Sociocultural and environmental influence on self and social processing and mental health in adolescence in the UK and Spain

Adolescence is considered a period of social reorientation in which people start to explore novel social surroundings, expanding their relationships with peers and spending less time with parents (Larson et al., 1996). As adolescents become better able to understand the mental states of other people (Dumontheil et al., 2010), they become more concerned with what others think of them and are more likely to use these judgments to inform what they think of themselves (van der Aar, 2018).

In parallel, many mental health issues have their onset in adolescence (Viner et al., 2012), which may in part be related to the changes in self and social cognitive processing that occur during this period (Choudhury, 2010). It has been proposed that adolescence is a sensitive period for sociocultural processing (Mills & Blakemore, 2014), and therefore social, cultural and environmental contextual factors may play an important role in the maturation of self and social cognitive processing, which may in turn become sources of risk or resilience to mental illnesses that have their onset during adolescence.

This multidisciplinary PhD will integrate experimental tasks, questionnaires and methods to characterize environment-specific factors, in a new adolescent sample in the UK and existing longitudinal cohort data from cohorts in the UK and Spain to investigate the questions: How do sociocultural and environmental factors affect core self-evaluations of adolescents in the UK and Spain, and how are these sources of risk and resilience to mental health outcomes during adolescence?

UK behavioural study. This study will investigate how social cohesion (e.g. social contacts and neighbourhood indicators of disadvantage) is related to changes in self and social processing, and how these might be sources of resilience to mental health outcomes. We will recruit around 300 participants ages 11 to 18-years in the UK and will use validated questionnaires and tasks to measure: peer relationships and connectedness to family, various mental health outcomes, core self-evaluations, self-descriptiveness and self-concept and perspective taking ability.

We will also include objective sociodemographic measures (e.g. Index of Multiple Deprivation; IMD) as well as subjective measures (e.g. perceived relative socioeconomic status) and obtain measures of greenspace and air and noise pollution by relating participant postcodes to governmental area-level data.

Cohort studies. We will investigate the relationship between environmental and sociodemographic factors and the development of mental health-related outcomes throughout adolescence, and how these are moderated by psychosocial factors. We will employ the Spanish INMA and the UK Understanding Society cohort studies, to explore how demographic measures of poverty, including parental education and area-level deprivation measures, and specific environmental factors, such as availability and use of greenspace, predict mental health outcomes.

We will also investigate influences of social support and relationships and compare these across both cultures.

Mixed effects models will investigate how sociocultural and environmental factors predict mental health difficulties, and how this relationship can be modulated by differences in socio-cognitive processing. We predict that objective and subjective indicators of disadvantage will have a detrimental effect on mental health, and that there will be a protective role of social relationships in this effect.

This might be due to resilience related to more malleable and positive core self-concepts that might be induced by strong social relationships, as well as better perspective taking abilities. We also predict that there might be a protective role of peer and family support in this relationship, especially in cultures that emphasize the development of adolescents within the family structure (e.g. Spain).