Examining the Associations Between Puberty and Social Reorientation at the Neural Level

Social reorientation theory posits that puberty may facilitate changes in social relationships, such as spending less time with parents and heightened motivation towards peer relationships, by reorienting neural responses to prioritize peer social information. However, limited studies have investigated whether puberty predicts social reorientation at the neural level, in terms of neural responses to teens’ own parent and friend. The current study utilized participants’ own parent and friend as stimuli in a task completed while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging. 57 participants (65% female assigned-at-birth) aged 11 to 15 years were asked to rate how positive or negative they found recordings of their own parent and friend expressing different emotions (angry, happy, and neutral). Additionally, participants’ parents completed the Pubertal Development Scale, which was used to create a binary measure of pubertal development (early or late). Linear mixed-effects modelling revealed that adolescents rated their parents’ happy expressions as significantly more positive compared to their friends’ happy expressions. A multivariate, whole-brain analysis found a significant main effect of puberty in three regions within the visual association cortex and a main effect of emotion in nine regions that are associated with the social brain and salience network. There were no effects of relationship type (parents vs. friends) nor interaction with other variables in predicting neural response. Finally, activation in the superior temporal gyrus (STG) interacted with emotion to predict adolescents’ behavioural ratings: heightened activation of the STG was associated with differential ratings of emotional expressions. These findings suggest that pubertal development does not predict differential neural response to friends versus parents in 11- to 15-years old; replication in a larger sample size is needed before drawing stronger conclusions about social reorientation and its representation in the brain.

Department dc:contributor.department

Psychology

Year dc:date.issued

2025

Author dc:creator

• Bonar, Riley J.T.

Advisor dc:contributor.supervisor

• Morningstar, Michele

• Adolescence
• Neuroimaging
• Social Reorientation

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1974/35274

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:queensu.scholaris.ca:1974/35274