Social interpretation inflexibility moderates emotional reactions to social situations in children and adolescents

Networks of guilt, shame, pride, and disordered eating in youths show stability over time

Recent literature suggests that self-conscious emotions (i.e., shame, guilt, and pride) play an important role in increasing the risk for disordered eating behaviors and cognitions. Despite the increasing frequency and intensity of self-conscious emotions and of disordered eating behaviors and cognitions during childhood and adolescence, little is known about how self-conscious emotions are related to disordered eating during this age, or how stable these relations are over time. The present study utilized a network analysis approach to address these gaps. One hundred sixteen youths (ages 9-17) completed daily diaries every evening for 28 days (Nassessments = 3004) reporting their emotions and disordered eating behaviors and cognitions during a population-level stressor. We fitted a network for each of the 4 weeks to investigate the stability of the associations among shame, guilt, pride, and disordered eating across time. Specific self-conscious emotions clustered with different groups of disordered eating: pride was associated with restrictive eating, shame was uniquely associated with weight concerns, and guilt was more associated with binge-eating-related disordered eating. The 4 weekly networks were similar, indicating stability across time. Our findings emphasize the importance of investigating differential interactions among self-conscious emotions with disordered eating behaviors and cognitions to understand eating disorder risk in youth.

Back to Normal? Harnessing Long Short-term Memory Network to Examine the Associations Between Adolescent Social Interactions and Depressive Symptoms During Different Stages of COVID-19

Adolescence is a developmental period in which social interactions are critical for mental health. While the onset of COVID-19 significantly disrupted adolescents' social environments and mental health, it remains unclear how adolescents have adapted to later stages of the pandemic. We harnessed a machine learning architecture of Long Short-Term Memory recurrent networks (LSTM) with gradient-based feature importance, to model the association among daily social interactions and depressive symptoms during three stages of the pandemic. A year before COVID-19, 148 adolescents reported social interactions and depressive symptoms, every day for 21 days. One hundred sixteen of these youths completed a 28-day diary after schools closed due to COVID-19. Seventy-nine of these youths and additional 116 new participants completed a 28-day diary approximately a year into the pandemic. Our results show that LSTM successfully predicted depressive symptoms from at least a week of social interactions for all three waves (r2 > .70). Our study shows the utility of using an analytic approach that can identify temporal and nonlinear pathways through which social interactions may confer risk for depression. Our unique analysis of the importance of input features enabled us to interpret the association between social interactions and depressive symptoms. Collectively, we observed a return to pre-pandemic patterns a year into the pandemic, with reduced gender and age differences during the pandemic closures. This pattern suggests that the system of social influences in adolescence was affected by COVID-19, and that this effect was attenuated in more chronic stages of the pandemic.

Better social reversal learning is associated with a more social approach across time

Flexibly updating behaviors towards others is crucial for adaptive social functioning. Previous studies have found that difficulties in flexibly updating behaviors are associated with social anxiety (SA). However, it is unclear whether such difficulties relate to actual social behaviors. The current study investigated the relationships between negative-to-positive social reversal learning, social approach behavior, and SA across time. Participants (MTurk, Time 1 = 275, Time 2 = 126, 16 weeks later) completed a performance-based social reversal-learning task. In the initial phase, participants learned that interactions with certain individuals are associated with negative outcomes, whereas interactions with other individuals are associated with positive outcomes. In the reversal phase, these associations were reversed, requiring participants to update their behaviors. The relationships between the performance in the task, SA severity, and social approach behavior reported by participants were assessed cross-sectionally and longitudinally. We found that negative-to-positive updating was negatively associated with SA severity. Furthermore, negative-to-positive updating was positively correlated with social approach behavior, both cross-sectionally and prospectively. Hence, individuals with better negative-to-positive updating at Time 1 reported significantly more social approach behaviors across time. The results support the role of negative-to-positive updating as a mechanism associated with SA and social approach, advancing and refining interpersonal and cognitive theories of SA.