How an adolescent’s brain reacts to faces may predict their social future

 

Study finds that social future is different for boys and girls

It’s been said that eyes are a window to the soul, but new research has found that an adolescent’s brain response to a face might open a window to their social future.

A new study at the University of California, Davis Center for Mind and Brain found that high activity in the amygdala when an adolescent looks at a face showing emotions predicts their social health two years later. The increased amygdala activity for girls predicted more involvement with their peers, but predicted less involvement for boys.

The amygdala is best known for the fight-or-flight response and controls strong emotional reactions, especially fear. It is also one of the core brain regions that process information from faces.

“Faces contain a lot of social information, and perceptually or cognitively humans process that information really, really quickly,” said Myles N. Arrington, lead author and postdoctoral fellow working with Professor Amanda E. Guyer, a co-author who directs the Teen Experiences, Emotions & Neurodevelopment (TEEN) Lab. “That makes it great for neuroscience, because as soon as you show a face to a person it doesn't take long for their brain to respond.”

The paper was recently published in the journal Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience with UC Davis co-authors Johnna R. Swartz and Jeffrey R. Fine.

The social brain and future social health

The “social brain” is an idea from neuroscience that specific key brain regions are behind nearly every aspect of our social behavior. These brain regions help us recognize people we know, and they guide us in understanding the thoughts of others as well as our own. These regions’ development during adolescence plays an important role in peer relationships later on, but it’s been unclear exactly how.

This study tested the social brain’s impact on future social health with data from 5,832 participants in the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development, or ABCD, Study. Participants were between 8 and 11 years old between 2017 and 2018 when shown images of either faces or places while their brain activity was observed with fMRI imaging showing blood flow in the brain. Data on their social health was collected two years later.

The team compared brain activity when participants viewed faces, which contain a high amount of social information, versus places, which have none. They also compared brain activity when participants viewed faces showing positive or negative emotions and faces showing no emotion. 

In addition to finding that high amygdala activation predicted boys and girls moving in opposite directions socially two years later, the analysis showed that the amygdala was the only brain region that predicted a participant’s future social health. 

Building on teen social health research

In a prior study, the team identified social health profiles that grouped teens by a mix of factors that included their number of friends, who was in their friend group and how much conflict they had with peers. Activation in the amygdala when seeing faces showing emotion predicted which of those profiles the participants would fall into two years later.

Arrington said that this study provides a valuable insight into how the brain develops during adolescence, a period when different parts of the brain develop at different rates. The results suggest that these differences in development between boys and girls may play a role in social health later on.

“For adolescents in particular, there’s a lot of development happening in this age range in the amygdala specifically, but it doesn't look the same for everyone,” said Arrington.

The work was supported by the National Institutes of Health.

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Journal

Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience

DOI

10.1016/j.dcn.2026.101774 

Is using screens to calm a child bad? It depends

  In “Llama Llama Mad at Mama,” a popular children’s book from 2007, a little Llama Llama goes to the grocery with his mama and becomes overwhelmed by all the sounds, sights, smells and shopping decisions happening around him. In a scene familiar to every parent, the cartoon animal has an epic meltdown in his shopping cart, screaming and throwing the contents of his mom’s shopping list on the floor. Mama Llama gets down to his level and calms him down by turning shopping into a fun game.

There are no cellphones or tablets in the world of Llama Llama, but if there were, who would blame Mama Llama if instead she handed her overwhelmed toddler a video to watch so she could carry on shopping in peace?

In real life, plenty of parents do reach for a screen to soothe a distressed child — a pattern of technology use researchers call “media emotion regulation.” A new study from The Ohio State University looked how using technology to regulate young children’s emotions affects their cognitive development, and found it isn’t a one-size-fits-all story.

“It’s not just that the effects are larger or smaller for some kids — the underlying pattern is different for different kids,” said Jane Shawcroft, an assistant professor of communication at Ohio State who led the study, published recently in the Journal of Communication.

The study focused on the relationship between media emotion regulation and executive functions — a set of interrelated cognitive skills necessary for goal-directed behavior and social functioning. Two of these skills — cognitive flexibility and inhibitory control — are thought to be especially sensitive to a child’s environment during their formative years.

Cognitive flexibility enables children to respond to changing demands, understand different perspectives and problem-solve. Inhibitory control allows them to suppress impulsive responses, which is important for making conscious choices and pausing before acting. Ultimately, these skills build the foundation for behavioral health, school success and healthy social relationships across a person’s lifespan.

To investigate, Shawcroft analyzed data from Project M.E.D.I.A., a long-term Brigham Young University study tracking how media shapes children’s development, with six waves following children from age 2½ to 7½. She tested three possibilities: that using screens to calm children affects the development of these cognitive skills; that a child’s own cognitive development drives parents to offer screens more or less often; or that the two feed into each other in a loop over time.

