Adolescent development of insula-dependent interoceptive regulation.

Adolescence is hypothesized to be a critical period for the maturation of self-regulatory capacities, including those that depend on interoceptive sensitivity, but the neural basis of interoceptive regulation in adolescence is unknown. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging and psychophysiology to study interoceptive regulation in healthy adolescent females. Participants regulated their gut activities in response to a virtual roller coaster by deep breathing aided by visually monitoring their online electrogastrogram (EGG) activity through a virtual thermometer (i.e. gut biofeedback), or without biofeedback. Analyses focused on the insula, given its putative role in interoception. The bilateral posterior insula showed increased activation in the no-biofeedback compared to biofeedback condition, suggesting that the participants relied more on interoceptive input when exteroceptive feedback was unavailable. The bilateral dorsal anterior insula showed activation linearly associated with age during both induction and regulation, and its activation during regulation correlated positively with change of EGG in the tachygastria frequency band from induction to regulation. Induction-related activation in the bilateral ventral anterior insula was nonlinearly associated with age and peaked at mid-adolescence. These results implicate different developmental trajectories of distinct sub-regions of the insula in interoceptive processes, with implications for competing neurobiological theories of female adolescent development.

Developmental trajectories of cortical-subcortical interactions underlying the evaluation of trust in adolescence.

Social decision making is guided by the ability to intuitively judge personal attributes, including analysis of facial features to infer the trustworthiness of others. Although the neural basis for trustworthiness evaluation is well characterized in adults, less is known about its development during adolescence. We used event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging to examine age-related changes in neural activation and functional connectivity during the evaluation of trust in faces in a sample of adolescent females. During scanning, participants viewed masked presentations of faces and rated their trustworthiness. Parametric modeling of trust ratings revealed enhanced activation in amygdala and insula to untrustworthy faces, effects which peaked during mid-adolescence. Analysis of amygdala functional connectivity demonstrated enhanced amygdala-insula coupling during the evaluation of untrustworthy faces. This boost in connectivity was attenuated during mid-adolescence, suggesting a functional transition within face-processing circuits. Together, these findings underscore adolescence as a period of reorganization in neural circuits underlying socioemotional behavior.