It is possible that the response to experiencing of a positive violation of expectations compared to a non-violation of expectations is not reflected in the adult literature because adults are less sensitive to uncertainty in social contexts compared to adolescents . Thus, perhaps meeting social expectations in adolescence is [developmentally] a phenotypically unique phenomenon. Additionally, we suggest it may be likely that if adolescents receive unexpected positive feedback from an unknown peer compared to a known friend, it would result in self-reported happiness , as they would have fewer relationship priors on which to base their expectations. Notably, adolescents spend more time with known peers than unknown peers, so a task that manipulates statements from a known peer may elicit stronger and perhaps different behavioral and neural responses from an adolescent than if the statements were from someone the adolescent did not know well. We propose that tasks assessing responses to social expectations in adolescents should consider the nature of the relationship of the peer , as the response of the target may vary significantly based on prior knowledge of the relationship. Our neuroimaging results demonstrate that adolescents recruit more affective circuitry when processing social violations of expectations compared to nonsocial violations of expectations. This finding is consistent with literature suggesting greater subcortical recruitment in adolescents when they receive social compared to non-social feedback . Additionally,plant benches adolescents recruited the VS and insula differentially when they experienced positive compared to negative violations of expectations.

Positive social violations compared to social negative violations also yielded activation in the VS, insula, and subACC. While we did not find significant behavior associated with neural activation, we posit that the increased happiness participants reported for positive compared to negative social violations suggests participants were happier and recruited the VS when they experienced positive social violations of expectations. When they experienced negative social violations of expectations, they reported feeling less happy by comparison and recruited the subACC and the insula. These results highlight important associations in how adolescents report feeling and the neural regions recruited when they learn new social information from someone they care to receive social feedback from. Finally, participants who had been more accurate in their expectations of what their friend would report and what their friend reported in the Friendship Questionnaire, and who had fewer total differences between their expectations and their friend’s reported responses reported feeling happier after experiencing a positive violation of expectations. This result supports our hypothesis that friendship closeness or quality may account for the differences exhibited in behavior and self-report when participants experienced a violation of their expectation. Furthermore, adolescents who reported greater friendship duration were particularly happy when expectations were met, suggesting they may be more knowledgeable about their friendship and felt more relief knowing they were accurate in their expectations. This supports our rationale to include a friend as a peer in the study design—as this addition suggests response to a peer may be specific to the closeness of the relationship given that behavioral and neural responses between adolescents who were not as close were different by comparison.

While our study has notable strengths, we acknowledge a few caveats.Thus, it was more challenging to assess positive violations of expectations compared to negative violations of expectations. Future research in this area should consider how to increase values of positive social violations of expectations to test this effect more precisely. Additionally, we posit that responses to violations of expectations in a friendship of a wide range may encompass thought processes that a restricted range may avoid. Indeed, when we restrict our analyses to a range of VoE-4 to VoE+4 values of violations, we find significant differences in behavior as we predicted, and more robust differences in self-report and neural recruitment. However, we recognize that by restricting our analyses, we also limit the amount of statistical power associated with our questions, and remove any significant responses to violations that may lend themselves to future responses. Finally, we found few significant differences between social and non-social trials in our task, perhaps due to the limited number of non-social items. Future research should consider expanding on non-social items to further probe these differences. To our knowledge, the present study is the first to highlight differences in adolescent responses to social feedback from a friend based on valence and VoE value. Understanding these differences is important, as differential feedback has been known to influence behavior, especially in adolescence, as teenagers’ behaviors can be reflective of their diminished cognitive control in affective situations. Moreover, most adolescent peer interactions occur with friends, and adolescents are particularly keen on social acceptance. Thus, by incorporating “authentic” feedback participants are actually interested in outside of the laboratory, we can elucidate differences that may not otherwise appear had we used a confederate or virtual peer.

