Neural and behavioral signatures of social evaluation and adaptation in childhood and adolescence: The Leiden consortium on individual development (L-CID)

Abstract

The transition period between early childhood and late adolescence is characterized by pronounced changes in social competence, or the capacity for flexible social adaptation. Here, we propose that two processes, self-control and prosociality, are crucial for social adaptation following social evaluation. We present a neurobehavioral model showing commonalities in neural responses to experiences of social acceptance and rejection, and multiple pathways for responding to social context. The Leiden Consortium on Individual Development (L-CID) provides a comprehensive approach towards understanding the longitudinal developmental pathways of, and social enrichment effects on, social competence, taking into account potential differential effects of such enrichment. Using Neurosynth based brain maps we point towards the medial prefrontal cortex as an important region integrating social cognition, self-referential processing and self-control for learning to respond flexibly to changing social contexts. Based on their role in social evaluation processing, we suggest to examine medial prefrontal cortex connections with lateral prefrontal cortex and the ventral striatum as potential neural differential susceptibility markers, in addition to previously established markers of differential susceptibility.

Keywords: Brain development; Cognitive control; Differential susceptibility; Prosocial; Self regulation.

Fig. 1

(A) Windows of larger cortical reorganization in infancy/early childhood (0-10 years; based on Gilmore et al., 2018) and during adolescence (10-25-years; based on Tamnes et al., 2017). (B) Potential age-related windows of larger effects of differential susceptibility on social competence increasing the developmental differences between children with lower versus higher susceptibility.

Fig. 2

(A) LCID cohort design with 6 time points and overlapping waves. (B) Visualization of LCID cohort design with 6 time points and overlapping waves for studying social adaptation. Red marks indicate influence of the Covid-19 pandemic, which caused delays in assessments and required adaptation of home-based assessments to remote video assessments. (For interpretation of the references to colour in this figure legend, the reader is referred to the web version of this article).

Fig. 3

Conceptual model of the Leiden Consortium on Individual Development (L-CID) study. Social competence is examined in the context of social evaluation of self and other, for which experimental paradigms were developed. These social competence measures, as reflected in neural and behavioral responses, are expected to indicate social adaptation. This Figure focuses on experienced and observed social rejection, but similar processes may be in place for experienced and observed social acceptance.

Fig. 4

Overlapping neural activation in two social evaluation paradigms for (A) rejection and exclusion (superior medial PFC), (B) acceptance and inclusion (dorsal medial PFC), (C) social evaluation, and self-referential processing for social evaluation in general (acceptance & rejection vs neutral). The results are presented in Achterberg et al. (2018) and Van der Meulen et al. (2018) reporting on the same 7-9-year old participants of wave 1 of the middle childhood cohort (see Fig. 2, Fig. 3).

Fig. 5

SNAT-rejection and PCG-exclusion related superior medial PFC activity from data reported in Achterberg et al. (2018a) and Van der Meulen et al. (2018) in 7-9-year old participants showing correlated activity across two paradigms in superior mPFC. Included data come from the contrasts: rejection-fixation (Achterberg et al., 2018a) and exclusion-inclusion (Van der Meulen et al., 2018), r = .17, based on a sample size of n = 261. Data were only included when the participants met the inclusion criteria for both experimental tasks.

Fig. 6

Behavioral profiles based on combined profiles of self-protective responses (aggression following personal rejection) and prosocial behavior (helping following observed rejection).

Fig. 7

Four potential differential susceptibility markers on different levels of functioning. Differential polygenic scores are potentially the foundation for the three (endo-)phenotypical markers, but across development epigenetic changes in expression of the genes involved might result from environmental influences filtered through immune and neural reactivity or temperamental characteristics. childhood cohort (ECC, left) and middle childhood cohort (MCC, right).