Key result
Acute social isolation of up to 4 hours significantly increased reward learning in adolescents, particularly from social feedback, compared to baseline (b=0.20).
Why the study?
Social connection is crucial during adolescence, but how a lack of connection impacts adolescent behaviour remains unclear.
Does short-term social isolation alter reward seeking and reward learning in human adolescents?
RCT (n=40)
Pseudo-randomly assigned to session order
No
Does short-term social isolation alter reward seeking and reward learning in human adolescents?
Effect estimate: b=0.20 (95% CI 0.18-0.21)
p-value: p=<0.001
Short-term social isolation in adolescents increases reward responsiveness, particularly to social feedback, which is partially mitigated by virtual interactions.
Brief isolation may heighten adolescent reward sensitivity to social feedback; leaves open clinical relevance and generalizability.
Social connection is a basic human need and particularly important during adolescence. How a lack of connection impacts adolescent behaviour is unclear. To address this question, we employed experimental short-term isolation, first, to assess how isolation affects reward seeking and learning in adolescents aged 16-19 years and, second, to investigate whether neural reward sensitivity predicts vulnerability to isolation. Additionally, we assessed whether virtual interactions remediate isolation effects. Isolation caused faster decisions to exert effort for rewards and faster learned reward contingencies, especially from social feedback. These effects were stronger in participants who experienced higher loneliness following isolation. Participants with lower neural reward sensitivity showed stronger effects of isolation. Virtual interactions remediated effects only partially and decreased learning from social feedback. These results demonstrate that in adolescence isolation increases reward responsiveness, a key driver of motivation and decision-making.
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Tomova et al. (2022) conducted an RCT in Healthy adolescents (n=40). Short-term social isolation vs. Baseline (no prior manipulation of social interactions) was evaluated on Reward learning (session-by-condition interaction for the learning_pos parameter) (b=0.20, 95% CI 0.18-0.21, p=<0.001). Acute social isolation of up to 4 hours significantly increased reward learning in adolescents, particularly from social feedback, compared to baseline (b=0.20).
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