Neural sensitivity to peer hierarchies: Risks for depressive symptoms for low status adolescents

Popularity is increasingly salient and impactful in adolescence, and unpopular youth are at significantly greater risk of experiencing depressive symptoms. However, adolescents can vary in their neural sensitivity to social stimuli, such that some adolescents may be more impacted by social status than others. We examined whether adolescents' neural sensitivity to popular and unpopular peers moderates the extent that their own social status is related to trajectories of depressive symptoms across 5 years (6th-10th grades). During an fMRI scan, adolescents from the southeastern United States (n = 116, 61 female, 29% White Non-Hispanic, 36% Hispanic, 22% Black/African American, 11% multiracial, 2% other; M_age = 13.59, SD = 0.59) viewed pictures of their popular and unpopular classmates based on sociometric nominations from their social networks. Results indicated that heightened amygdala sensitivity to unpopular peers moderated the relations between participants' own popularity and their depressive symptoms, leading to increased depressive symptoms for unpopular youth. These findings suggest that individual differences in sensitivity to peer hierarchies impact the degree to which adolescents are negatively impacted by their own level of popularity.