Mid-adolescence is a critical time for the development of stress-related disorders and it is associated with significant social vulnerability. However, little is known about normative neural processes accompanying psychosocial stress at this time. Previous research found that emotion regulation strategies critically influence the relationship between stress and the development of psychiatric symptoms during adolescence. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we examined neural responses to acute stress and analyzed whether the tendency to use adaptive or maladaptive emotion regulation strategies is related to neural and autonomic stress responses. Results show large linear activation increases from low to medium to high stress levels mainly in medial prefrontal, insulae and temporal areas. Caudate and subgenual anterior cingulate cortex, neural areas related to reward and affective valuations, showed linearly decreasing activation. In line with our hypothesis, the current adolescent neural stress profile resembled social rejection and was characterized by pronounced activation in insula, angular and temporal cortices. Moreover, results point to an intriguing role of the anterior temporal gyrus. Stress-related activity in the anterior temporal gyrus was positively related to maladaptive regulation strategies and stress-induced autonomic activity. Maladaptive coping might increase the social threat and reappraisal load of a stressor, relating to higher stress sensitivity of anterior temporal cortices.

A better understanding of emotion regulation (ER) within daily life is a growing focus of research. This study evaluated the average use of two ER strategies (cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression) and concurrent and lagged relationships between these two ER strategies and affect (positive and negative affect) in the daily lives of adolescents. We also investigated the role of the same strategies at the trait level on these within-person relationships. Thirty-three adolescents provided 1,258 reports of their daily life by using the Experience Sampling Method for one week. Regarding the relative use of ER strategies, cognitive reappraisal (M = 2.87, SD = 1.58) was used more often than expressive suppression (M = 2.42, SD = 1.21). While the use of both strategies was positively correlated when evaluated in daily life (p = .01), the same did not occur at the trait level (p = .37). Multilevel analysis found that ER strategies were concurrently related to affect (p < .01), with the exception of cognitive reappraisal-positive affect relationship (p = .11). However, cognitive reappraisal predicted higher positive affect at the subsequent sampling moment ( β = 0.07, p = .03). The concurrent associations between cognitive reappraisal and negative affect vary as function of the use of this strategy at the trait level (β = 0.05, p = .02). Our findings highlighted the complex associations between daily ER strategies and affect of a normative sample of adolescents.