Search

With age, adolescents increasingly demonstrate the ability to forgo immediate, smaller rewards in favor of larger delayed rewards, indicating reduced delay discounting. Adolescence is also a time of social reorientation, where decisions not only involve weighing immediate against future outcomes, but also consequences for self versus those for others. In this functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging study, we examined the neural correlates of immediate and delayed reward choices where the delayed outcomes could benefit self, friends, or unknown others. A total of 196 adolescent twins aged 14-17 completed a social delay discounting task, with fMRI data acquired from 174 participants. Out of these, 156 adolescents had valid fMRI data, and 138 adolescents had observations in every condition. Adolescents more often chose the immediate reward when it was larger, and when the delay was longer. Area-under-the-curve (AUC) comparisons revealed that behavior differed across delay-beneficiaries, with AUC being highest for the self, followed by friends, and lowest for unknown others. This suggests that adolescents are more willing to wait for rewards for self. Neuroimaging analyses showed increased activity in the midline areas medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) and precuneus, as well as bilateral temporal parietal junction (TPJ) when considering delayed reward for unknown others and friends compared to self. A whole-brain interaction with choice showed that the bilateral insula and right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) were more active for delayed choices for unknown others and for immediate choices for friends and self. This underscores that the neuro-cognitive processing of how delays reduce the value of rewards depends on closeness of the beneficiary.

With age, adolescents increasingly demonstrate the ability to forgo immediate, smaller rewards in favor of larger delayed rewards, indicating reduced delay discounting. Adolescence is also a time of social reorientation, where decisions not only involve weighing immediate against future outcomes, but also consequences for self versus those for others. In this functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging study, we examined the neural correlates of immediate and delayed reward choices where the delayed outcomes could benefit self, friends, or unknown others. A total of 196 adolescent twins aged 14–17 completed a social delay discounting task, with fMRI data acquired from 174 participants. Out of these, 156 adolescents had valid fMRI data, and 138 adolescents had observations in every condition. Adolescents more often chose the immediate reward when it was larger, and when the delay was longer. Area-under-the-curve (AUC) comparisons revealed that behavior differed across delay-beneficiaries, with AUC being highest for the self, followed by friends, and lowest for unknown others. This suggests that adolescents are more willing to wait for rewards for self. Neuroimaging analyses showed increased activity in the midline areas medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) and precuneus, as well as bilateral temporal parietal junction (TPJ) when considering delayed reward for unknown others and friends compared to self. A whole-brain interaction with choice showed that the bilateral insula and right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) were more active for delayed choices for unknown others and for immediate choices for friends and self. This underscores that the neuro-cognitive processing of how delays reduce the value of rewards depends on closeness of the beneficiary.

Our society faces a great diversity of opportunities for youth. The 10-year Growing Up Together in Society (GUTS) program has the long-term goal to understand which combination of measures best predict societal trajectories, such as school success, mental health, well-being, and developing a sense of belonging in society. Our leading hypothesis is that self-regulation is key to how adolescents successfully navigate the demands of contemporary society. We aim to test these questions using socio-economic, questionnaire (including experience sampling methods), behavioral, brain (fMRI, sMRI, EEG), hormonal, and genetic measures in four large cohorts including adolescents and young adults. Two cohorts are designed as test and replication cohorts to test the developmental trajectory of self-regulation, including adolescents of different socioeconomic status thereby bridging individual, family, and societal perspectives. The third cohort consists of an entire social network to examine how neural and self-regulatory development influences and is influenced by whom adolescents and young adults choose to interact with. The fourth cohort includes youth with early signs of antisocial and delinquent behavior to understand patterns of societal development in individuals at the extreme ends of self-regulation and societal participation, and examines pathways into and out of delinquency. We will complement the newly collected cohorts with data from existing large-scale population-based and case-control cohorts. The study is embedded in a transdisciplinary approach that engages stakeholders throughout the design stage, with a strong focus on citizen science and youth participation in study design, data collection, and interpretation of results, to ensure optimal translation to youth in society.

Empathy determines our emotional and social lives. Research has recognised the role of the right temporo-parietal junction (rTPJ) in social cognition, however there is less direct causal evidence for its involvement in empathic responses to pain, which is typically attributed to simulation mechanisms. Given the rTPJ's role in the false beliefs and contextual information during social scenarios, we hypothesized that empathic responses to another's pain depend on the rTPJ if participants are given information about people's intentions, engaging mentalizing mechanisms alongside simulative ones. Participants viewed videos of an actress freely showing or suppressing pain caused by an electric shock, while receiving 6Hz repetitive Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (rTMS) over the rTPJ or sham vertex stimulation. Active rTMS had no significant effect on participants' ratings depending on the pain expression, although participants rated the actress' pain as lower during rTPJ perturbation. In contrast, rTMS accelerated response times of providing ratings during pain suppression. We also found that participants perceived the actress' pain more intense when they knew she would suppress vs. show it. These results suggest an involvement of the rTPJ in attributing pain to others and provide new insights into people's behavior in judging others' pain when it is concealed.

Darwin proposed that blushing-the reddening of the face owing to heightened self-awareness-is 'the most human of all expressions'. Yet, relatively little is known about the underlying mechanisms of blushing. Theories diverge on whether it is a rapid, spontaneous emotional response that does not involve reflection upon the self or whether it results from higher-order socio-cognitive processes. Investigating the neural substrates of blushing can shed light on the mental processes underlying blushing and the mechanisms involved in self-awareness. To reveal neural activity associated with blushing, 16-20 year-old participants (n = 40) watched pre-recorded videos of themselves (versus other people as a control condition) singing karaoke in a magnetic resonance imaging scanner. We measured participants' cheek temperature increase-an indicator of blushing-and their brain activity. The results showed that blushing is higher when watching oneself versus others sing. Those who blushed more while watching themselves sing had, on average, higher activation in the cerebellum (lobule V) and the left paracentral lobe and exhibited more time-locked processing of the videos in early visual cortices. These findings show that blushing is associated with the activation of brain areas involved in emotional arousal, suggesting that it may occur independently of higher-order socio-cognitive processes. Our results provide new avenues for future research on self-awareness in infants and non-human animals.

Our society faces a great diversity of opportunities for youth. The 10-year Growing Up Together in Society (GUTS) program has the long-term goal to understand which combination of measures best predict societal trajectories, such as school success, mental health, well-being, and developing a sense of belonging in society. Our leading hypothesis is that self-regulation is key to how adolescents successfully navigate the demands of contemporary society. We aim to test these questions using socio-economic, questionnaire (including experience sampling methods), behavioral, brain (fMRI, sMRI, EEG), hormonal, and genetic measures in four large cohorts including adolescents and young adults. Two cohorts are designed as test and replication cohorts to test the developmental trajectory of self-regulation, including adolescents of different socioeconomic status thereby bridging individual, family, and societal perspectives. The third cohort consists of an entire social network to examine how neural and self-regulatory development influences and is influenced by whom adolescents and young adults choose to interact with. The fourth cohort includes youth with early signs of antisocial and delinquent behavior to understand patterns of societal development in individuals at the extreme ends of self-regulation and societal participation, and examines pathways into and out of delinquency. We will complement the newly collected cohorts with data from existing large-scale population-based and case-control cohorts. The study is embedded in a transdisciplinary approach that engages stakeholders throughout the design stage, with a strong focus on citizen science and youth participation in study design, data collection, and interpretation of results, to ensure optimal translation to youth in society.

Footshock self-experience enhances rodents' reactions to the distress of others. Here, we tested one potential mechanism supporting this phenomenon, namely that animals auto-condition to their own pain squeaks during shock pre-exposure. In Experiment 1, shock pre-exposure increased freezing and 22 kHz distress vocalizations while animals listened to the audible pain-squeaks of others. In Experiment 2 and 3, to test the auto-conditioning theory, we weakened the noxious pre-exposure stimulus not to trigger pain squeaks, and compared pre-exposure protocols in which we paired it with squeak playback against unpaired control conditions. Although all animals later showed fear responses to squeak playbacks, these were weaker than following typical pre-exposure (Experiment 1) and not stronger following paired than unpaired pre-exposure. Experiment 1 thus demonstrates the relevance of audible pain squeaks in the transmission of distress but Experiment 2 and 3 highlight the difficulty to test auto-conditioning: stimuli weak enough to decouple pain experience from hearing self-emitted squeaks are too weak to trigger the experience-dependent increase in fear transmission that we aimed to study. Although our results do not contradict the auto-conditioning hypothesis, they fail to disentangle it from sensitization effects. Future studies could temporarily deafen animals during pre-exposure to further test this hypothesis. While audible pain squeaks among rats are relevant in the transmission of distress, it is difficult to disentangle whether animals can be auto-conditioned to the sound of their own pain squeaks., This work was supported by the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina (LPDS 2021-05; J.P.), the Dutch Research Council (VICI 453-15-009; C.K.), the Fonds Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek-Vlaanderen (FWO; Research Foundation-Flanders; e.g. G0C0522N and G0E6722N; M.W.) and a start-up grant at KU Leuven (PXF-E0120-STG/20/062; M.W.). We thank Sharon Furtak for reanalyzing the audio recordings of the Calub et al. (2018) study to examine whether devocalization affected the emission of pain squeaks.

The processing of reinforcers and punishers is crucial to adapt to an ever changing environment and its dysregulation is prevalent in mental health and substance use disorders. While many human brain measures related to reward have been based on activity in individual brain regions, recent studies indicate that many affective and motivational processes are encoded in distributed systems that span multiple regions. Consequently, decoding these processes using individual regions yields small effect sizes and limited reliability, whereas predictive models based on distributed patterns yield larger effect sizes and excellent reliability. To create such a predictive model for the processes of rewards and losses, termed the Brain Reward Signature (BRS), we trained a model to predict the signed magnitude of monetary rewards on the Monetary Incentive Delay task (MID; N = 39) and achieved a highly significant decoding performance (92% for decoding rewards versus losses). We subsequently demonstrate the generalizability of our signature on another version of the MID in a different sample (92% decoding accuracy; N = 12) and on a gambling task from a large sample (73% decoding accuracy, N = 1084). We further provided preliminary data to characterize the specificity of the signature by illustrating that the signature map generates estimates that significantly differ between rewarding and negative feedback (92% decoding accuracy) but do not differ for conditions that differ in disgust rather than reward in a novel Disgust-Delay Task (N = 39). Finally, we show that passively viewing positive and negatively valenced facial expressions loads positively on our signature, in line with previous studies on morbid curiosity. We thus created a BRS that can accurately predict brain responses to rewards and losses in active decision making tasks, and that possibly relates to information seeking in passive observational tasks.