Reward positivity moderates the association between pubertal status and social anxiety symptoms in nine-to-12-year-old youths

The transition to adolescence is characterized by rapid development of puberty, reward processing, and internalizing psychopathology (i.e., depression and anxiety). More advanced pubertal status and altered reward processing are both known to be associated with elevated internalizing symptoms. However, it was unclear to what extent pubertal status and reward processing interacted with each other in predicting internalizing psychopathology. We examined how the puberty-psychopathology association was moderated by the reward processing indexed by ERPs, including the reward positivity (RewP) and the late positive potential (LPP). A-hundred-and-fifteen nine-to-12-year-old typically developing youths (66 girls; Mean age/SD =10.98/1.18 years) reported their pubertal status and symptoms of depression and social anxiety and completed an EEG Doors task that assessed monetary reward feedback processing. A principal component analysis of the ERP data identified a RewP, an anterior LPP, and a posterior LPP, elicited by the win and loss feedback of the task. The puberty-social anxiety relationship was moderated by the RewP, an identified neural marker of reward sensitivity. Specifically, more advanced puberty was associated with heightened social anxiety symptoms in the presence of a larger, but not smaller, RewP. We did not observe any moderating effect of the LPPs. Our study provided novel evidence that a hypersensitivity toward the reward stimuli (indexed by an enlarged RewP) further exacerbated the risks associated with more advanced pubertal status for social anxiety.