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Stressful life events (SLEs) are strongly associated with the emergence of adolescent anxiety and depression, but the underlying mechanisms remain poorly understood, especially at the within-person level. We investigated how adolescent social communication (i.e., frequency of calls and texts) following SLEs relates to changes in internalizing symptoms in a multi-timescale intensive year-long study (N=30; n=355 monthly observations; n=~5,000 experience-sampling observations). Within-person increases in SLEs were associated with receiving more calls than usual at both monthly- and momentary-levels, and making more calls at the monthly-level. Increased calls were prospectively associated with worsening internalizing symptoms at the monthly-level only, suggesting that SLEs rapidly influences phone communication patterns, but these communication changes may have a more protracted, cumulative influence on internalizing symptoms. Finally, increased incoming calls prospectively mediated the association between SLEs and anxiety at the monthly-level. We identify adolescent social communication fluctuations as a potential mechanism conferring risk for stress-related internalizing psychopathology., Competing Interests: Conflicts of Interest The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

Exposure to stressful life events is strongly associated with internalizing psychopathology, and identifying factors that reduce vulnerability to stress-related internalizing problems is critical for development of early interventions. Drawing on research from affective science, we tested whether high emotion differentiation-the ability to specifically identify one's feelings-buffers adolescents from developing internalizing symptoms when exposed to stress. Thirty adolescents completed a laboratory measure of emotion differentiation before an intensive year-long longitudinal study in which exposure to stress and internalizing problems were assessed at both the moment-level (n=4,921 experience sampling assessments) and monthly-level (n=355 monthly assessments). High negative and positive emotion differentiation attenuated moment-level coupling between perceived stress and feelings of depression, and high negative emotion differentiation eliminated monthly-level associations between stressful life events and anxiety symptoms. These results suggest that high emotion differentiation buffers adolescents against anxiety and depression in the face of stress, perhaps by facilitating adaptive emotion regulation., Competing Interests: Conflicts of Interest The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

Antisociality is commonly conceptualized as a unitary construct, but there is considerable evidence for multidimensionality. In particular, two partially dissociable symptom clusters - psychopathy and externalizing - have divergent associations to clinical and forensic outcomes and are linked to unique patterns executive dysfunction. Here, we used fMRI in a sample of incarcerated offenders to map these dimensions of antisocial behavior to brain circuits underlying two aspects of inhibitory self-control: interference suppression and response inhibition. We found that psychopathy and externalizing are characterized by unique and task-selective patterns of dysfunction. While higher levels of psychopathy predicted increased activity within a distributed fronto-parietal network for interference suppression, externalizing did not predict brain activity during attentional control. By contrast, each dimension had opposite associations to fronto-parietal activity during response inhibition. These findings provide neurobiological evidence supporting the fractionation of antisocial behavior, and identify dissociable mechanisms through which different facets predispose dysfunction and impairment.