Neural and psychological predictors of digital status-seeking in adolescence

Abstract

While social media affords youths the opportunity to enhance their online status via the accumulation of likes, followers, and other quantifiable metrics, not all youths engage in digital status-seeking. Individual differences in adolescents' neural sensitivity to low popular peers and social motivations may help explain why some youth engage more strongly in digital status-seeking than others. We examined how adolescents' social motivation such as their need for approval (NFA; approach & avoidance) moderate the links between neural sensitivity to low popular peers in the ventral striatum (VS) and amygdala and digital status-seeking among 95 adolescents (M_age = 13.40 years, SD = 0.58, females = 50.5%). Participants were part of a larger 5-year longitudinal study of 873 adolescents from the Southeastern U.S. At wave 2, we assessed for NFA and had adolescents perform an fMRI task involving images of their real-life classmates. Notably, we used peer-nominated sociometric ratings from 873 students across 3 middle-schools to select images of their most and least popular peers. We then assessed digital status-seeking 2 years later. Results show that NFA moderated the links between neural sensitivity to low popular peers and digital status-seeking, such that sensitivity to low popular peers in the VS predicted greater digital status-seeking 2 years later, but only for adolescents with high avoidance NFA. Similarly, sensitivity to low popular peers in the amygdala significantly predicted greater digital status-seeking 2 years later, but only for adolescents with high approach NFA, as well as adolescents with high avoidance NFA. These results suggest that neural sensitivity to low popular peers, or NFA in isolation, does not predict digital status-seeking, but the heightened combination of both may underlie digital status-seeking in adolescence.