Cooperating under social anxiety: EEG hyperscanning reveals heightened interbrain synchrony and ERP responses in socially anxious adolescents

Harmonious peer interactions can promote adolescents' socialization. However, social anxiety, a negative experience in social scenarios, can inhibit adolescents' peer interactions. Previous studies have rarely explored the interactive behavior and neural underpinnings of socially anxious adolescents in a naturalistic peer interaction setting. Based on electroencephalography (EEG) hyperscanning technique, the present study examined the differences in the cooperative performance, the event-related potentials (ERPs), and the interbrain synchrony (IBS) between the socially anxious adolescent group (SOA, 21 adolescent peer dyads) and the control group (CO, 19 adolescent peer dyads), using a cooperative game task. Behavior results revealed that the success rate of the cooperative game task in the SOA group was significantly lower than that in the CO group. ERP results showed that N1 and P300 amplitudes of the socially anxious adolescents were significantly higher than those of the non-anxious adolescents on successful trials. IBS results showed that the IBS of the SOA group was significantly higher than that of the CO group on successful trials. Results of mediation analyses showed that social anxiety affects adolescents' P300 amplitude through lower psychological resilience, which in turn positively affects delta band IBS during interactions. Social anxiety negatively affects cooperative success of the adolescent dyads through delta band IBS. These findings suggest that adolescents with higher social anxiety may have a heightened neural activation in peer cooperative interactions because of the higher demand of cognitive resources. The low psychological resilience might be a possible risk factor for the higher IBS and poorer performance of cooperative behaviors of socially anxious adolescents.