Most children showed that reinforcing loop: the harder or easier a child was to settle, the more or less a parent hit play to calm them down — and that screen use, in turn, shaped the child's developing executive functions, which again shaped how often screens were used for calming. That was expected, Shawcroft said, because “children influence parenting, and parenting influences children’s development.”

For that majority, she noted, this means there’s more than one way to intervene and support both healthy development and healthy relationships with technology: Parents can change how, when and why they use technology to support cognitive development, but they can also support a child’s cognitive development through other means, which can in turn lead to a healthier relationship with technology for young children.

But two smaller groups of children broke from the overall pattern. In one group — about 6% of children — the two cognitive skills were related to media emotion regulation in different ways, which researchers couldn’t fully explain. Shawcroft said a later wave of the ongoing study is collecting more information about these children.

For the other outlier group (roughly 7% of children), screen use appeared to shape how cognitive skills developed, but the reverse wasn’t true: A child’s cognitive skills didn’t predict how often parents reached for a screen to manage their child’s difficult emotions. What stood out about these families, the study found, was that the parents of children in this group were more likely to report higher levels of depression.

“We found that parent mental health is a strong predictor of the way parents use technology with their young kids, because technology is a lever parents can pull when parents don’t have the resources to cope with their own poor mental health,” Shawcroft said.

Parenting a small child is hard, she added, and a screen is sometimes one of the few tools a struggling parent has within reach, especially when their child is struggling with their own feelings. Cultural conversations around technology and child development often focus on whether parents are doing the right thing for their kids. But a takeaway of this study, she said, isn’t that these struggling parents are necessarily doing something wrong, rather: “Supporting parents’ mental health is a way to help them parent with technology better.”

What this study tells us, Shawcroft said, is that parents need more resources at their disposal — including access to other ways to help their children regulate, like places for children to spend time outdoors, or tools to help practice mindfulness, etc. — especially when parents are struggling with their own mental health concerns. This means helping children experience healthy development in the context of technology isn’t just on parents’ shoulders. The children at most risk of problematic media use, she said, would benefit from broader community support and increased resources, including check-ins from family members, neighbors and friends who can help make parenting less isolating and difficult for struggling parents.

“I really wish the narrative around children and tech would be less about ‘it’s just a parents’ job,’ and more about this shared responsibility we have as a society to support children in this context we’ve built for them,” Shawcroft said. “If we want kids to be OK, part of that is helping their parents to be OK.”

Brains of teens with autism ‘tune in’ less to unfamiliar voices

Just like other teenagers, many teens on the autism spectrum are itching to exercise their social muscles. They hope for new friends, fun with people who share their interests, maybe even a romantic relationship. 

“Adolescence is a moment of opportunity for these kids,” said Daniel Abrams, PhD, clinical associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford Medicine. “They want to build friendships.”

But spreading their social wings is challenging for teens with autism. A new Stanford Medicine-led study, publishing July 13 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, sheds light on a key factor: how the brains of teenagers with autism handle the sounds of unfamiliar voices. Unlike in neurotypical teenagers, the reward centers in autistic teens’ brains don’t become increasingly responsive to strangers’ voices as they mature, the research found.

“Typically developing teens are becoming far more aware of their social world, and tuning in to new voices is important for making new social connections,” said Abrams, who led the new research as well as a 2022 study on neurotypical teens’ responses to voices.

“Our results point to adolescence as a period when, for some kids with autism, their brains are not becoming increasingly responsive to unfamiliar vocal stimuli,” Abrams said. “Their brains did not show an uptick in responding to new voices like the neurotypical kids did.”

The study’s senior author is Vinod Menon, PhD, the Rachael L. and Walter F. Nichols, MD, Professor and a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences. 

“We tend to think of autism in terms of what the brain does differently, but not enough about how those differences unfold with age,” Menon said. “The way the brain attends to socially relevant information is reshaped throughout adolescence, and in autism that developmental process appears to follow a different course.”

Young kids with autism are less attuned to voices than others their age, prior research has shown.  As they reach adolescence, some teens with autism show unchanged engagement with voices, while those with the most severe autism symptoms are even less engaged than younger kids.

The researchers also examined how teens’ brains respond to the sound of their mother’s voice. In neurotypical teens, the sound of Mom’s voice remains highly rewarding, but unfamiliar voices become increasingly engaging as adolescents mature. In contrast, teens with autism become increasingly attuned to their mother’s voice, with the strongest examples of this pattern in teens with the most severe autism symptoms.

A key social sound

The voices of people around us — friends, family members, even strangers — are a key signal in human emotional bonds. (Think of the swell of happiness you feel from the sound of a loved one’s voice after a long absence, or the comfort of hearing a friend’s sympathetic tone if you are grieving.)

