Brain activity underlying negative self- and other-perception in adolescents: The role of attachment-derived self-representations |
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| Authors: | Martin Debbané Deborah Badoud David Sander Stephan Eliez Patrick Luyten Pascal Vrtička |
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| Affiliation: | 1.Developmental Clinical Psychology Research Unit, Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences,University of Geneva,Geneva,Switzerland;2.Office Médico-Pédagogique Research Unit, Department of Psychiatry,University of Geneva School of Medicine,Geneva,Switzerland;3.Research Department of Clinical, Educational and Health Psychology,University College London,London,UK;4.Swiss Center for Affective Sciences,University of Geneva,Geneva,Switzerland;5.Laboratory for the Study of Emotion Elicitation and Expression, Department of Psychology,University of Geneva,Geneva,Switzerland;6.Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences,University of Leuven,Leuven,Belgium;7.Department of Social Neuroscience,Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences,Leipzig,Germany |
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| Abstract: | One of teenagers’ key developmental tasks is to engage in new and meaningful relationships with peers and adults outside the family context. Attachment-derived expectations about the self and others in terms of internal attachment working models have the potential to shape such social reorientation processes critically and thereby influence adolescents’ social-emotional development and social integration. Because the neural underpinnings of this developmental task remain largely unknown, we sought to investigate them by functional magnetic resonance imaging. We asked n = 44 adolescents (ages 12.01–18.84 years) to evaluate positive and negative adjectives regarding either themselves or a close other during an adapted version of the well-established self-other trait-evaluation task. As measures of attachment, we obtained scores reflecting participants’ positive versus negative attachment-derived self- and other-models by means of the Relationship Questionnaire. We controlled for possible confounding factors by also obtaining scores reflecting internalizing/externalizing problems, schizotypy, and borderline symptomatology. Our results revealed that participants with a more negative attachment-derived self-model showed increased brain activity during positive and negative adjective evaluation regarding the self, but decreased brain activity during negative adjective evaluation regarding a close other, in bilateral amygdala/parahippocampus, bilateral anterior temporal pole/anterior superior temporal gyrus, and left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. These findings suggest that a low positivity of the self-concept characteristic for the attachment anxiety dimension may influence neural information processing, but in opposite directions when it comes to self- versus (close) other-representations. We discuss our results in the framework of attachment theory and regarding their implications especially for adolescent social-emotional development and social integration. |
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