Characterizing Negative Affect Across Adolescence: Evidence from Cross-Sectional, Longitudinal, and Neuroimaging Approaches

Abstract

During healthy adolescent development, there is a downward shift in emotional experience in the direction of more frequent negative and less frequent positive states. While this increase in negative emotional experience, or negative affect, is thought to be developmentally normative, sustained increases in negative affect during developmental years can result in an increased risk for the development of psychopathology that often persists into adulthood. However, despite these long-term health risks, negative affective experiences and their relationships with well-being outcomes and underlying neurodevelopmental changes are poorly understood. In this dissertation, we aim to address this gap in the literature by offering a granular characterization of negative affective experiences and their correlates using a combination of cross-sectional, longitudinal, and neuroimaging approaches. In Study 1, we use a data-driven approach to identify qualitatively different types of negative affective experiences and show that these distinct feeling states show unique age-related trends and specific relationships with functional outcomes in a cross-sectional sample. In Study 2, we explore within-person affect trajectories over time and discover three, externally valid subtypes of age-related changes in affect within our longitudinal sample, with some individuals showing steady levels of negative affect across adolescence with others showing sharp increases. In Study 3, we explore the neural correlates of these negative affective experiences and find that connectivity within and between higher-order resting-state networks significantly predicts both concurrent levels of negative affect and longitudinal negative affect trajectories. All studies were conducted using data from the Human Connectome Project in Development, allowing us to easily link our neural, cross-sectional, and longitudinal findings. Together, these results reveal that different precise feeling states within broad category of negative valence show distinct relationships across well-being and neural dimensions, underscoring the importance of characterizing affective experiences at this granular level in youth samples. Our work identifies promising targets for future translational work to extend our findings and elucidate the links between normative experiences of negative affect and the development of emotion-related symptoms and psychopathologies.