Sensitivity to negative feedback among children and adolescents: An ERP study comparing developmental differences between high-worriers and low-worriers.

Neurodevelopmental imbalance models suggest that asynchrony in the maturation of interconnections between brain regions contributes to adolescents being more sensitive to emotionally salient events (e.g., negative feedback) than children. There may, however, be important individual differences to consider when investigating sensitivity to negative feedback. For example, worriers tend to have a greater sensitivity to negative feedback than low-worriers. Thus, it may be that adolescents' sensitivity to negative feedback is tied to worry. One way to test this question is to compare worriers to nonworriers separately for both children and adolescents. If only adolescent worriers are sensitive to negative feedback (i.e., low-worriers are not), then sensitivity to negative feedback may be linked to higher rates of worry. If however, adolescent nonworriers also have a sensitivity, then adolescents in general may be sensitive to negative feedback. The current study (N = 100, Mage = 11.26, standard deviation = 1.71) used event-related potentials (ERPs) to investigate neural differences in sensitivity to negative feedback among adolescents and children with high and low levels of worry. For both children and adolescents, worriers had a larger P3 amplitude to negative feedback than nonworriers. This difference, however, was smaller among the adolescents (i.e., adolescent nonworriers also had a large P3 amplitude to negative feedback). Our results support neurodevelopmental imbalance models that suggest adolescents in general are sensitive to emotionally salient events, such as receiving negative feedback.