The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on neural and behavioral markers of mental health across child and adolescent development
1 - (Sym 114) The Affective Benefits of Exploration in Adolescence Depend on the Presence of Environmental Threat
Sunday, November 20, 2022
8:00 AM – 9:30 AM EST
Location: Skylobby, 16th Floor
Keywords: Adolescents, Child, Emotion Recommended Readings: Heller AS, Shi TC, Ezie CEC, Reneau TR, Gibbons C, Baez LM, Hartley CA (2020). Association between real-world experiential diversity and positive affect relates to hippocampal-striatal functional connectivity. Nature Neuroscience. 3(7):800-804. doi: 10.1038/s41593-020-0636-4. Sisk LM, Gee DG. Stress and adolescence: vulnerability and opportunity during a sensitive window of development. Curr Opin Psychol. 2021 Oct 23;44:286-292. doi: 10.1016/j.copsyc.2021.10.005. Epub ahead of print. PMID: 34818623. Sequeira, S. L., Silk, J. S., Hutchinson, E., Jones, N. P., & Ladouceur, C. D. (2021). Neural responses to social reward predict depressive symptoms in adolescent girls during the COVID-19 pandemic. Journal of pediatric psychology, 46(8), 915-926.
Associate Professor University of Miami Coral Gables, Florida
Humans continually face the decision to exploit a location with known properties or explore spaces of uncertain, but potentially greater value. Exploration exposes organisms to novel and diverse environments (i.e., experiential diversity), but these novel environments can also place the individual at risk for harm. Yet, exploration appears to also have beneficial psychological consequences, particularly during adolescence. For instance, in rodents, novelty results in increases in play, social affiliative behaviors, stress resilience, and optimistic evaluative biases. In humans, experiential diversity is linked to variation in positive emotion. Yet, whether the beneficial psychological consequences of real-world experiential diversity occur during development only when one’s environment is free of threat or whether environmental risk suppresses these benefits is unknown. To that end, COVID-19 elevated the threat of leaving one’s home by altering the risk-reward balance of exploration. In 632 adolescents, we synchronously recorded emotion, psychiatric symptoms, and real-world geospatial exploration via GPS, prior to, in the initial months of the pandemic, and again six months later to investigate how humans navigate an environment of uncertain threat and whether experiential diversity in such an environment remains subjectively rewarding. COVID-19 reduced overall exploration and subjective well-being. Yet, days of greater experiential diversity predicted higher positive emotion throughout the pandemic. However, the association between experiential diversity and positive affect was impacted by anxiety when threat uncertainty was at its peak. In the first days of the pandemic, when we knew little about the transmissibility and prognosis of a COVID-19 diagnosis, individuals reporting anxiety experienced no affective benefit to leaving the home. This study provides direct evidence of the importance of variability in one’s daily activities and physical environment for psychological well-being and suggests strategies for adolescents to mitigate the massive mental health challenges emerging in the wake of the ongoing pandemic.