Department of Psychology, Queen's University, Kingston, ON K7L 3L3, Canada.
Center for Biobehavioral Health, Nationwide Children's Hospital, Columbus, OH 43205, USA.
Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci. 2022 Oct 3;17(10):890-903. doi: 10.1093/scan/nsac021.
Adolescence is associated with maturation of function within neural networks supporting the processing of social information. Previous longitudinal studies have established developmental influences on youth's neural response to facial displays of emotion. Given the increasing recognition of the importance of non-facial cues to social communication, we build on existing work by examining longitudinal change in neural response to vocal expressions of emotion in 8- to 19-year-old youth. Participants completed a vocal emotion recognition task at two timepoints (1 year apart) while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging. The right inferior frontal gyrus, right dorsal striatum and right precentral gyrus showed decreases in activation to emotional voices across timepoints, which may reflect focalization of response in these areas. Activation in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex was positively associated with age but was stable across timepoints. In addition, the slope of change across visits varied as a function of participants' age in the right temporo-parietal junction (TPJ): this pattern of activation across timepoints and age may reflect ongoing specialization of function across childhood and adolescence. Decreased activation in the striatum and TPJ across timepoints was associated with better emotion recognition accuracy. Findings suggest that specialization of function in social cognitive networks may support the growth of vocal emotion recognition skills across adolescence.
青春期与支持处理社会信息的神经网络功能成熟有关。先前的纵向研究已经确定了青少年对情绪面部表情的神经反应的发展影响。鉴于对面部表情以外的非面部线索在社会交流中的重要性的认识不断提高，我们通过检查 8 至 19 岁青少年对情绪声音的神经反应的纵向变化，在现有工作的基础上进一步研究。参与者在两次（相隔一年）进行功能磁共振成像的同时完成了一项声音情绪识别任务。在时间点上，右侧额下回、右侧背侧纹状体和右侧中央前回的激活减少，这可能反映了这些区域反应的集中化。背内侧前额皮质的激活与年龄呈正相关，但在时间点上是稳定的。此外，在右侧颞顶联合区（TPJ）中，参与者年龄的变化斜率因访问而异：这种随时间和年龄的激活模式可能反映了儿童期和青春期功能的持续专业化。随着时间的推移，纹状体和 TPJ 的激活减少与更好的情绪识别准确性有关。研究结果表明，社会认知网络功能的专业化可能支持青少年时期声音情绪识别技能的增长。
