Age-related differences in neural activation and functional connectivity during the processing of vocal prosody in adole
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Age-related differences in neural activation and functional connectivity during the processing of vocal prosody in adolescence Michele Morningstar 1,2 & Whitney I. Mattson 1 & Joseph Venticinque 1 & Stanley Singer Jr & Bhavani Selvaraj 3 & Houchun H. Hu 3 & Eric E. Nelson 1,2
# The Psychonomic Society, Inc. 2019
Abstract The ability to recognize others’ emotions based on vocal emotional prosody follows a protracted developmental trajectory during adolescence. However, little is known about the neural mechanisms supporting this maturation. The current study investigated age-related differences in neural activation during a vocal emotion recognition (ER) task. Listeners aged 8 to 19 years old completed the vocal ER task while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging. The task of categorizing vocal emotional prosody elicited activation primarily in temporal and frontal areas. Age was associated with a) greater activation in regions in the superior, middle, and inferior frontal gyri, b) greater functional connectivity between the left precentral and inferior frontal gyri and regions in the bilateral insula and temporo-parietal junction, and c) greater fractional anisotropy in the superior longitudinal fasciculus, which connects frontal areas to posterior temporo-parietal regions. Many of these age-related differences in brain activation and connectivity were associated with better performance on the ER task. Increased activation in, and connectivity between, areas typically involved in language processing and social cognition may facilitate the development of vocal ER skills in adolescence. Keywords Adolescence . Emotional prosody . Vocal . Emotion recognition . Functional connectivity . Neural activation Adolescence is a time of intensive changes to youth’s brain structure and function, cognitive capacities, and socioemotional processing (Crone & Dahl, 2012; Gogtay et al., 2004; Nelson et al., 2005). Neural maturation in adolescence is evidenced by regional reductions in gray matter and global increases in white matter (Blakemore & Choudhury, 2006; Paus et al., 2011), enhanced integrity of white matter tracts (Mohammad & Nashaat, 2017; Schmithorst et al., 2002), and heightened functional network formation (Cohen Kadosh et al., 2010; Fair et al., 2009). Alongside this pattern of neural development, marked changes in social behaviour also emerge: adolescents are increasingly oriented towards * Michele Morningstar [email protected] 1
Center for Biobehavioral Health, Nationwide Children’s Hospital, Near East Office Building, 431 S. 18th St., Columbus, OH 43205, USA
2
Department of Pediatrics, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA
3
Department of Radiology, Nationwide Children’s Hospital, 700 Children’s Drive, Columbus, OH 43205, USA
their peers (Larson et al., 1996; Nelson et al., 2005) and begin to develop complex and nuanced social relationships (Furman & Buhrmester, 1992; Güroğlu, van den Bos, & Crone, 2014). Importantly, both the neural and behavioural maturation that o
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