Probing Puberty as a Source of Developmental Change in Neural Response to Emotional Faces in Early Adolescence

Pubertal development is theorized to shape the brain's response to socio-emotional information in the environment. Large-scale longitudinal studies, such as the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) study, provide the opportunity to examine the association between pubertal maturation and within-person changes in neural activation to emotional stimuli over time. Leveraging ABCD data (n = 9648), the current study examines the coupling between parent-reported pubertal development and changes in youth's brain response to emotional faces in an emotional n-back task (during functional magnetic resonance imaging) across two timepoints (2 years apart). Bivariate latent change score models were fit to regions of interest canonically involved in face processing (fusiform), emotional/motivational salience (amygdala, nucleus accumbens, orbitofrontal cortex [OFC]), and social cognition (temporoparietal junction [TPJ]) to determine the associations between baseline pubertal status and neural response, and rate of change in either variable across time. Results point to both concurrent and longitudinal associations between pubertal maturation and neural activation to emotional faces in regions involved in processing emotional and social information (amygdala, TPJ, accumbens, OFC) but not basic facial processing (fusiform). These findings highlight pubertal maturation as a potential mechanism for change in neural response to emotional information during the transition from childhood to adolescence.