et al, 2021; Gonzalez et al, 2015; Pelletier-Baldelli et al, 2022; DeCross et al, 2022). Applying methods similar to ours to a dataset like that of Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development study may be particularly illuminating.…”

“…Indeed, neuroecological approaches have long investigated the link between social relationships and brain connectivity Gonzalez et al (2015); Coan et al (2017); DeCross et al (2022); Morawetz et al (2021); McLaughlin et al (2014); Sheridan and McLaughlin (2014); Gee et al (2013); Callaghan and Tottenham (2016). While neuroecologists, who study how brain organization and dynamics vary across individuals given the experiences during development, often have extensive data about individuals’ environments, brain analyses from a neuroecological perspective often focus on the connectivity between a few seed regions of interest (Gonzalez et al, 2015; Gee et al, 2013; Callaghan and Tottenham, 2016, but see Pelletier-Baldelli et al, 2022; DeCross et al, 2022 for network approaches). Network neuroscience, on the other hand, provides tools for understanding environmentally-influenced differential connectivity in the context of the entire brain.…”

Brain network connectivity during peer evaluation in adolescent females: Associations with age, pubertal hormones, timing, and status

“…Of the 99 participants included in primary analyses, approximately 58% self-reported that they had experienced menarche. A portion of this sample has been analyzed in one prior study using the same fMRI task ( Pelletier-Baldelli et al, 2023 ); this prior study focused on identifying social goals and associated brain connectivity, with no attention to puberty and age links with brain function. Participants' assent and caregiver consent was obtained according to the Declaration of Helsinki, and all consent and study procedures were pre-approved by the University’s Institutional Review Board.…”

“…Brain function was examined using a social evaluation fMRI task ( Miller et al, 2019 , Pelletier-Baldelli et al, 2023 , Somerville et al, 2013 ). Participants were told that the task examined how their brains responded to an initial interaction with a similar aged, same-sex peer.…”