Neural Sensitivity to Peer Feedback and Depressive Symptoms: Moderation by Executive Function.

Theories of adolescent development suggest that elevated neural sensitivity to social evaluation confers tradeoffs for adolescents' wellbeing, promoting adaptation to changing social contexts but increasing risk for emotional distress and depression. This study investigated whether the association between neural processing of peer feedback and depressive symptoms depends on teacher-reported executive function (EF) ability in adolescent girls. Girls showed activation to negative and positive peer feedback in regions implicated in social-emotional processing that interacted with EF to predict depressive symptoms. Specifically, activation predicted more depression in youth with poorer EF but less depression in youth with better EF, suggesting that the impact of increased social sensitivity may depend on youths' ability to regulate this sensitivity in adaptive ways.

Assessing mindfulness-based cognitive therapy intervention for tinnitus using behavioural measures and structural MRI: a pilot study.

Objective: We used a minimally-modified version of Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) to treat symptoms of distress associated with tinnitus.Design: Audiological screening (establishing a baseline) was conducted prior to treatment and at three time-points: pre-intervention, post-intervention and follow-up, 8 weeks after completion of training. MRI tests were also conducted at these three time-points.Study sample: Twenty-one participants were enrolled in the study, of whom 15 completed training and audiological testing and eight completed the MRI portion of the study.Results: Scores on tinnitus-related questionnaires showed a significant decline either from pre- to post-intervention or from pre-intervention to follow-up, despite no significant change during baseline. Voxel-based morphometric analysis of the structural MRI scans revealed clusters in bilateral superior frontal gyrus that exhibited significant increases in grey matter volume over the period of intervention and follow-up. Further, grey matter changes in occipital and cingulate regions correlated with declines in tinnitus handicap.Conclusions: This pilot study supports MBCT as an adequate approach for treating distressing tinnitus and suggests that neuroanatomical changes may reflect reductions in tinnitus-related severity. Although our small sample size precludes drawing strong conclusions, there is potential for assessing neuroanatomical changes due to mindfulness-based interventions in tinnitus.

Thumbs up or thumbs down: neural processing of social feedback and links to social motivation in adolescent girls.

Adolescence is a period of rapid biological and psychological development, characterized by increasing emotional reactivity and risk-taking, especially in peer contexts. Theories of adolescent neural development suggest that the balance in sensitivity across neural threat, reward and regulatory systems contributes to these changes. Building on previous research, this study used a novel social feedback task to explore activation and functional connectivity in the context of social threat and reward in a sample of mid-adolescent girls (n = 86, Mage = 16.32). When receiving negative peer feedback, adolescents showed elevated activation in, and amygdala connectivity with, social processing regions [e.g. medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) and temporoparietal junction (TPJ)]. When receiving positive feedback, adolescents showed elevated activation in social and reward (e.g. mPFC and ventromedial prefrontal cortex) processing regions and less striatum-cerebellum connectivity. To understand the psychological implications of neural activation and co-activation, we examined associations between neural processing of threat and reward and self-reported social goals. Avoidance goals predicted elevated amygdala and striatum connectivity with social processing regions [e.g. medial temporal gyrus (MTG)], whereas approach goals predicted deactivation in social processing regions (e.g. MTG/TPJ and precuneus), highlighting the importance of considering individual differences in sensitivity to social threat and reward in adolescence.

Listening Into 2030 Workshop: An Experiment in Envisioning the Future of Hearing and Communication Science.

Here we report the methods and output of a workshop examining possible futures of speech and hearing science out to 2030. Using a design thinking approach, a range of human-centered problems in communication were identified that could provide the motivation for a wide range of research. Nine main research programs were distilled and are summarized: (a) measuring brain and other physiological parameters, (b) auditory and multimodal displays of information, (c) auditory scene analysis, (d) enabling and understanding shared auditory virtual spaces, (e) holistic approaches to health management and hearing impairment, (f) universal access to evolving and individualized technologies, (g) biological intervention for hearing dysfunction, (h) understanding the psychosocial interactions with technology and other humans as mediated by technology, and (i) the impact of changing models of security and privacy. The design thinking approach attempted to link the judged level of importance of different research areas to the "end in mind" through empathy for the real-life problems embodied in the personas created during the workshop.

Learning to Produce Syllabic Speech Sounds via Reward-Modulated Neural Plasticity.

At around 7 months of age, human infants begin to reliably produce well-formed syllables containing both consonants and vowels, a behavior called canonical babbling. Over subsequent months, the frequency of canonical babbling continues to increase. How the infant's nervous system supports the acquisition of this ability is unknown. Here we present a computational model that combines a spiking neural network, reinforcement-modulated spike-timing-dependent plasticity, and a human-like vocal tract to simulate the acquisition of canonical babbling. Like human infants, the model's frequency of canonical babbling gradually increases. The model is rewarded when it produces a sound that is more auditorily salient than sounds it has previously produced. This is consistent with data from human infants indicating that contingent adult responses shape infant behavior and with data from deaf and tracheostomized infants indicating that hearing, including hearing one's own vocalizations, is critical for canonical babbling development. Reward receipt increases the level of dopamine in the neural network. The neural network contains a reservoir with recurrent connections and two motor neuron groups, one agonist and one antagonist, which control the masseter and orbicularis oris muscles, promoting or inhibiting mouth closure. The model learns to increase the number of salient, syllabic sounds it produces by adjusting the base level of muscle activation and increasing their range of activity. Our results support the possibility that through dopamine-modulated spike-timing-dependent plasticity, the motor cortex learns to harness its natural oscillations in activity in order to produce syllabic sounds. It thus suggests that learning to produce rhythmic mouth movements for speech production may be supported by general cortical learning mechanisms. The model makes several testable predictions and has implications for our understanding not only of how syllabic vocalizations develop in infancy but also for our understanding of how they may have evolved.