Development of neural and cognitive processing of peers' nonverbal cues in adolescence

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The ability to interpret emotional states from nonverbal cues, such as facial expressions or tone of voice, is a critical aspect of successful interpersonal interaction. The capacity to decode these cues-particularly those contained in the voice-continues to mature during the teenage years. Adolescents especially struggle to identify emotional intent in vocal expressions produced by other teenagers. Thus, although nonverbal signals communicated by peers are central to adolescents' social experiences, they may be particularly challenging for teenagers to interpret. The long-term vision of the proposed research program is to elucidate the social, cognitive, and biological mechanisms that support the growing capacity to interpret peers' nonverbal cues (emotion recognition [ER]) in adolescence. We will examine developmental change in three potential mechanistic predictors of ER in adolescence: (1) social experience with peers ("practice effects"), as teenagers begin to spend less time with their caregivers and more time with friends, (2) greater attentional engagement with the faces and voices of their peers over other social signals (like those of caregivers), given heightened salience of social information conveyed by friends during adolescence, and (3) ongoing development of neural systems, including subcortical regions that are sensitive to salient stimuli (e.g., amygdala, striatum) and cortical networks involved in social information processing. To date, little is known about the influence of age/puberty on these mechanisms and about their predictive effect on adolescents' ER. In a series of experiments, we will investigate changes in these mechanisms (i.e., social experience, attentional bias towards peers, and neural responses to peers) as a function of age and puberty, in 10- to 15-year-old adolescents. Constructs will be measured concurrently and longitudinally using a combination of tasks, questionnaires, and neuroimaging paradigms. HQP will have the opportunity to create and validate extensions of existing attention and ER measures, to collect and analyze longitudinal neuroimaging data, and to participate in the dissemination of findings. Charting maturational trajectories of social, cognitive, and biological mechanisms supporting ER in adolescence will inform models of social information processing, which currently do not include considerations of developmental change in its components (e.g., attention, interpretation). Furthering our understanding of the changing ways in which adolescents' attention is naturally allocated to their social environment can point to effective methods of communicating information to teenagers; for instance, findings have implications for the design of technology intended for adolescent users. Identifying factors that facilitate ER can also inform efforts to support teenagers' social adjustment-an outcome which will be particularly important in the wake of COVID-19's disruption to youth's social lives.