Associations between emotional reactivity to stress and adolescent substance use: Differences by sex and valence.

Although stress is often related to substance use, it remains unclear whether substance use is related to individual differences in how adolescents respond to stress. Therefore the present study examined associations between substance use and daily emotional reactivity to stress within a year across adolescence. Adolescents (N = 330; Mage = 16.40, SD = 0.74 at study entry; n = 186 female; n = 138 Latine; n = 101 European American; n = 72 Asian American; n = 19 identifying as another ethnicity including African American and Middle Eastern) completed a longitudinal study, including three assessments between the 10th grade and 3-years post-high school. At each assessment, participants reported frequency of alcohol and cannabis use and the number of substances they had ever used. They also completed 15 daily checklists, in which they reported the number of daily arguments and their daily emotion. Multilevel models suggested that more frequent alcohol and cannabis use were related to attenuated positive emotional reactivity to daily stress (i.e., smaller declines in positive emotion on days when they experienced more arguments) for both male and female adolescents. Associations for negative emotional reactivity to stress varied by sex; more frequent alcohol use and use of more substances in one's lifetime were related to greater anxious emotional reactivity to stress among female adolescents, whereas more frequent alcohol and cannabis use and higher lifetime substance use were related to attenuated depressive emotional reactivity to stress among male adolescents. Taken together, substance use was related to emotional reactivity to daily stress within the same year during adolescence, although associations differed by valence and adolescent sex.

A dyadic longitudinal analysis of parent-adolescent inflammation trends and the role of shared socioeconomic characteristics on family inflammation.

The objective of the present study was to evaluate the interdependency of parent-adolescent inflammation trends across time and to examine whether shared family socioeconomic characteristics explained between-family differences in parents' and adolescents' risk for inflammation. A total of N = 348 families, consisting of one parent and one adolescent child, were followed every two years in a three-wave longitudinal study. Sociodemographic questionnaires were used to determine parental educational attainment and family income-to-needs ratio (INR). At each time point, parents and adolescents collected dried blood spot (DBS) samples that were assayed for circulating CRP and log-transformed prior to analysis by longitudinal dyadic models. Models revealed significant differences in parents' and adolescents' inflammation trends over time (bint = - 0.13, p < 0.001). While parental CRP levels remained relatively stable across the study period, adolescent CRP increased by approximately 38% between study waves. Parents' average CRP levels were positively correlated with adolescents' average CRP (r = 0.32, p < 0.001), but parental change in CRP over time was not significantly related to change in adolescents' CRP over time. Family dyads with higher parental educational attainment had lower average CRP (b = -0.08, p = 0.01), but parental education did not predict change in dyads' inflammation over time. Study findings suggest that shared family socioeconomic characteristics contribute to baseline similarities in parents' and adolescents' inflammation and potentially point to adolescence as a period of inflammatory change where youth may diverge from parental inflammation trends.

Everyday discrimination, emotion, and daily interactions during adolescence.

The present study examined whether everyday discrimination relates to the frequency of adolescents' positive and negative daily social interactions and whether these associations are driven by anger and positive emotion. Adolescents (N = 334) participated in a three-wave longitudinal study, in which they completed surveys regarding everyday discrimination, anger, and positive emotion, as well as 15 daily reports of conflict and getting along with friends and family. Higher everyday discrimination was related to more daily conflicts and fewer experiences of getting along with other people. Longitudinal models also provided preliminary evidence that everyday discrimination was associated with daily conflicts 4 years later indirectly through anger. Overall, results suggest everyday discrimination relates to adolescents' daily experiences, potentially through differences in emotion.

Associations between emotion reactivity to daily interpersonal stress and acute social-evaluative stress during late adolescence.