“Voices provide a really important set of cues to help us feel connected to the people we know and love,” Abrams said. “But, from early stages of development, kids with autism struggle to tune into the vocal world.”

Autism is a developmental disorder that affects 1 in 31 children and is characterized by social difficulties, not just with interpreting voices but also with skills such as interpreting facial expressions and maintaining eye contact as well as restricted interests, repetitive behaviors and sensory aberrations. The condition exists on a wide spectrum, with some individuals much more affected than others.

A small child’s unresponsiveness to the sound of their own name can be an early clue that they have autism. And prior research by Abrams’ team showed that 7- to 12-year-old children with autism have difficulty picking up emotional cues in people’s voices.

However, no one had studied how brain responses to voices change during adolescence in autism.

“Autism changes over the course of a lifetime; it’s not one thing,” Abrams said. “The way that autism is expressed in younger kids is different than in older kids and in teenagers.”

Understanding how autism manifests in teens could drive new opportunities for therapies tailored to this phase of life, he added.

Familiar and unfamiliar voices

The researchers studied 79 children and teens who were 7 to 17 years old. The group included 39 participants with autism spectrum disorder and 40 typically developing participants who were matched on age, sex and IQ to the individuals with autism.

As their brain activity was being recorded by the functional magnetic resonance imaging scanner, the study participants listened to three types of brief recordings: nonsense words such as “keebudishawlt” spoken by their mother; the same nonsense words spoken by two unfamiliar women; and non-voice environmental sounds, such as a dishwasher running. (Nonsense words were used in the voice recordings to avoid engaging parts of the brain that respond to the meanings of words.) The researchers analyzed how the brain responded to each type of sound in young people with and without autism, and how the responses varied with age.

The study produced several insights into how the adolescent brain is processing voices in autism, Abrams said.

The researchers found that “social” brain centers engaged differently depending on whether the individual had autism. In typically developing teens, the brain’s reward centers and brain regions focused on salience (directing what one pays attention to) both responded more strongly to voices the older the teen was. In teens with autism, the reward and salience centers did not become more responsive to voices, and in some older individuals these brain regions were even less responsive to voices than in younger children with autism.

The research also found that teens with autism tuned in more to their mother’s voice than to unfamiliar voices — the opposite of what neurotypical teenagers do.

The more impaired their social skills were, the more their brains favored the sound of their mom’s voice.

“In neurotypical kids, we found a strong pattern in adolescence to tune in more to unfamiliar voices than to Mom’s voice,” Abrams said. “They’re tuning into new social partners.”

But in kids with autism, he said, “Instead of tuning into unfamiliar voices during adolescence, they were tuning in more to the sound of their mom than at younger ages. We think this pattern reflects the social communication challenges faced by many adolescents with autism.”

New possibilities for treatment

The findings point to new prospects for autism therapies tailored to the characteristics of the teen brain, Abrams said.

“Autism treatments are often focused on much younger kids, with far fewer options for adolescents,” he said, adding that early interventions focused on preschoolers remain critically important, but teens shouldn’t be neglected.

“We know the brain is plastic and developing all the way through adolescence, in everyone,” he said. “There’s no question that adolescence provides a golden opportunity, especially for teens with autism who are enthusiastic about building social connections. We hope the field can translate our expanding knowledge of the brain into more effective interventions.”

 

Vaping or smoking found to reduce fitness in young people by 15%

 

Young people who vape or smoke cigarettes have reduced blood vessel functionality, breathing efficiency and exercise capacity compared to those who have never smoked or vaped, according to a study published today in ERJ Open Research.

Dr Azmy Faisal, the lead author of the study from the Manchester Metropolitan University, United Kingdom, explains: “In active, healthy young adults with normal lungs, both vapes and tobacco smoking led to worsened exercise capacity, shortness of breath, and intense leg fatigue.

“Like smoking, our research indicates that vaping can lead to harmful changes to the blood vessels, lung efficiency during exercise and approximately a 15% reduction in fitness compared to those who have never smoked or vaped.”

The study examined 75 people aged 18-30, a third had never smoked or vaped, a third were smokers but had never used vapes, and a third were vapers for approximately 3 years but had never smoked. All participants had normal resting lung function and similar lifestyles, including caffeine and alcohol consumption, and physical activity levels.

