Department of Psychology, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR, USA.
Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci. 2012 Jan;7(1):35-43. doi: 10.1093/scan/nsr066.
Adolescence is marked by profound psychosocial and physiological changes. Although investigations into the interactions between these forces have begun to shed light on the neural correlates of affective processing during the transition to adolescence, relatively little is known about the relationship between pubertal development and emotion perception at the neural level. In the current longitudinal study, 45 neurotypical participants were shown affective facial displays while undergoing fMRI, at ages 10 and 13. Neural responses to emotional expressions at both time points were then correlated with a self-report measure of pubertal development, revealing positive associations with activity in amygdala, thalamus and visual cortical areas at age 10 that increased in magnitude and extent by age 13. At the latter time point, pubertal development was additionally correlated with enhanced responses to faces in temporal pole, ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (PFC) and dorsomedial PFC. Longitudinal comparisons revealed that the relationships between pubertal development and activity in the amygdala, hippocampus and temporal pole were significantly stronger during early adolescence than late childhood. These results suggest that pubertal development per se is linked to neural processing of socioemotional stimuli, particularly with respect to the integration of complex perceptual input and higher order cortical processing of affective content.
青春期以深刻的心理社会和生理变化为标志。虽然对这些力量之间的相互作用的研究已经开始揭示青春期过渡期间情感处理的神经相关性，但关于青春期发育和神经水平上的情绪感知之间的关系知之甚少。在当前的纵向研究中，45 名神经典型参与者在 10 岁和 13 岁时接受 fMRI 检查，观看了情感面部表情。然后，将两个时间点的神经反应与青春期发育的自我报告测量相关联，结果表明 10 岁时杏仁核、丘脑和视觉皮层区域的活动与积极相关，到 13 岁时其程度和范围增加。在后者的时间点，青春期发育还与颞极、腹外侧前额叶皮层 (PFC) 和背内侧 PFC 中对面孔的反应增强相关。纵向比较表明，青春期发育与杏仁核、海马体和颞极活动之间的关系在青春期早期比在儿童晚期更强。这些结果表明，青春期发育本身与社会情感刺激的神经处理有关，特别是与复杂感知输入的整合和情感内容的高级皮质处理有关。