Emotion reactivity refers to the intensity of changes in positive and negative emotion following a stimulus, typically studied with respect to daily stressors (e.g., arguments, demands) or laboratory stressors, including the Trier Social Stress Test (TSST). Yet, it is unclear whether emotion reactivity to daily and to laboratory stressors are related. The present study examined whether greater emotion reactivity to daily stressors (i.e., arguments, demands) is associated with greater reactivity to the TSST. Late adolescents (N = 82; Mage = 18.35, SD = 0.51, range 17-19; 56.1% female; 65.9% Latine, 34.2% European American) reported whether they experienced arguments and demands with friends, family, and individuals at school and their negative and positive emotion nightly for 15 days. They also completed the TSST, a validated paradigm for eliciting social-evaluative threat, and reported their emotion at baseline and immediately post-TSST. Multilevel models examined whether daily and laboratory emotion reactivity were related by testing whether the daily associations between arguments and demands with emotion differed by emotion reactivity to the TSST. Individuals with greater positive emotion reactivity (i.e., greater reductions in positive emotion) and greater negative emotion reactivity to the TSST showed greater positive emotion reactivity to daily demands. Emotion reactivity to the TSST was not significantly related to emotion reactivity to arguments. Findings provide preliminary evidence that emotion reactivity to the TSST relates to some aspects of daily emotion reactivity, with relations differing depending on type of daily stressor and valence of emotion. Results contextualise the implications of emotion reactivity to the TSST for daily stress processes.

Neural Mechanisms Underlying Trust to Friends, Community Members, and Unknown Peers in Adolescence.

Trust plays an important role during adolescence for developing social relations. Although prior developmental studies give us insight into adolescents' development of differentiation between close (e.g., friends) and unknown (e.g., unknown peers) targets in trust choices, less is known about the development of trust to societal targets (e.g., members of a community organization) and its underlying neural mechanisms. Using a modified version of the Trust Game, our preregistered fMRI study examined the underlying neural mechanisms of trust to close (friend), societal (community member), and unknown others (unknown peer) during adolescence in 106 participants (aged 12-23 years). Adolescents showed most trust to friends, less trust to community members, and the least trust to unknown peers. Neural results show that target differentiation in adolescents' trust behavior is associated with activity in social brain regions implicated during mentalizing, reward processing, and cognitive control. Recruitment of the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) and OFC was higher for closer targets (i.e., friend and community member). For the mPFC, this effect was most pronounced during no trust choices. Trust to friends was additionally associated with increased activity in the precuneus and bilateral temporal parietal junction. In contrast, bilateral dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and anterior cingulate cortex were most active for trust to unknown peers. The mPFC showed increased activity with age and consistent relations with individual differences in feeling needed/useful.

Corticostriatal Connectivity during Prosocial Decision-making Relates to Giving Behavior during Adolescence.

Prosocial behavior during adolescence becomes more differentiated based on the recipient of the action as well as the perceived value or benefit, relative to the cost to self, for the recipients. The current study investigated how functional connectivity of corticostriatal networks tracked the value of prosocial decisions as a function of target recipient (caregiver, friend, stranger) and age of the giver, and how they related to giving behavior. Two hundred sixty-one adolescents (9-15 and 19-20 years of age) completed a decision-making task in which they could give money to caregivers, friends, and strangers while undergoing fMRI. Results indicated that adolescents were more likely to give to others as the value of the prosocial decision (i.e., the difference between the benefit to other relative to the cost to self) increased; this effect was stronger for known (caregiver and friends) than unknown targets, and increased with age. Functional connectivity between the nucleus accumbens (NAcc) and OFC increased as the value of the prosocial decisions decreased for strangers, but not for known others, irrespective of choice. This differentiated NAcc-OFC functional connectivity during decision-making as a function of value and target also increased with age. Furthermore, regardless of age, individuals who evinced greater value-related NAcc-OFC functional connectivity when considering giving to strangers relative to known others showed smaller differentiated rates of giving between targets. These findings highlight the role of corticostriatal development in supporting the increasing complexity of prosocial development across adolescence.

Enhanced Immune Activation Following Acute Social Stress Among Adolescents With Early-Life Adversity.

