Social Reward Responsiveness Moderates the Association between Perceived Social Competence and Depressive Symptoms in Adolescents

TL;DR

This study shows that how teens respond to social rewards affects how their social skills relate to depression.

Contribution

The study identifies social reward responsiveness as a moderator in the link between social competence and depressive symptoms in adolescents.

Findings

Adolescents with low social competence and blunted social reward responses showed stronger depressive symptoms.

Social reward processing moderates the relationship between perceived social competence and depression.

Neural measures like RewP can help understand social-emotional processes in depression.

Abstract

Adolescence is an important social development period that is also marked by increased rates of depression. Positive social interactions are crucial for cultivating social skills and functioning, also known as social competence, and lower social competence has been related to greater depressive symptoms. Still, little is known about factors that impact why some adolescents with low self-perceptions of social competence develop depression while others do not. The present study addressed this gap by examining neural processing of social rewards as a potential moderator of the association between self-perceptions of social competence and depressive symptoms in adolescents. Data from 165 adolescents were collected using electroencephalography during a perceived peer interaction task, eliciting the reward positivity (RewP) event-related potential component in response to social acceptance versus rejection feedback. We identified a moderating effect of social RewP (b = 0.52, p = .039), such that the negative relation between self-perceived social competence and depressive symptoms was strongest for adolescents with a blunted social RewP. These results provide further evidence for the importance of social reward responsiveness in moderating the relation between risk factors and depressive symptoms in adolescents and highlight the utility of multi-method approaches to examining social processes in depression.

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10802-025-01402-1.

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