Each volunteer took part in an incremental cycle exercise test whilst having their heart, breathing and blood lactate responses measured at increasing difficulty until they reached their maximum. Ultrasound scans and blood tests were also done to look how well their arteries were functioning. Test results found that at their peak exercise ability, the vaping and smoking groups had significantly lower exercise capacity and oxygen uptake by approximately 15%. The lungs ability to blow out carbon dioxide was diminished and lactic acid built up quicker in vapers and smokers at all levels of exercise before they reached their maximum, resulting in increased breathlessness and leg discomfort compared to the group who had never smoked or vaped. Ultrasounds scans and blood samples showed signs of inflammation in the blood vessels. Researchers say these results suggest similar effects of vaping and smoking in young people.

Dr Faisal added: “These findings provide critical information for the general public, healthcare providers, and regulatory authorities regarding potential early risks associated with vape use, particularly for the growing number of young adults who have never smoked but choose to use these products. Additionally, our study supports the UK’s Tobacco and Vapes Act 2026, which prohibits vaping for individuals under 18 and aims to reduce vaping among young adults in the future.”

The team are now planning to conduct a series of MRI studies to better understand the changes within the heart, lungs and skeletal muscles associated with vaping, particularly the underlying mechanisms which lead to lower levels of fitness.

Dr Stamatoula Tsikrika from the European Respiratory Society’s expert group on tobacco, smoking control and health education, based at Sotiria Hospital, Athens, Greece, who was not involved in the research, said: “More and more young people who have never smoked are using vapes. As the popularity of vaping continues to rise, so too do concerns that it is becoming normalised behaviour, functioning as a gateway to nicotine addiction and introducing serious health risks.

“Vapes may contain lower levels of cancer-causing substances, but they can still trigger genetic changes such as DNA damage and inflammation, which are linked to increased lung cancer risk. For people who have never smoked, and are therefore not using vapes as a cessation method, the health consequences of vaping are becoming harder for policymakers and the tobacco industry to justify.”

Dr Tsikrika also commented on the Tobacco and Vapes Bill, passed in the United Kingdom earlier this year: “Ninety-four per cent of smokers start before they are 25 and 22% of 15-16 year olds in Europe are reported to use vapes, by establishing a generational sales ban on nicotine products, the UK has taken a monumental leap towards protecting the health of young people.”

(ends)

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Journal

ERJ Open Research

DOI

10.1183/23120541.00425-2026 

Shifting Low-Income Students to Higher Quality Colleges

 Earnings inequality among college graduates has grown, and returns to a bachelor's degree (BA) vary substantially across colleges. This study experimentally evaluates a program that shifted high-achieving, low-income students into higher-quality colleges. Students randomly offered a guarantee of four years of tuition and fees at the University of Michigan were 21 percentage points more likely to enroll at a UM campus. The offer shifted students across colleges rather than into college: most compliers would otherwise have attended less-selective four-year colleges. 

HAIL increased four-year BA completion by 4 percentage points, but had no effect on attainment after six years. It substantially increased degree quality: students offered the scholarship were 12 percentage points more likely to earn a bachelor's degree from a highly or most selective college. 

IV estimates indicate that students induced to attend a University of Michigan campus were 56 percentage points more likely to earn such a degree. The increase in college quality predicts earnings gains of 18 to 25 percent. Faster degree completion adds about another 1 percent to the present discounted value of lifetime earnings.

Leveraging Chatbot Outreach for Improved Course Performance

 This study provides pre-registered, experimental evidence on the use of non-generative artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots to support students in large-enrollment undergraduate courses. 

The authors find the chatbot messaging increased students’ final grades and engagement with academic supports, such as tutoring. Treatment effects were generally consistent across student demographics, with the exception of treated women in a Microeconomics course, who earned final grades that were seven percentage points higher than women in the control group. 

This study provides evidence that integrating AI-enabled outreach and communication to students in their college courses can enhance student engagement, learning, and course performance.

Undergraduate students' understanding of the relative effectiveness of study methods

This study analyzes whether information frictions about the relative effectiveness of study methods distort students’ effort allocation. Standard models treat effort as a single input whose level, rather than composition, determines outcomes. The authors instead model effort as an allocation across methods with heterogeneous effectiveness. 

Combining panel surveys, administrative records, digital activity logs, and a randomized information intervention with over 2,000 undergraduates, the authors test whether imperfect information leads to effort misallocation and quantify consequences for performance. 

At baseline, students hold divergent beliefs, and many devote time to passive strategies such as rereading, despite evidence that active retrieval is more effective; these choices predict lower performance and larger self-assessment errors.

General feedback has little effect. Personalized feedback widens the perceived effectiveness gap between active and passive methods by 42 percent, shifts time toward effective practices, and raises exam scores by 0.05–0.08 standard deviations. 

A dynamic model with learning-by-doing and convex allocation costs shows that, for students with the weakest baseline beliefs, personalized feedback is equivalent to a 16.5 percent reduction in adoption costs. 

These results identify information frictions about multidimensional effort as a determinant of academic performance.