Background: Early-life adversity (ELA) has been linked to higher depression risk across the life span and chronic inflammatory conditions that contribute to earlier mortality. In this study, we characterized innate immune responses to acute social stress in a community sample of adolescents (mean age = 13.9 ± 1.6 years; 46.4% female) as a potential pathway linking ELA and depression pathogenesis. Methods: Parents reported their child's exposure to 9 ELAs, and adolescents participated in the Trier Social Stress Test for Children, with blood collected immediately before and then at 60 and 90 minutes thereafter. Overall, 65 adolescents had complete data for analysis of stress-induced changes in gene expression and 84 adolescents had complete data for circulating inflammatory markers. Results: Relative to adolescents exposed to no ELA (11.9%) or low ELA (ELA = 1-3; 67.9%), those exposed to high ELA (ELA = 4+; 20.2%) showed larger stress-associated increases in expression of both proinflammatory and innate antiviral gene transcripts in circulating blood. Consistent with a potential mediating role of sympathetic nervous system activity, promoter-based bioinformatics analyses implicated CREB transcription factor activity in structuring observed gene expression differences. These effects were accompanied by a smaller initial but protracted increase in circulating interleukin 6 in adolescents with high ELA. Conclusions: Results are consistent with the hypothesis that ELA may enhance cellular and gene regulatory reactivity to stress, which may, in turn, increase vulnerability to depression and other inflammation-related disease processes.

Positive and negative emotion are associated with generalized transcriptional activation in immune cells.

Alterations in immune system gene expression have been implicated in psychopathology, but it remains unclear whether similar associations occur for intraindividual variations in emotion. The present study examined whether positive emotion and negative emotion were related to expression of pro-inflammatory and antiviral genes in circulating leukocytes from a community sample of 90 adolescents (Mage = 16.3 years, SD = 0.7; 51.1% female). Adolescents reported their positive emotion and negative emotion and provided blood samples twice, five weeks apart. Using a multilevel analytic framework, we found that within-individual increases in positive emotion were associated with reduced expression of both pro-inflammatory and Type I interferon (IFN) response genes, even after adjusting for demographic and biological covariates, and for leukocyte subset abundance. By contrast, increases in negative emotion were related to higher expression of pro-inflammatory and Type I IFN genes. When tested in the same model, only associations with positive emotion emerged as significant, and increases in overall emotional valence were associated with both lower pro-inflammatory and antiviral gene expression. These results are distinct from the previously observed Conserved Transcriptional Response to Adversity (CTRA) gene regulation pattern characterized by reciprocal changes in pro-inflammatory and antiviral gene expression and may reflect alterations in generalized immunologic activation. These findings highlight one biological pathway by which emotion may potentially impact health and physiological function in the context of the immune system, and future studies can investigate whether fostering positive emotion may promote adolescent health through changes in the immune system.

The role of early life adversity and inflammation in stress-induced change in reward and risk processes among adolescents.

BACKGROUND: Early life adversity (ELA) has long been associated with increased risk for stress-related psychopathology, particularly depression. The neuroimmune network hypothesis posits that ELA increases sensitivity to psychosocial stress, moderating the association between increases in peripheral markers of inflammation and decreases in reward outcomes linked to anhedonia and risk-taking behaviors. The present study examined this hypothesis in a sample of adolescents by using acute psychosocial stress to probe the role of inflammatory signaling in behavioral measures of reward and risk processing. METHOD: 80 adolescents [13.86 years (SD = 1.54); 45 % female], oversampled for ELA, underwent the Trier Social Stress Test for Children while providing blood samples immediately before and 60-minutes after stress onset. Blood samples were assayed for plasma IL-6. One hour before stress onset, and then 60 min after, participants completed computer-administered behavioral tasks measuring reward (Pirate Task) and risk (Balloon Analog Risk Task). RESULTS: ELA moderated the association between increases in IL-6 and decreases in risk tolerance in pursuit of rewards (p = 0.003) and reward response bias (p = 0.04). Stress-induced increases in IL-6 were associated with decreases in pumps for rewards among adolescents exposed to high, relative to little or no, ELA. Further, greater IL-6 increases were associated with increases in bias toward high relative to low value rewards among adolescents with low adversity exposure but not among those exposed to higher adversity. CONCLUSIONS: The present study provides the first evidence in a pediatric sample that ELA may alter the role of stress-induced inflammation in reward and risk processing, and may extend our understanding of why stress leads to depression in this high-risk population.

