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Principal Investigator: Naomi Ilana Eisenberger
Organization: UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LOS ANGELES
Fiscal Year: 2024
Award: $196,875
Funding agency: Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development
Project Summary
Adolescents demonstrate a high need for emotion regulation [2-4], but often struggle to employ gold-
standard regulatory strategies such as cognitive reappraisal due to underdeveloped lateral prefrontal
neuroarchitecture (i.e. lateral prefrontal cortex (LPFC)), which plays a crucial role in cognitive control [5-8]. At
the same time, adolescents are exquisitely sensitive to their peers [11,13-16]. Notably, neural regions linked to
peer influence in adolescence, including ventral striatum (VS) and ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC),
mature prior to LPFC. Thus, adolescents are uniquely poised to benefit from a social intervention designed to
appropriate peer influence mechanisms towards enhancing emotion regulation efficacy. The goal of this R21
is to work with the developing brain, not against it, to utilize adolescent-emergent reward-related
circuitry (VS, VMPFC) instead of LPFC to regulate emotion in adolescents. We will administer a novel
paradigm during functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine whether adolescents (N = 50) and
adults (N = 50) are more effective at down-regulating negative affect when a friend provides them with
reinterpretations of negative stimuli (i.e. social reappraisal), as compared to when they reinterpret stimuli alone
(i.e., cognitive reappraisal) [12]. Specifically, we will investigate whether social reappraisal is more effective
and longer-lasting than cognitive reappraisal in down-regulating negative affect in adolescents and adults (Aim
1). We hypothesize that social reappraisal will be more effective and enduring than cognitive reappraisal in
both groups, but that this effect will be larger in adolescents given their heightened sensitivity to peers.
Furthermore, we will identify the neural mechanisms supporting social versus cognitive reappraisal and
characterize age-related differences in these mechanisms (Aim 2). We will focus on examining activation in
the amygdala, LPFC, VS, and VMPFC, as well as functional connectivity between these regions. We
hypothesize that LPFC-amygdala connectivity will support cognitive reappraisal, which will be stronger in
adults versus adolescents, whereas VS-amygdala and VMPFC-amygdala connectivity will support social
reappraisal. While VS-amygdala connectivity is likely to be stronger in adolescents than adults, VMPFC-
amygdala connectivity might not be given that this pathway is still developing during adolescence [21,76]. We
expect that social reappraisal will have a more transformative and thus longer-lasting effect on amygdala-
based representations of negative stimuli, particularly in adolescents, and will use representation similarity
analysis to test this hypothesis. Examining the efficacy and neural underpinnings of social reappraisal in
adolescents versus adults is an important step in advancing our understanding of how social contexts shape
emotion regulation neurodevelopment, with the aim of improving adolescent health and laying the groundwork
for positive emotional wellbeing into adulthood.
Terms: <12-20 years old><21+ years old><Adolescence><Adolescent><Adolescent Youth><Adult><Adult Human><Age><Amygdala><Amygdaloid Body><Amygdaloid Nucleus><Amygdaloid structure><Behavior><Behavioral><Brain><Brain Nervous System><Brain region><Buffers><Cognitive><Collection><Cues><Data><Decision Making><Development><Down-Regulation><Emotional><Emotional well being><Emotions><Encephalon><Event><Feels well><Frequencies><Friends><Functional MRI><Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging><Goals><Intervention><Intervention Strategies><Lateral><Link><NICHD><National Institute of Child Health and Human Development><National Institute of Children's Health and Human Development><Neural Development><Normal mental condition><Normal mental state><Normal psyche><Pathway interactions><Patient Self-Report><Play><Prefrontal Cortex><Psychological Well Being><Regulation><Research><Rewards><Risk Behaviors><Risky Behavior><Role><Self-Report><Sense of well-being><Shapes><Social Environment><Social Facilitation><Source><Stimulus><Symptoms><Testing><Time><Ventral Striatum><Well in self><Work><adolescence (12-20)><adolescent brain development><adolescent health><adulthood><age associated difference><age based difference><age dependent difference><age dependent variation><age difference><age group><age related difference><age related variation><age specific difference><ages><amygdaloid nuclear complex><at risk behavior><cognitive control><cognitive reappraisal><cognitive regulation><determine efficacy><developmental><differ by age><difference across age><difference in age><efficacy analysis><efficacy assessment><efficacy determination><efficacy evaluation><efficacy examination><emotion dysregulation><emotion regulation><emotional dysregulation><emotional expression><emotional regulation><emotional wellbeing><emotional wellness><evaluate efficacy><examine efficacy><experience><expression of emotion><fMRI><improved><intervention design><interventional strategy><juvenile><juvenile human><mental well-being><mental wellbeing><mental wellness><negative affect><negative affectivity><neural><neural mechanism><neurodevelopment><neuromechanism><novel><pathway><peer><peer influence><psychological wellbeing><psychological wellness><recruit><reward circuitry><scaffold><scaffolding><self wellness><sense of wellbeing><showing emotion><social><social climate><social context><social interventions><social role><socioenvironment><socioenvironmental><success><therapy design><treatment design><variation by age><vulnerable adolescent>