| Summary: | A study investigated the neural correlates of anticipated peer evaluation in adolescence. Functional magnetic resonance imaging was used to assess neural correlates of social-cognition in 9- to- 17-year-olds, who evaluated how unfamiliar peers they had previously identified as being of high or low interest would assess them for an expected online chat session. Findings revealed differential age- and sex-related activation patterns in a number of regions previously linked to affective processing, including the ventral striatum, hippocampus, hypothalamus, and insula. Generally, activation patterns changed with age in older relative to younger females, whereas no association between activation patterns and age was found in males. Linking these neural response patterns to changes in adolescent social cognition augments theories of adolescent social development through improved neurobiological understanding of social behavior.
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