Low subjective social status is associated with daily selection of fewer healthy foods and more high-fat/high sugar foods.

Socioeconomic status has been related to poorer eating behaviors, potentially due to feeling of lower status relative to peers. Despite experimental evidence that temporarily feeling of lower status can contribute to greater caloric intake, it remains unclear how feeling of lower social status relate to eating behavior in daily life. This study aimed to test whether lower subjective social status (SSS)-the feeling of having relatively lower social status-in American society and relative to college peers were related to daily food selection. A sample of 131 young adults (Mage = 20.3, SD = 0.8; 60% female; 46% Latinos; 34% European American; 15% Asian American; 5% of other ethnicities) reported their SSS in society and in college and completed 15 daily reports regarding the number of daily servings they had of fruits, vegetables, fried foods, fast foods, desserts, and sugary drinks. Multilevel models with days nested within individuals were used to test whether low SSS in society or college related to daily food intake. Next, we examined whether associations were driven by young adults' perceived stress and daily stressors. Analyses controlled for age, gender, ethnicity, family and personal income, and parents' education to test the unique associations between subjective status and food intake. Whereas SSS in society was not related to food intake, young adults with lower SSS in their college consumed fewer daily servings of healthy foods and more daily servings of high-fat/high-sugar foods. Although lower college SSS was related to greater perceived stress, perceived stress and daily stressors were consistently unrelated to daily food intake. Findings suggested that lower SSS in local environments (e.g., college) may impact young adults' daily food choices through processes beyond heightened stress.

Resting respiratory sinus arrhythmia is related to emotion reactivity to social-evaluative stress.

BACKGROUND: Higher resting parasympathetic nervous system activity, as indexed by respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA), has been considered a marker of emotion regulatory capacity and is consistently related to better mental health. However, it remains unclear how resting RSA relates to emotion reactivity to acute social-evaluative stress, a potent predictor of depression and other negative outcomes. METHOD: A sample of 89 participants (Mage = 18.36, SD = 0.51; 58.43 % female) provided measures of RSA at rest and then completed the Trier Social Stress Test, a standardized laboratory-based social-evaluative stress task that involves public speaking and mental arithmetic while being evaluated by two confederate judges. Participants reported a variety of emotions (e.g., negative emotion, positive emotion) at baseline and immediately after the stress task. RESULTS: Participants with higher resting RSA showed greater increases in negative emotion, guilt, depressive emotion, and anger, as well as greater decreases in positive emotion after the task. LIMITATION: Data were limited to a relatively small sample of late adolescents, who may be particularly responsive to social-evaluative stress compared to adults. CONCLUSIONS: Findings suggest that higher resting RSA may enhance emotion responses to social-evaluative stress in adolescents, potentially due to active engagement and responding to rather than passively viewing stimuli. Higher resting RSA may promote flexible emotion responses to the social environment, which may account for associations between higher RSA and better mental health.

A 28-day, 2-year study reveals that adolescents are more fatigued and distressed on days with greater NO2 and CO air pollution.

This 2-year, 28-day study examined whether adolescents felt greater fatigue and emotional distress the same day and the day after air quality was worse. We linked objective daily air quality measurements to daily self-reports from 422 Mexican-American adolescents in Los Angeles County, California from 2009 to 2011 (50% girls, MAge = 15 years). A robust, within-subject analysis of 9696 observations revealed that adolescents with ongoing physical complaints reported greater fatigue and emotional distress on days that the air contained higher levels of nitrogen dioxide (NO2) and carbon monoxide (CO). Regardless of physical complaints, adolescents on average also reported greater fatigue the day after NO2 levels were higher. The same-day and next-day associations between air pollution and distress were mediated via daily increases in fatigue. Results were robust when controlling for day of the week, and daily temperature and humidity. Sulfur dioxide (SO2), ozone (O3), PM2.5 and PM10 were not related to daily fatigue or distress.

