Schedule of Events | Symposia

Social Withdrawal is Associated with Widespread Morphological and Topological Differences in the Adolescent Brain

Poster Session D - Monday, March 31, 2025, 8:00 – 10:00 am EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Catherine Stamoulis^1,2, Matthew Risner²; ¹Harvard Medical School, ²Boston Children's Hospital

Social withdrawal during adolescence may have detrimental and currently unclear effects on the developing brain. We investigated the neural correlates of preference for solitude in n = 2809 youth (median (IQR) age = 12.0 (1.1) years; 51.3% females) from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study. Topologies of task-independent brain circuits and morphological parameters were analyzed. Associations between these characteristics and a self-reported social withdrawal were examined, as well as the latter’s correlations with internalizing/externalizing behaviors and parental mental health (all t-scores). Higher parental mental health issues correlated with preference for solitude (β=0.14, 95% confidence interval (CI)=[0.10,0.19], p<0.01), and similarly for internalizing/externalizing behaviors (β=[0.23,0.45], CI=[0.19,0.49], p<0.01). Preferring to be alone was associated with lower topological robustness and efficiency of the entire connectome (β=[-0.07,-0.05], CI=[-0.12,-0.01], p<0.04), lower connectivity of the right-salience network (β=-0.07, CI=[-0.11,-0.02], p<0.02), lower robustness of bilateral somatomotor, left frontoparietal control, and left dorsal attention networks, and lower efficiency of these and the bilateral reward, salience, prefrontal networks and their subcortical projections, and the left social network (β=[-0.07,-0.05], CI=[-0.12,-0.01], p<0.05). Preferring to be alone was also associated with lower cortical thickness of bilateral superior temporal, caudal anterior cingulate and right insular gyri, and the pars opercularis (β=[-0.09,-0.05], CI=[-0.14,-0.01], p<0.05), white matter intensity in the bilateral parahippocampal, left insular, right lingual, medial orbitofrontal, and posterior cingulate gyri (β=[-0.05,-0.04], CI=[-0.08,-0.004], p<0.05), and higher volume of the right parahippocampal gyrus (β=0.05, CI=[0.01,0.10], p<0.04). These findings suggest that socially withdrawn youth may have widespread topological and structural brain differences compared to socially engaged peers.

Topic Area: EMOTION & SOCIAL: Development & aging