Learning new social information is critical during adolescence, as it is a time in development spent largely with friends. While research has determined receiving unexpected positive feedback results in more approach behaviors and receiving unexpected negative feedback results in more avoid behaviors , our study finds that receiving expected social feedback may result in greater approach behaviors, as it may be more reinforcing,gardening rack or rewarding than unexpected positive social feedback. We found that adolescents who are close friends prefer to learn they were correct in their expectations about their friendship, even if their friend reports something better than they expected; while adolescents who are not as close prefer to learn something better than expected and take longer to respond—perhaps indicating they are learning something new about someone they know only somewhat well. We suggest that learning unexpected social information at this age can be discordant with internal representations, which perhaps allows for it to be more easily remembered. However, we conclude that any new and unexpected social information garnered during this age about a close friendship may be disruptive to the cognitive harmony that a teenager has regarding his/her friendship, which may have implications for adolescent behavior in affective contexts. Adolescence marks a time of increased exploration and socialization with peers, where teenagers take risks more than other age groups, and often do so in the presence of their peers . While many of the risks they take lead to positive long-term outcomes , and finding a romantic partner, some can lead to negative outcomes, including health compromising behaviors such as getting into automobile accidents , and substance use . It has been proposed that a cascade of developmental changes in the brain during adolescence underlie these behaviors . As the brain develops during adolescence, there is a surge in dopamine in the limbic system coupled with a lack of functional connectivity with the prefrontal cortex . Thus, adolescents are more inclined to engage in reward-related activities, in part because they demonstrate diminished cognitive control and an increased neural response to reward . The same neural circuitry that is involved in reward processing also processes prediction error , defined as the neural computation of the difference between the expectation of an event and its actual outcome. PEs are positive or rewarding in nature when the actual outcome is better than the expected outcome and negative when the actual outcome in worse than the expected outcome. Our research is consistent with a large literature on PE in demonstrating that the neural circuitry implicated in reward PE —a region rich in dopamine receptors is also implicated in positive social violations of expectations , suggesting the neural processing of basic reward learning extends to the experience of positive social VoE in adolescence . While researchers have associated real-world behaviors with neural activation to reward PE in adults , none have determined whether an association exists between positive social VoE and real-world behaviors in adolescents. It is especially important to explore if the same processes are involved for basic reward and positive social processing in adolescents, as we may expect adolescents who demonstrate enhanced engagement of these processes to partake in more rewarding activities. Many adolescents in the United States have had social experiences in which they have been offered or have used licit/illicit substances as risky). Research indicates that nationwide, 18.1% of adolescents have had alcohol prior to age 13, and 34.9% have had a drink at least once in the past month .

Alcohol and drug induced deaths are one of the most avoidable causes of accident and death in the United States . Like most risk taking behaviors, adolescents are more likely to use substances with their peers or in social settings , suggesting that substance use in adolescence is a social behavior. Additionally, the types of substances adolescents use varies greatly, though most commonly, adolescents tend to use alcohol and tobacco and are least likely to use heroin —as the former is perceived as having fewer severe consequences and is more socially acceptable.Recently, researchers have associated the basic reward processes involved in PE to vulnerability to substance addiction in adults , though none have associated response to VoE with self-reported substance use in adolescents. The goal of this study was to elucidate the relation between the rewarding experience of learning social information from a friend to self-reported risky and rewarding social behaviors in adolescents with the aim of identifying whether the ventral striatum activation evinced in social VoE is associated with the extent to which adolescents use substances. Because previous research has demonstrated a positive association between ventral striatal response to reward PE in adults and their substance use behaviors, we hypothesize adolescents who demonstrate greater ventral striatal activation in response to positive social violations of expectations will also report greater and more frequent use of substances than those who demonstrate decreased VS recruitment. Twenty-six participants completed the initial fMRI study that assessed behavioral and neurobiological responses to social violations of expectations. Nineteen adolescents were re-enrolled in the behavioral follow-up study ; primary reason for subject attrition was college attendance out of state. The average amount of time that elapsed from participation in the first study to the second was 613.11 days . The participant group was ethnically diverse , and did not differ by socioeconomic status— measured as average level of parental education obtained in the household = 6.22, p = .62.Target participants completed self-report surveys that assessed their friendship status with the friend that completed Study 1 with them; rejection sensitivity ; resistance to peer influence ; and risk taking and substance use behaviors , ; Ontario Student Drug Use and Health Survey , . Friendship status questions asked participants how close they remembered being friends with the friend who accompanied them at Study 1, and how close they were at Study 2. Participants responded on a Likert scale from 1 to 5 . A Friendship Difference Score was calculated by subtracting the friendship status score reported from Study 1 from the friendship status score reported from Study 2 to determine whether participants were closer or less-close between Study 1 and Study 2. Items from the RSQ first asked participants how concerned or anxious they would be about someone’s response to a question ; followed by asking them how they thought a person would respond on a scale of 1 to 6 . Participants responded to 18 pairs of questions prior to proceeding to the OSDUHS. Items from the OSDUHS asked participants about their demographic information and behavioral information . Items pertaining to their substance use requested history of use, frequency of use in the past 12 months, frequency of use in the past 4 weeks, and how usage impacted daily life. Participants responded by selecting an answer that best corresponded to their habits. A sample item read, “In the last 12 months, how often did you use cannabis ?” Participants responded by selecting one of the following: “1 or 2 times; 3-5 times; 6-9 times; 10-19 times; 20-39 times; 40 or more times; used but not in the last 12 months; never used in lifetime; don’t know what cannabis is.” Items pertaining to their risk taking behavior asked about activities they participated in while they or a peer was under the influence.