Self-referential Processing in the Adolescent Brain: Do Neural Self-Referential Processes Related to Adolescent Self-Concept Confer Risk for Depression?

Adolescence is an important developmental period in which self-concept stabilizes and depression develops. During early adolescence, self-concept becomes reliant on social comparison, leading to excessive self-focused attention that may contribute to risk for depression. Research has confirmed that negative global and social self-concept are closely related to the development of depressive symptoms during adolescence. Affective neuroscience studies demonstrate that there is a neural network underlying the processing of self-related information, yet little is known about how its function is associated with subjective feelings of self-concept and risk for depression in adolescence. The current study examined whether neural functioning during negative, compared to positive, self-referential processing is associated with early-adolescent girls’ ratings of global and social self-concept and depressive symptoms at two timepoints. The final sample included 39 girls (Myrs=12.18, SD=.77) who reported on their social and global self-concept using a questionnaire and during a functional neuroimaging task in which they responded whether they believed positive and negative personality trait words were true about them. Girls reported on depressive symptoms at the time of the scan and 6-months later. Results showed that greater social self-competence was related to greater neural activation when processing self-negative, relative to self-positive, adjectives in the PCC/precuneus, superior temporal gyrus/temporoparietal junction, and inferior parietal lobe. More positive self-perceptions during the imaging task were related to greater activation to self-positive>self-negative in the visual association area. More depressive symptoms at T1 were associated with greater activation to self-negative>self-positive in the caudate/putamen, dorsal anterior cingulate/supplementary motor area, and somatosensory cortex/inferior parietal cortex, while more symptoms at T2 were related to greater insula activation. Indirect effects analyses revealed that more negative self-perceptions during the fMRI task explained the positive association between dorsal medial prefrontal cortex activity in response to negative traits and depressive symptoms. This may suggest that youth with hyperactivation in the dMPFC during self-referential processing of negative traits may be excessively focused on negative self-related information. Findings highlight how differential neural processing of negative versus positive self-relevant information directly maps onto behavioral reports of self-concept during adolescence and how these brain-behavior associations may contribute to depression in early-adolescence