Contextualizing the adolescent social brain: Links to social health using data from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study.

Social health, defined as adequate quantity and quality of social relationships (Doyle & Link, 2024), is essential for human well-being. The social brain, a network of regions involved in social cognition, ostensibly facilitates social health; however, few studies assess how social brain function relates to different profiles of social health. We tested this association during early adolescence when close relationships with peers gain increased importance. We used baseline (8- to 11-years old) brain data and year 2 (10- to 13-years old) social health data from 5832 adolescents in the Adolescent Brain Cognitive DevelopmentSM (ABCD) Study. We focused on an fMRI task that implicitly elicited emotion processing when viewing faces and applied latent profile analysis on variables associated with peer relationships: the number of friends (close and general), experiences with aggression and victimization, relationships with prosocial and rule-breaking peers, and support from peers. We identified three profiles ("concerning": 12.96% of sample; "robust": 33.95%; "selective": 53.09%). We found a significant interaction between sex and amygdala reactivity to emotional faces, indicating that boys and girls differed in likelihood of belonging to profiles reflecting greater (concerning, robust) vs weaker (selective) peer involvement. Exploratory analyses revealed that associations with other brain regions were only detected when examining individual social health outcomes. This study highlights divergent pathways in how social brain function informs both general social health patterns and individual health outcomes, setting the stage for future research.