How do social threat and reward processes develop during adolescence? 

Sensitivity to social threat and reward, particularly social threat and reward from peers, is essential for helping adolescents navigate increasingly complex social environments and fulfill tasks critical of this developmental period (e.g., individuation, joining peer groups). However, heightened neural and behavioral sensitivity to social threat, as well as deficits in sensitivity to social reward, have been linked to psychopathology, including anxiety and depression, in adolescents. The goal of my research in this area is three-fold:

• First, I aim to develop and test ecologically-valid methods to study social threat and reward processes (e.g., social reward learning, emotional and neural responses to social threat and reward) in adolescence.

• Second, I use these methods (including fMRI and ecological momentary assessment) to characterize social threat and reward processes occurring in the brain, in daily life, and on social media.

• Third, I link these methods to characterize brain-behavior associations supporting the development of social threat and reward sensitivity in childhood and adolescence. For example, I have studied how brain responses to social threat and reward from peers are associated with how early adolescent girls perceive and respond to social threat and reward in their real worlds (Sequeira et al., 2021, SCAN; Sequeira, Rosen, et al., 2021, DCN).

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What is the role of reward processes (especially social reward processes) in the development of anxiety disorders and suicidal thoughts and behaviors during adolescence?

Anxiety disorders have historically been studied in relation to altered threat sensitivity, but despite decades of research on threat-related pathophysiological mechanisms of anxiety development, we are only effectively treating 50-60% of youth with anxiety disorders presenting for treatment. This arm of my research program aims to move beyond threat to consider more closely how anxiety develops in relation to reward systems (e.g., Sequeira et al., 2021, AJP; Sequeira et al., 2023, JAD). In this domain, I study how different aspects of reward processing at multiple units of analysis (e.g., self-reported positive affect, neural responses to rewards, attention bias to rewards) support the development of anxiety during adolescence. The goal of this research is to elucidate the biobehavioral mechanisms contributing to anxiety development in adolescence to identify novel targets for intervention.

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Additionally, during my clinical internship, I became struck by the number of adolescents who presented to inpatient and partial hospitalization programs with suicidal thoughts and behaviors (STBs) but denied most other depression symptoms. Many of these youth reported significant symptoms of anxiety, often social anxiety. This experience strengthened my interest in better understanding reward-related factors contributing to STBs in youth with primary anxiety disorders. Towards this goal, I am currently assessing reward learning and social anxiety symptoms in a sample of youth with STBs. Additionally, I was recently awarded a grant from the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention (AFSP) to study social anhedonia in the daily lives of teens with STBs using EMA and behavioral measures; this project will be one focus of my lab at UVa for the next couple years.