Neural correlates of self-evaluation in relation to age and pubertal development in early adolescent girls

Abstract

Early adolescence is marked by puberty, and is also a time of flux in self-perception. However, there is limited research on the neural correlates of self-evaluation in relation to pubertal development. The current study examined relationships between neural activation during self-evaluation of social traits and maturation (age and pubertal development) in a community sample of female adolescents. Participants (N = 143; age M = 11.65, range = 10.0-13.0) completed a functional MRI task in which they judged the self-descriptiveness of adjectives for prosocial, antisocial and social status-related traits. Pubertal development was based on self-report, and was also examined using morning salivary testosterone, dehydroepiandrosterone, and estradiol. Contrary to preregistered hypotheses, neither age nor pubertal development were related to neural activation during self-evaluation. We further examined whether activation in two regions-of-interest, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) and perigenual anterior cingulate (pgACC), was associated with trial-level self-evaluative behavior. In line with preregistered hypotheses, higher vmPFC and pgACC activation during self-evaluation were both associated with a higher probability of endorsing negative adjectives, and a lower probability of endorsing positive adjectives. Future studies should examine neural trajectories of self-evaluation longitudinally, and investigate the predictive value of the neural correlates of self-evaluation for adolescent mental health.

Keywords: Activation; Adolescence; Hormones; Puberty; Self-concept; fMRI.

Fig. 1

Main effects of task, thresholded at voxelwise p_fwe<.01 to illustrate the core self-evaluation related areas. Positive (yellow-red) clusters are self > change and negative (blue) clusters are change > self. (For interpretation of the references to colour in this figure legend, the reader is referred to the web version of this article).

Fig. 2

Interactions between adjective type and DHEA (left) and testosterone (right). Top panels show clusters significant at p_fwe<.05. Bottom panels are individual parameter estimates averaged across clusters for each adjective type and plotted against hormone level.

Fig. 3

Predicted response probabilities by valence of the adjective, plotted against the mean parameter estimates in the perigenual anterior cingulate cortex (pgACC) and in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC).