Mallory J. Feldman

Neighborhood disadvantage encompasses multiple co‐occurring adversities, including threat and deprivation, yet its underlying neural mechanisms remain unclear. Applying a dimensional framework to neighborhood contexts may help clarify how distinct features of disadvantage influence brain development. Here, we used representational similarity analysis to investigate associations between adolescents’ neural representations of affective valence and neighborhood disadvantage, as measured by caregiver self‐report and the Area Deprivation Index (ADI). One hundred and twenty‐one adolescents aged 11 to 14 ( M _age = 12.81 years old, 52.07% female, 28.93% White non‐Hispanic) completed an emotional reactivity fMRI task. Caregiver‐reported neighborhood disadvantage was associated with greater representational similarity in right amygdala between negative and neutral images, while no such effect emerged for the ADI. Follow‐up analyses examined whether specific dimensions of disadvantage drove these effects. Although our measure did not map cleanly onto threat and deprivation dimensions, factor analyses revealed distinctions between social (e.g., crime, loitering) and physical (e.g., abandoned buildings, walkability) disadvantage‐related items; our preliminary findings suggest that the effects of reported overall neighborhood disadvantage may be driven by characteristics of the social environment. No associations between caregiver‐reported neighborhood disadvantage or ADI were observed for positive/neutral similarity. These findings provide preliminary evidence that neighborhood disadvantage may impact the amygdala's differentiation of negative and neutral stimuli during early adolescence, supporting the view that neighborhoods are a critical ecological context for development.

Human experience varies across contexts and individuals. Yet, psychological studies typically seek to constrain rather than discover structured variation. Here we leverage a powerful alternative approach to examine variability in emotional experience by sampling multimodally from individuals across a variety of contexts throughout their daily life and employing unsupervised machine learning to discover reliable, person-specific, multimodal patterns of experience. Healthy adults (N=97) completed 14 days of biologically-triggered experience sampling. Participants wore mobile cardiac monitors for 8 hours/day and reported their current valence, arousal, primary activity (e.g., relaxing), social context (e.g., alone), and emotional experience (via free report) when prompted. Prompts were initiated whenever a sustained change in cardiac activity (i.e., interbeat interval) was detected in the absence of gross bodily movements (and twice randomly each day). From each event (10,755 total, M=110.9 events/person), we extracted cardiovascular, postural, affective, and contextual features, which were submitted to integrative clustering to derive reliable patterns for each individual. Integrative clustering identified 313 multimodal patterns (M=3.2 patterns/person). The number of multimodal patterns varied across people, as did, to varying extents, their nature. The features that best distinguished patterns from one another also varied by person. Critically, all participants mapped many emotion labels to a single multimodal pattern, and a single emotion label to many patterns (i.e., a many-to-many mapping). Our comprehensive approach has broad utility for discovering structured variation in emotional experience ‘in the wild’ and provides further evidence that emotions are diverse populations of instances constructed by a perceiver in context.

This study examined longitudinal associations between early adolescents' emotional responding and use of cognitive reappraisal and the stability of their friendships with grade‐mate peers. The sample consisted of 152 early adolescents (53.29% female) in the sixth and seventh grades from three rural southeastern middle schools who provided school‐based peer nominations of their friendships. A stability index of adolescents' close friendships was computed from in‐school peer nominations collected at two time points, approximately 1 year apart. Adolescents self‐reported their levels of emotional responding, habitual use of cognitive reappraisal, and peer relationship quality during assessments. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we also examined the behavioral and neural correlates of emotional responding to negatively and positively valenced stimuli in an affective pictures task. We found that greater self‐reported emotional responding predicted less close school‐based friendship stability across 1 year, even controlling for adolescents' characterizations of global peer relationship quality. Self‐reported reappraisal use did not predict friendship stability. However, reappraisal use interacted with neural reactivity to negative stimuli in regions of visual cortex (ventral occipitotemporal cortex) to predict friendship stability; among adolescents reporting moderate to high reappraisal use, greater neural activation in ventral occipitotemporal cortex was associated with more stable friendships across 1 year, whereas among those reporting markedly low reappraisal use, greater activation was associated with fewer stable friendships. These findings provide valuable—albeit preliminary—insights about affective predictors of friendship stability during a life stage critical to social development.

