7.1

Question 1

…might be responsible for adolescent typical behaviors of heightened “emotionality” and “sociality”

Answer 1

Changes in functioning of limbic and prefrontal networks, especially during social-affective processing

Question 2

Adolescence: Transitional period that involves

Answer 2

physiological and psychological changes, orchestred by experience-dependent and biologically programmed regulation of gene expression: hormonal changes initiate a cascade of morphological and neural maturations, which impact on cognition and information processing.

Question 3

Changes in functioning of limbic and prefrontal networks, especially during social-affective processing, might be responsible for adolescent typical behaviors of heightened “emotionality” and “sociality”. These in turn may explain

Answer 3

age-associated changes in social fears and worries. Data suggests a peak in neural response to monetary rewards, emotional faces and peer feedback in adolescents, in subcortical regions involved in basic processing of threat and reward.

Question 4

Neurological differences Adolescence, Adults in Anxiety response

Answer 4

-neural response to monetary rewards, emotional faces and peer feedback in adolescents, in subcortical regions involved in basic processing of threat and reward.

Also differences in medial and lateral functional subdivisions of the prefrontal cortex in response to emotionally provocative stimuli between adolescents and adults have been found. In older age groups an increased ability to recruit these regions to effectively down-regulate subcortical arousal with age, has been found.

Regulatory functional connectivity between PFC and subcortical regions continues to mature throughout adolescents.

Question 5

…may be responsible for increased emotional responses in adolescents.

Answer 5

Protracted maturation of prefrontal engagement together with a heightened reactivity of limbic regions to threatening and rewarding stimuli

Question 6

What neurodevelopmental changes might increase “sociality” (increased motivational salience of peers and understanding of complex social situations) across age ?

Answer 6

• A decrease in anterior/dorsal medial PFC activity and increase in posterior-temporal areas (temporo-parietal junction and superior temporal sulcus) in response to tasks requiring mental state attribution when comparing adolescent and adult groups has been found.
• There is continuous development in understanding of others behavior, in terms of motivations, thoughts and feelings (“mentalizing”) during adolescence.
• A continuous shift in functional contributions from frontal to temporal areas across adolescence whilst engaged in thinking about mental states, has been found.
• This suggests an increased automaticity of engaging in “mentalizing”. Changes in brain networks engaged in by social-affective stimuli across adolescents may result in greater affective responding and greater engagement with, and understanding of, complex interpersonal situations. This allows for more flexible responses enabling to adapt rapidly to changing social contextual demands. But on the other hand change the perception of an importance placed on the social world and increase social fears and worries. Also the fact that some social environments, e.g. school are also changing during that time, which increase academic and peer pressure.

Question 7

Attention biases
Interpretation bias
Expectation bias

And relation to brain activity

Answer 7

(systematic differences in orienting to threat cues) play a role in social anxiety.

of ambiguous social information have also been found in socially anxious youth.

of outcomes of social- evaluative situations also play a role.

biases in attention and the tendency to perceive ambiguous social cues such as neutral facial expressions as negative have been linked to impaired regulatory recruitment of fronto-amygdalae circuits and increased emotion-related neural responses of limbic areas in SAD individuals.

Question 8

It is suggested that age-typical changes in emotionality and sociality in adolescence may magnify differences across individuals, making existing tendencies more extreme. This can occur through two routes.

Answer 8

1) Developmental changes in the sensitivity of the “emotional brain” may further amplify attention and expectancy biases for potential threat cues.

Bi-directional interactions between pre-existing cognitive biases and the plasticity of the adolescent brain may serve to amplify negative effects over time.

Pre-existing cognitive biases will affect functional restructuring by biasing incoming info to further sensitize socio-affective networks. So, individuals with a pre-existing tendency to attend to negative aspects of social cues or situations—or to expect negative out- comes from these—may experience these to a greater degree and, to alleviate distress, may engage in maladaptive behavioral strategies such as avoidance.

This will set up a vicious cycle, which, over time, reinforces these pre-existing maladaptive biases.

2)Developmental changes in the “social brain” may act as a vehicle for the expression of biases at the level of interpretation.

Emergence of increases mentalizing abilities (being abl to generate more mental explanations for others’ behavior) in adolescence may result in an increase in perceived complexity and ambiguity of daily social situations.

As these maturational brain developments are paralleled by increases in time spent with peers, this change in perception of social interactions may “bring out” in some individuals the tendency to interpret socially ambiguous cues in a more negative manner.

Question 9

Conclusion: Normative neurodevelopmental progressions could

Answer 9

magnify pre-existing cognitive biases in attention, interpretation and expectations that are characteristic of persistent and impairing social fears and worries. Adolescence as a time of increase plasticity may also be an optimal time for administering neurocognitive interventions.