On June 18 Lina van Drunen defended her dissertation entitled “Rhythms of Resilience: Individual Differences in Genetic and Environmental Effects on Brain Development.”

What impact does growing up in a musical environment or during the COVID-19 pandemic have on the brain development of teenagers? This was the focus of psychologist Lina van Drunen’s PhD research, which studied hundreds of twins. Her findings reveal that practising music slows brain development, presenting unique opportunities.

Developmental psychologist Lina van Drunen understands the dedication required to learn a musical instrument like no one else. ‘I play guitar and sing, so I was particularly interested in discovering how these activities affect brain development.’ As she delved into the literature, she realised: ‘A lot of research has been conducted on the effects of disadvantaged environments on the brain, such as growing up with many stressors. However, there’s been little investigation into the effects of cognitively enriching environments, such as those filled with music.’

For her PhD research, Van Drunen examined the influence of a musical environment and of the COVID-19 pandemic on the brain development of 500 pairs of twins aged 7 to 14.

A unique opportunity

‘The data collection for my research began eight years ago, but my PhD journey lasted four years,’ Van Drunen explains. When the third MRI study commenced in 2020, more than 100 pairs of twins had already participated before the COVID-19 pandemic started. ‘Then the research halted for three months. That was a shock, but fortunately, we could resume the measurements afterward.’ This period offered a unique opportunity. ‘We could now measure the impact of the pandemic as a disadvantaged environment on brain development. We already had data from a group of young people who hadn’t experienced the pandemic, allowing us to compare it with those growing up during the pandemic.’ Over six years, the twins underwent three MRI scans, performed cognitive tasks, social behaviour tasks, and a sensorimotor synchronisation task to measure musicality.

‘We suspect that the brains of musical youngsters develop longer’

Playing music slows down brain development

In the musicality task, the researchers measured how well the participants could move their fingers to the beat of a metronome and music. They then looked at how brain development predicted how good young people were at that task. ‘We saw that some brain regions developed more slowly in young people who were good at the music task and practised a lot on an instrument than in young people who were less good at the music task.’ That sounds negative, but Van Drunen and her colleagues actually interpret this result as a sign that the brain is developing more slowly. ‘Our suggestion is that the brains of musical youngsters develop longer and the so-called window of learning is wider. We already saw this effect in young people who occasionally play music at amateur level.’ That a musical environment is enriching for brain development is also consistent with previous research.. This shows that playing music lowers stress, improves emotion regulation and is good for your social interaction because you play with others.

‘The COVID-19 pandemic required youth to mature more quickly in certain areas’

Effect of the COVID-19 pandemic

On the contrary, the researchers saw an opposite effect when they looked at the impact of the corona pandemic. ‘There, we saw accelerated development of certain brain regions, notably the medial prefrontal cortex and hippocampus that are associated with social interactions and regulating stress. Such accelerated development is not necessarily a bad thing. Brains seem to adapt in this way so that you can best survive in the environment you grow up in. The corona pandemic required young people to mature faster in certain areas.’ Moreover, after a while, the brain region involved in taking another person’s perspective developed at a rate similar to that before the pandemic. ‘So apparently children found ways to maintain social contacts in a new way. That also indicates resilience.’

Teenagers’ well-being

Van Drunen stresses that her results say nothing about how bad or desirable it is if the brain develops at a certain rate. ‘We now know that the environment plays a major role in how that happens in the teenage years, but it is not yet clear what influence this has on young people’s well-being.’ She will therefore be investigating this further in the coming years as a postdoc of the ActiveMinds project at Erasmus University in Rotterdam. ‘Together with young people, we will find out how they think about mental and physical well-being and how we can best measure it. That way, we will learn with them what they can do to boost their own well-being.’

On October 26th, Simone Dobbelaar defended her dissertation entitled “Helping me, helping you. Behavioral and neural development of social competence from childhood to adolescence.”

Summary of the dissertation

Why do some children easily find their way in social situations and are satisfied with their social lives, while others experience more difficulties? One key component that may explain this is social competence: the ability to fulfill both own and other’s social goals, for example in social interactions. This thesis focused on individual differences in social competencedevelopment from childhood to adolescence, an important developmental period that is marked by an increase in social experiences and interactions. To understand individual differences in social competence development, I examined contextual, developmental, environmental and neurobiological influences on aggressive and prosocial responses to social evaluation. Moreover, I examined whether the co-occurrence of aggression and prosocial behavior may work as predictor for developmental outcomes such as wellbeing later in time.

The results of this thesis can be described in three main findings. First, findings showed that there were robust neural processes related to the processing of social feedback and subsequent aggression already in middle childhood. Additionally, this thesis revealed that the period between childhood and adolescence is important for the behavioral and neural development of inhibition of aggression following negative, neutral and positive social feedback. Aggression following social feedback decreased towards adolescence, but aggression following positive feedback decreased earlier in childhood than aggression following negative feedback. Moreover, the involvement of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, known for its role in executive functioning and inhibition, decreased over time. Finally, results indicated that the co-occurrence of aggression following rejection of oneself and prosocial behavior following observed rejection of others may possibly protect against externalizing behaviors and promote wellbeing. Together, this thesis highlights the importance of examining the interplay of developmental processes across social contexts to understand mental health outcomes later in adolescence.

Simone Dobbelaar will continue as a post-doc for the GUTS project. Within GUTS, she will focus on the role of peer networks and social dynamics in relation to neural processes related to self regulation.

Promotors:
Michelle Achterberg, Anna van Duijvenvoorde and Eveline Crone.

You can find an interview with Simone regarding her research in the article titled “Een beetje agressie helpt kinderen in hun sociale ontwikkeling, ontdekte Simone Dobbelaar tijdens haar promotie.” To access the interview, please follow this link: Interview with Simone Dobbelaar.

On April 6th, Ilse van de Groep defended her dissertation entitled “Resisting, Desisting or Persisting? Neural correlates of antisocial and psychopathic pathways in early adulthood.”

Dissertation in short:

Children who encounter the police early are at risk of developing persistent antisocial behavior later, but by no means all of them end up on the “wrong” path. However, it is unclear why and how possible differences in development occur, particularly in young adulthood (18-30 years). During this period, a lot changes in the social environment, giving young people the opportunity to stop displaying antisocial behavior. However, successful adaptation requires (self)knowledge and skills to balance constraints of the social environment while enabling you to achieve your personal goals. In this dissertation, I therefore examined whether young adults with and without a history of antisocial behavior process and use social information about themselves and others differently. Since there is much variation in antisocial behavior, I also examined individual differences in psychopathic traits. To better explain differences in behavior, I used functional MRI scans to examine which brain regions are involved in social information processing.

This led to some important discoveries. Young adults with persistent antisocial behavior show difficulty distinguishing between different types of social information and adjusting their behavior accordingly, whereas young adults who stopped displaying antisocial behavior are particularly good at adjusting their behavior. Young adults with higher levels of psychopathic traits also showed less brain activity when thinking about themselves and made more distinctions between themselves and others in a reward area of the brain while making choices, indicating that there are indeed differences in processing and using information about self and others in young adulthood.

Well done, Dr. van de Groep!!

Proud promotors: Eveline Crone, Arne Popma, Lucres Nauta-Jansen and Marieke Bos.