A normative model of brain responses to social scenarios reflects the maturity of children and adolescents’ social–emotional abilities

Abstract

The rapid brain maturation in childhood and adolescence accompanies the development of socio-emotional functioning. However, it is unclear how the maturation of the neural activity drives the development of socio-emotional functioning and individual differences. This study aimed to reflect the age dependence of inter-individual differences in brain responses to socio-emotional scenarios and to develop naturalistic imaging indicators to assess the maturity of socio-emotional ability at the individual level. Using three independent naturalistic imaging datasets containing healthy participants (n = 111, 21 and 122), we found and validated that age-modulated inter-individual concordance of brain responses to socio-emotional movies in specific brain regions. The similarity of an individual’s brain response to the average response of older participants was defined as response typicality, which predicted an individual’s emotion regulation strategies in adolescence and theory of mind (ToM) in childhood. Its predictive power was not superseded by age, sex, cognitive performance or executive function. We further showed that the movie’s valence and arousal ratings grounded the response typicality. The findings highlight that forming typical brain response patterns may be a neural phenotype underlying the maturation of socio-emotional ability. The proposed response typicality represents a neuroimaging approach to measure individuals’ maturity of cognitive reappraisal and ToM.