Neural correlates of social exclusion among youth exposed to family conflict

描述（由申请人提供）：暴露于家庭冲突与后来的社会功能缺陷有关，而社会困难与各种心理障碍有关。该研究旨在通过识别青少年社会处理不良的神经标记，为社会脆弱性的原因和后果的研究提供信息。我们测试了一个理论模型，将家庭冲突与社会行为和心理症状联系起来，在青春期晚期（17-19岁）的不同样本中，他们暴露于家庭冲突的情况已被跟踪作为八年五波纵向研究的一部分。我们特别关注社会排斥反应性的神经相关，我们将其称为社会排斥反应性（SER）。我们将向参与者介绍两种旨在评估神经SER （NSER）的功能神经成像（fMRI）任务：赛博球范式（Williams & Jarvis, 2006），一种引发社会排斥感的电脑游戏，以及社会痛苦任务（Immordino-Yang, McColI， Damasio和Damasio，出版），在该任务中，年轻人会看到显示他人被社会排斥或拒绝的小图片。这两项神经成像任务都与大脑中与痛苦和疼痛处理相关区域的激活增加有关。我们预计，过去经历过家庭冲突的年轻人在这些“痛苦”区域会表现出更大的激活，同时通过招募前额皮质区域来管理痛苦的能力也会减弱，而前额皮质区域在之前的研究中被证明有助于降低社会痛苦的调节。我们还期望这些SER的神经相关因素与青少年的心理症状和他们在14天的日常日记研究中测量的日常社会行为有关。通过将这两种神经成像方案与来自多个记者的关于家庭冲突的纵向数据和关于青少年现实生活中社会互动的生态有效数据相结合，拟议的项目将为关键发展阶段的社会功能提供前所未有的深度视角。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Exposure to family conflict has been linked with later deficits in social functioning, and social difficulties are implicated in a variety of psychological disorders. The proposed study seeks to inform research into the causes and consequences of social vulnerability by identifying neural markers of maladaptive social processing among adolescents. We test a theoretical model linking family conflict to social behavior and psychological symptoms in a diverse sample of youth in late adolescence (ages 17-19) whose exposure to family conflict has been tracked as part of an eight-year, five-wave longitudinal study. We focus in particular to the neural correlates of reactivity to social exclusion, a construct we label social exclusion reactivity (SER). We will introduce participants to two functional neuroimaging (fMRI) tasks designed to assess neural SER (NSER): the Cyberball paradigm (Williams & Jarvis, 2006), a computer game that elicits feelings of social exclusion, and the Social Pain Task (Immordino-Yang, McColI, Damasio and Damasio, in press), in which youth are presented with vignettes showing others being socially excluded or rejected. Both neuroimaging tasks have been linked with increased activation in brain regions associated with distress and pain processing. We expect youth with past exposure to family conflict to display greater activation in these "distress" areas, as well as diminished ability to manage that distress by recruiting areas of the prefrontal cortex that have been shown to help down regulate social distress in previous studies. We also expect these neural correlates of SER to be associated with youths' psychological symptoms and with their everyday social behavior as measured during a 14-day daily diary study. By integrating these two neuroimaging protocols with longitudinal data on family conflict from multiple reporters and ecologically valid data on adolescents' real-life social interactions, the proposed project should offer an unprecedented depth of perspective on social functioning at a pivotal developmental stage. PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE: Conflictual family environments and a lack of social integration have both been linked with increased mental and physical health risks across the lifespan. Research that identifies markers of social vulnerability in young people, at the level of nonconscious cognitive and affective processing, can inform understanding of psychological disorders related to social functioning and the development of interventions targeting youth at risk. Important, enduring relationships are often formed during the transition from adolescence to adulthood, while psychological symptoms may begin to emerge, warranting a focus on social difficulty during this stage of life.