Sleep duration moderates the associations between immune markers and corticolimbic function during stress in adolescents.

Adolescence is characterized by biological changes in hormonal and circadian systems that, with concurrent psychosocial changes, result in increased sleep disturbances and stress sensitivity. Sleep disturbance has been associated with heightened stress sensitivity and elevated levels of inflammation in adults and adolescents, yet the neural correlates are unknown in adolescents. The current study investigated whether and how individual differences in peripheral immune markers (IL-6, TNF-α) related to neural response to stress in adolescents and whether these immune-brain associations were moderated by adolescents' sleep duration. Thirty-seven adolescents (14-15 years) who met quality control criteria for fMRI reported daily sleep duration for 7 days and performed a fMRI stressor task. A subsample of 23 adolescents additionally provided blood samples that were assayed for inflammatory markers using a multiplex assay. Results revealed that average sleep duration moderated associations between TNF-α and medial frontolimbic circuitry (amygdala, medial prefrontal cortex) during the stressor task such that, among adolescents who reported shorter sleep duration, higher levels of TNF-α were associated with greater deactivation in those regions during stress, which was associated with greater self-reported anxiety. These findings suggest that insufficient sleep duration coupled with greater levels of peripheral inflammation may promote a neural profile characterized by alterations in frontolimbic circuitry during stress, which can exacerbate sleep disturbances and/or peripheral inflammation.

The Relationship Between Family Socioeconomic Status and Adolescent Sleep and Diurnal Cortisol.

OBJECTIVE: This study aimed to investigate the associations between indices of family socioeconomic status and sleep during adolescence and to examine whether measures of hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis functioning mediate the observed associations. METHODS: A total of 350 ethnically diverse adolescents (57% female; mean [standard deviation] age wave 1 = 16.4 [0.7] years) completed a three-wave longitudinal study in which sleep and cortisol data were collected at 2-year time intervals. Sleep duration, latency, and variability were assessed via actigraphy during a period of 8 days per study wave. Salivary cortisol was collected across 3 days per study wave to assess cortisol diurnal slope, area under the curve, and the cortisol awakening response. Adolescents' caregivers reported their education levels, family income, and economic hardship. RESULTS: A greater family income-to-needs ratio was associated with longer adolescent sleep duration ( b = 2.90, p = .023), whereas greater parental education was associated with shorter sleep duration ( b = -3.70, p = .030), less sleep latency ( b = -0.74, p = .016), and less variability across days ( b = -2.06, p = .010). Diurnal cortisol slope statistically mediated the association of parental education with sleep duration ( b = -0.48, 95% confidence interval = -1.099 to -0.042), but not the association of income-to-needs ratio with sleep duration. CONCLUSIONS: Findings suggest that parental education and family resources may have unique impacts upon sleep and HPA axis functioning during the period of adolescence. Future research is needed to examine family and behavioral factors that may underlie socioeconomic status associations with adolescent sleep and HPA axis functioning.

Giving to others and neural processing during adolescence.

Adolescence is marked by an increased sensitivity to the social environment as youth navigate evolving relationships with family, friends, and communities. Prosocial behavior becomes more differentiated such that older adolescents increasingly give more to known others (e.g., family, friends) than to strangers. This differentiation may be linked with changes in neural processing among brain regions implicated in social decision-making. A total of 269 adolescents from 9-15 and 19-20 years of age completed a decision-making task in which they could give money to caregivers, friends, and strangers while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Giving to caregivers and friends (at a cost to oneself) increased with age, but giving to strangers remained lower and stable across age. Brain regions implicated in cognitive control (dorsolateral and ventrolateral prefrontal cortex) showed increased blood-oxygen-level-dependent (BOLD) activation with increasing age across giving decisions to all recipients; regions associated with reward processing (ventral striatum and ventral tegmental area) showed increased activation across all ages when giving to all recipients. Brain regions associated with social cognition were either not active (dorsomedial prefrontal cortex) or showed reduced activation (temporal parietal junction and posterior superior temporal sulcus) when giving to others across all ages. Findings have implications for understanding the role of brain development in the increased complexity of social decision-making during adolescence.

