What scientists know—and don’t—about isolation and the teenage brain
Much of what scientists currently know about social isolation and the brain comes from two main sources, Tomova explains: behavioral studies of adolescent humans and brain imaging studies in adolescent animals, such as mice.
At the behavioral level, most studies find that social isolation is associated with adverse outcomes like increased anxiety and greater vulnerability to addiction. In animal studies, researchers have found that isolation is associated with changes in the prefrontal cortex, an area involved in higher- and social cognition, Tomova explains.
Part of this lack of human data stems from the current pace of social change. To understand how reduced social interaction affects brain development, scientists rely on longitudinal studies that follow large groups of children over many years, says Kaiser.
(This generation is facing a host of completely unique health threats.)
Only recently has such data begun to emerge, largely through the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study, the largest long-term study of teen brain development in the United States. Launched in 2016, the ABCD Study followed the development of nearly 12,000 teens across the U.S., tracking both biological data, such as brain scans, and behavioral information, such as socialization patterns or screen time.
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“The ABCD data is finally allowing researchers to explore the relationship between kids’ behaviors and brain development more fully,” says Caterina Stamoulis, an associate professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and principal investigator of the Computational Neuroscience Laboratory at Boston Children’s Hospital.
Last October, Stamoulis published the most extensive study to date on the relationship between isolation and teen brain development, using advanced computational tools that can analyze brain networks through neuroimaging data.
Along with co-author Matthew Risner, a researcher at the Computational Neuroscience Lab at Harvard Medical School, she analyzed structural and functional MRI data from nearly 3,000 pre-teens aged 11 to 12, a time when social interaction outside the household becomes more prominent than in childhood.
To estimate levels of isolation, the researchers relied on parents’ reports of children’s social behavior. “As part of the ABCD study, parents were asked to report on how often their child preferred solitude versus socialization and whether they acted ‘withdrawn,’ as in ‘not getting involved with others,’ Stamoulis explains. “So we used data from those observations as a measure of isolation and social withdrawal.”
The results, published in Cerebral Cortex, indicate that the brain structure and the strength of brain circuits in teens who prefer solitude or were socially withdrawn differ from those who socialize more.