1. Home
  2. Our Research
  3. 2026
  4. Publications

Publications by Year: 2026

2026

Lin, J., Moore, J., Field, N., Stern, J. A., Allen, J. P., & Coan, J. A. (2026). Adolescent empathy predicts reduced neural responses to social rejection in adulthood. Development and Psychopathology. https://doi.org/10.1017/S095457942610131X (Original work published 2026)
Publisher's Version
Publisher's Version

Objective:

Adolescence is a sensitive period for social and neural development. Empathic growth during adolescence has been linked to improved prosocial behavior in adulthood. This study examined how adolescent empathy relates to adulthood neural responses to rejection.

 

Method:

Participants (N = 77; 42 females, 52% White) were drawn from a demographically diverse community sample and assessed annually from ages 13 to 21. Each year, participants’ empathic support provision toward a close friend was evaluated during an observationally coded support task. At approximately age 24, participants completed the Cyberball social exclusion paradigm while undergoing fucntional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).

 

Results:

Whole-brain exploratory analyses revealed that greater empathic support provision during adolescence was associated with reduced activation in the subgenual anterior cingulate cortex (sACC) during social exclusion in early adulthood (Cohen’s d = 0.12), suggesting a contribution of empathy provision to rejection-related neural responses later in life. The effect was not driven by felt distress during social exclusion, indicating that adolescent empathic support provision is potentially associated with neural responses to social exclusion independent of subjective distress.

 

Conclusion:

These findings underscore the long-term links of empathy to adult social processes and may inform interventions aimed at enhancing interpersonal functioning and resilience.

Allen, J. P., Costello, M. A., Hunt, G. L., Uchino, B., & Sugden, K. (2026). Predictions from early adolescent interpersonal aggression to accelerated aging in adulthood: Relational and biological mechanisms of linkage. Health Psychology : Official Journal of the Division of Health Psychology, American Psychological Association. https://doi.org/10.1037/hea0001576 (Original work published 2026)
Publisher's Version
Publisher's Version

Objective: This study examined early adolescent interpersonal aggression, subsequent conflict with parents, and aggression toward close peers as predictors of accelerated biological aging by age 30.

Method: Participants (N = 123; 46 males and 75 females) were assessed repeatedly, along with parents and close friends, ages from 13 to 30.

Results: Early adolescent interpersonal aggression was found to predict later accelerated aging even after accounting for adolescent gender, family income, prior health difficulties, and body shape ratings in adolescence. Path analyses suggested that the effects of early interpersonal aggression were potentially mediated via higher levels of father-adolescent conflict reported by fathers in adolescence and by aggressive behavior toward close peers as reported by those peers in early adulthood. Follow-up analyses suggested that these same factors also predicted adult body mass index scores after accounting for body shape in adolescence.

Conclusions: Results are interpreted as evidence that social difficulties with lifelong health implications may be identified beginning in early adolescence, thus highlighting the potential importance of early interventions to address these difficulties. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Bailey, N. A., Golino, H. F., & Allen, J. P. (2026). Autonomy and Relatedness in Mother-Adolescent Interactions: An Investigation Using Exploratory Graph Analysis. Family Process. https://doi.org/10.1111/famp.70116 (Original work published 2026)
Publisher's Version
Publisher's Version

Mother-adolescent interactions are important contexts for teens to develop essential autonomy and relatedness skills. The Autonomy and Relatedness Coding System was designed to measure these behaviors and is based on four a priori theoretical categories, including behaviors promoting autonomy, behaviors undermining autonomy, behaviors promoting relatedness, and behaviors undermining relatedness. The current study used Exploratory Graph Analysis (EGA) to examine the underlying dimensional structure of autonomy and relatedness behaviors in mother-adolescent interactions and compare this structure to the theoretical categories. Participants were 184 mother-adolescent dyads participating in a larger longitudinal study of adolescent social development. Mothers and adolescents (Mage = 13.35, SD = 0.64) discussed an area of disagreement. These interactions were coded for nine different autonomy and relatedness behaviors displayed by mothers and adolescents. EGA results revealed a three-dimensional structure for both adolescents' behaviors toward mothers and mothers' behaviors toward adolescents. These three-dimensional models fit the data significantly better than the theoretical four-dimensional model. Bootstrap EGA results further replicated the three-dimensional structure. These findings suggest that EGA is a useful tool for examining the dimensional structure of autonomy and relatedness behaviors in mother-adolescent interactions and provide more nuanced insights into the developmental differences of these behaviors in mothers versus teens.