Youth's Experiences of the Devaluing of Their Contributions Due to Their Ethnicity and Gender.

The message that one's contributions are devalued can be a significant way that youth experience marginalization during the transition into adulthood. Participants (N = 298, Mage = 19.47 years, 51% female) reported having their ideas, opinions, and contributions being unwelcomed due to their ethnicity and gender. African American, Latinx, and Asian American young women indicated the most frequent devalued contributions. Devalued contributions due to ethnicity and gender were most strongly linked among these groups and Multiethnic youth than European American youth. Devalued contributions predicted depressive symptoms, feeling more needed and useful by society, and a greater sense of purpose beyond a traditional measure of discrimination. Assessing experiences of devalued contributions can provide a more thorough understanding of how marginalization shapes the transition to adulthood.

Growing in generosity? The effects of giving magnitude, target, and audience on the neural signature of giving in adolescence.

Giving is essential for forming and maintaining social relationships, which is an important developmental task for adolescents. This pre-registered fMRI study investigated behavioral and neural correlates of adolescents' (N = 128, ages 9 - 19 years) small versus large size giving in different social contexts related to target (i.e., giving to a friend or unfamiliar peer) and peer presence (i.e., anonymous versus audience giving). Participants gave more in the small size than large size condition, more to friends than to unfamiliar peers, and more in the audience compared to anonymous condition. Giving very small or large amounts was associated with increased activity in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) and anterior insula (AI), and older adolescents showed increased lateral and anterior PFC activation for small size giving. We observed activity in the intraparietal cortex (IPL), dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, and AI for giving to friends, but no age-related differences in this activity. Behaviorally, in contrast, we observed that older adolescents differentiated more in giving between friends and unfamiliar peers. Finally, we observed interactions between peer presence and target in the AI, and between giving magnitude and target in the precuneus. Together, findings reveal higher context-dependency of giving and more lateral PFC activity for small versus large giving in older adolescents.

Feeling Needed and Useful during the Transition to Young Adulthood.

A more complete understanding of the role of social relationships during the transition to young adulthood should include the extent to which adolescents believe that others see them as needed and useful. Two samples of late adolescents (Ns = 237, 298) aged 18 to 25 years completed measures of feeling needed and useful by family and friends. Feeling needed and useful by family and friends did not differ across demographic groups, was associated with greater received support, and predicted psychological well-being above-and-beyond received support. Future research should examine how social relationships provide late adolescents with the opportunity to be needed and useful at a time of life when they are seeking to establish their place in the social world.

Resting parasympathetic nervous system activity is associated with greater antiviral gene expression.

Parasympathetic nervous system activity can downregulate inflammation, but it remains unclear how parasympathetic nervous system activity relates to antiviral activity. The present study examined associations between parasympathetic nervous system activity and cellular antiviral gene regulation in 90 adolescents (Mage = 16.28, SD = 0.73; 51.1% female) who provided blood samples and measures of cardiac respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA), twice, five weeks apart. Using a multilevel analytic framework, we found that higher RSA (an indicator of higher parasympathetic nervous system activity)-both at rest and during paced breathing-was associated with higher expression of Type I interferon (IFN) response genes in circulating leukocytes, even after adjusting for demographic and biological covariates. RSA was not associated with a parallel measure of inflammatory gene expression. These results identify a previously unrecognized immunoregulatory aspect of autonomic nervous system function and highlight a potential biological pathway by which parasympathetic nervous system activity may relate to health.