Social safety signals – Neurodevelopmental dynamics of social threat regulation

Threat- and anxiety related disorders limit the life of millions of people around the world.

Experimental research has focused on understanding dysfunctions in the neural threat circuitry in the adult brain and has resulted in clinical treatments that have been implemented based on their efficacy in adult neural frameworks.

However, the majority of adults met diagnostic criteria for these disorders already as adolescents, and accumulating evidence suggests that there are dramatic developmental changes in threat regulation that occur in the transition from childhood to adolescence.

These changes might render standard treatments ineffective, warranting new treatment approaches that are tailored to be effective in youth.

This project will address this by capitalizing on the fact that adolescence represents a unique transitional period during which neuronal circuits are particularly susceptible to social learning processes and integrate this knowledge with well-established models of threat processing.

In doing so, the project will use advanced functional imaging methods to delineate how social learning can optimize threat regulation in adolescents and describe how the underlying social treat regulation circuitry is influenced by individual differences in exposure to early-life stress.

This approach can advance our understanding of the integration of social processes and basic learning mechanisms and inform novel treatments tailored for adolescents to allow for early intervention.