Older adults tend to miss cues to others’ untrustworthiness and are disproportionally vulnerable to suboptimal social decisions. One overlooked mechanism of age-related change in interpersonal trust decisions is interoception, the perception of one’s own bodily signals. Interoception is important for well-calibrated trust decisions because somatic signals, or “gut-based” affective responses, can help inform who is trustworthy versus ill-intentioned. This study examined how individuals’ interoceptive accuracy and their interoceptive metacognitive ability moderated associations between age and interpersonal trust perceptions. During an in-lab session, 135 participants (aged 18–83) completed an interpersonal trust task and a heartbeat detection (HBD) task to measure their interoceptive accuracy (measured as d’) and interoceptive metacognition (measured as metacognitive sensitivity and metacognitive efficiency). We found that, as age increased, participants were more likely to rate normatively untrustworthy facial stimuli as more trustworthy, and this effect was stronger for those with lower interoceptive accuracy. We also found that among those with high interoceptive metacognition, older participants were more likely to rate normatively untrustworthy stimuli as more trustworthy, and trustworthy stimuli as more untrustworthy. Results from this study suggest bodily cues may provide information about others’ trustworthiness, and at older age, those who do not perceive their own bodily signals accurately are also likely to make errors in interpersonal decisions. As adults develop, better interoceptive metacognition may reflect a tendency to discount affective responses during decision making.

Growing evidence suggests that social contexts may prompt qualitatively distinct experiences of emotions than nonsocial contexts. In this study of people's naturalistic daily emotional experiences, we examined in adults with and without major depressive disorder (MDD) whether experiencing emotions in a social context (with others) versus nonsocial context (without others) was associated with greater emotional clarity and attention to one's emotional experience (i.e., emotional awareness). Based on evidence that social stimuli are highly salient to social species, we predicted that interactions with social others-and especially close social others-would be associated with greater emotional awareness. We furthermore expected that individuals with MDD, who tend to have diminished emotional clarity and social deficits, might experience less emotional awareness in social settings than healthy controls. Across a 2-week experience sampling study that concluded in 2019, we assessed emotional awareness when people were interacting with others (vs. not) and interacting with close (vs. nonclose) others among adults with current MDD (n = 53), remitted MDD (n = 80), and healthy controls (n = 87). As expected, attention to emotion and emotional clarity were higher in social versus nonsocial contexts and when interacting with close versus nonclose others. Contrary to expectations that these effects would be weaker among those with current MDD, the current MDD group showed enhanced emotional clarity in social versus nonsocial settings compared to the other two groups. Insofar as emotional clarity is beneficial to well-being, these findings suggest those with MDD may especially benefit from social contexts. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Individuals befriend others who are similar to them. One important source of similarity in relationships is similarity in felt emotion. In the present study, we used novel methods to assess whether greater similarity in the multivoxel brain representation of affective stimuli was associated with adolescents’ proximity within real-world school-based social networks. We examined dyad-level neural similarity within a set of brain regions associated with the representation of affect including the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), amygdala, insula, and temporal pole. Greater proximity was associated with greater vmPFC neural similarity during pleasant and neutral experiences. Moreover, we used unsupervised clustering on social networks to identify groups of friends and observed that individuals from the same (versus different) friend groups were more likely to have greater vmPFC neural similarity during pleasant and negative experiences. These findings suggest that similarity in the multivoxel brain representation of affect may play an important role in adolescent friendships.

Social judgments-that others are kind or cruel, well intentioned, or conniving-can ease or disrupt social interactions. And yet a person's internal state can alter these judgments-a phenomenon known as affective realism. We examined the factors that contribute to, and mitigate, affective realism during a stressful interview. Using data collected between 2015 and 2019, we hypothesized and found that individuals' ability (N = 161; 57.6% female; 57.6% European American, 13.6% African American, 13.6% Asian American, 6.4% Latinx, 6.0% biracial, and 2.8% that identified with none or 1 + of the races presented; M_age = 19.20 years) to accurately perceive their own internal sensations (i.e., heartbeats) influenced whether they attributed their own heightened stress reactions (i.e., sympathetic nervous system reactivity) to the behavior of two impassive interviewers. Participants who were poor heartbeat detectors perceived their interviewers as less helpful, polite, or professional, and more apathetic, judgmental, and aggressive when experiencing heightened levels of cardiovascular sympathetic nervous system reactivity during their interview. Being aware of one's internal state may be one pathway to reducing bias in social perceptions in circumstances where such biases may lead us astray. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).