Graduate Student Virginia Tech Blacksburg, Virginia
Objective: Adolescence is a critical period for the development of reward reinforcement patterns. Typically, teens recruit significantly greater ventral striatum (VS) activity in response to rewards as compared to adults and demonstrate a higher sensitivity to rewards than adults. This sensitivity to rewards is generally adaptive. However, when combined with adversity, such as peer victimization, this may lead to negative future expectations about social reward. This pattern of non-reward may lead to the development of anhedonia, with adolescence serving as a distinct risk period. Recent work has shown that following social stress, teens demonstrate blunted reward responses—a marked shift from the hypersensitivity generally displayed by teens in rewarding contexts. Thus, teens who experience peer victimization may demonstrate blunted reward patterns which may then serve as a risk factor for the development of anhedonia. Of particular interest here, socially anxious teens may be at a particularly high risk for the development of anhedonia when exposed to peer victimization due to the central fear of social rejection, as well as their tendency to show heightened sensitivity to social situations. However, no work to date has evaluated these relations in socially anxious teens. Accordingly, the present study aimed to characterize reward responses during social stress and evaluate relations of peer victimization and anhedonia with reward responses.
Method: 30 socially anxious teens (Mage = 15.25, SD = 1.51; 53.6% cisgender women) were recruited. They completed a clinical interview, self-report measures, and an MRI scan where they completed the Island Getaway Task. BOLD contrast timeseries were extracted from VS volumes.
Results: Linear regressions were run for peer victimization and anhedonia as they predicted VS signal. Next, hierarchical linear regressions were run with anhedonia in the first step and peer victimization in the second step as they predicted VS activation. A significant association between peer victimization and blunted VS signal (p < 0.01) and between anhedonia and blunted VS signal (p < 0.05) emerged. Results also indicated that peer victimization is significantly related to blunted VS signal above and beyond anhedonia (p < 0.05).
Discussion: Collectively, results suggest that socially anxious teens who have experienced peer victimization tend to show blunted reward activation in key regions when anticipating social feedback. Thus, peer victimization may represent a good target for depression prevention efforts.
