Acute isolation is associated with increased reward seeking and reward learning in human adolescents.

Social connection, a basic human need, is vital during adolescence. How a lack of connection impacts adolescent behaviour is unclear. To address this question, we employed experimental short-term isolation with and without access to virtual social interactions (iso total; iso with media; order counterbalanced, both compared to a separate baseline session).

Transactional models of depression via caregiver-child interactions: Evaluating conflict resolution as a source of resilience in adversity-exposed families.

Background: Youth who experienced early life caregiving adversity (ECA) are at increased risk for developing depression, which may in part reflect a heightened vulnerability to the deleterious effects of later-life stressors, including poor caregiver mental health and interpersonal conflict. Transactional models posit bidirectional influences between caregivers and children that operate over development and more proximally across interactions.

Objective: To address gaps in knowledge of bidirectional influences between caregivers and children, and differences therein based on ECA exposure, we evaluated the effects of caregiver and child depressive symptoms on their own and each other's emotion-related behavior during conflict resolution, and the effects of their behavior on their own and each other's changes in affect expression from conflict resolution to a recovery task.

The mind, brain, and body study: A protocol for examining the effects of the gut-brain-immune axis on internalizing symptoms in youth exposed to caregiving-related early adversity.

Experiences of caregiving-related adversity are common and one of the strongest predictors of internalizing psychopathology (i.e., anxiety and depression).

Characteristics of the oral microbiome in youth exposed to caregiving adversity.

Caregiving adversity (CA) exposure is robustly linked to increased risk for poor oral, physical, and mental health outcomes. Increasingly, the gut microbiome has garnered interest as a contributor to risk for and resilience to such health outcomes in CA-exposed individuals. Though often overlooked, the microbiome of CA-exposed individuals may be just as important a contributor to health outcomes as the gut microbiome.

Sensitivity and specificity in affective and social learning in adolescence.

Adolescence is a period of heightened affective and social sensitivity. In this review we address how this increased sensitivity influences associative learning. Based on recent evidence from human and rodent studies, as well as advances in computational biology, we suggest that, compared to other age groups, adolescents show features of heightened Pavlovian learning but tend to perform worse than adults at instrumental learning.

Sometimes "we" can help: parents' pronoun use buffers fear and anxiety transmission.

Background And Objectives: Parents' natural language when describing health-related threats reflects parents' cognitions that may shape their transmission of anxiety and fear. Parents' greater communal focus (i.e.

Curiosity: The effects of feedback and confidence on the desire to know.

In 10 experiments, we investigated the relations among curiosity and people's confidence in their answers to general information questions after receiving different kinds of feedback: yes/no feedback, true or false informational feedback under uncertainty, or no feedback. The results showed that when people had given a correct answer, yes/no feedback resulted in a near complete loss of curiosity. Upon learning they had made an error via yes/no feedback, curiosity increased, especially for high-confidence errors.

Virtual social interaction and loneliness among emerging adults amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

Many social activities moved online during the global COVID-19 pandemic, yet research investigating whether virtual social interactions facilitate social connectedness has been inconclusive. In this study, participants completed online questionnaires assessing objective social isolation, loneliness, mental health, and virtual social interactions. There was clear evidence for worsening mental health among emerging adults during the COVID-19 pandemic characterized by large increases in depressive symptoms (mean increase = 8.

Revealing the self in a digital world: a systematic review of adolescent online and offline self-disclosure.

Adolescence is an important stage of social development. While adolescents are prominent adopters of social media, little is known about whether digital interactions can fulfil the social needs of this age group. Here, we focus on one component of social interaction: self-disclosure.

Revealing the self in a digital world: A systematic review of adolescent online and offline self-disclosure.

Adolescence is an important stage of social development. While adolescents are prominent adopters of social media, little is known about whether digital interactions can fulfil the social needs of this age group. Here, we focus on one component of social interaction: self-disclosure.

Parenting under pressure: Parental transmission and buffering of child fear during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The current study investigated the impacts of parental behaviors (threat communication and comforting) on children's COVID-19 fears and whether effects differed by age. Caregivers of 283 children (5.5-17 years, M = 10.

Parenting under pressure: A mixed-methods investigation of the impact of COVID-19 on family life.

Background: development and implementation of effective family-based psychosocial intervention and treatment strategies during COVID-19 will require a detailed understanding of how the virus has impacted the lives of families.

Methods: written reports on the life impacts of COVID-19 for parents ( = 56) and their children ( = 43), and a questionnaire assessing parent positive and negative affect, were collected between April and May 2020. An inductive approach was used to identify themes in written reports, followed by statistical analysis to explore associations between themes and changes in parent positive and negative affect pre- and post-writing.