Johanna M Jarcho

• Ph.D.
• Professor (Assistant) at Temple University

People lose tens of billions of dollars a year to financial exploitation in the United States alone. Few studies have examined how preferences for trust and fairness in economic activities may contribute to risk for financial exploitation. Furthermore, few studies have examined the interaction between risk factors. In three studies, we attempt to a...

People lose tens of billions of dollars a year to financial exploitation in the United States alone. Few studies have examined how preferences for trust and fairness in economic activities may contribute to risk for financial exploitation. Furthermore, few studies have examined the interaction between risk factors. In three studies, we attempt to a...

Individuals vary substantially in their responses to rewarding events and their motivation to pursue rewards. The ventral striatum (VS) plays a key role in reward anticipation, and connectivity between the VS and the default mode network (DMN)—a network associated with self-referential and evaluative processes—has been implicated in reward processi...

Social relationships change across the lifespan as social networks narrow and motivational priorities shift. These changes may affect, or reflect, differences in how older adults make decisions related to processing social and non-social rewards. While we have shown initial evidence that older adults have a blunted response to some features of soci...

Aberrant levels of reward sensitivity have been linked to substance use disorder and are characterized by alterations in reward processing in the ventral striatum (VS). Less is known about how reward sensitivity and subclinical substance use relate to striatal function during social rewards (e.g., positive peer feedback). Testing this relation is c...

This article describes the rationale, aims, and methodology of the Accelerating Medicines Partnership® Schizophrenia (AMP® SCZ). This is the largest international collaboration to date that will develop algorithms to predict trajectories and outcomes of individuals at clinical high risk (CHR) for psychosis and to advance the development and use of...

People lose tens of billions of dollars a year to financial exploitation in the United States alone. Few studies have examined how preferences for trust and fairness in economic activities may contribute to risk for financial exploitation. Furthermore, few studies have examined the interaction between risk factors. In three studies, we attempt to a...

Trait reward sensitivity, risk for developing substance use, and mood disorders have each been linked with altered striatal responses to reward. Moreover, striatal response to reward is sensitive to social context, such as the presence of a peer, and drugs are often sought out and consumed in social contexts or as a result of social experiences. Th...

Memory is a reconstructive process that can result in events being recalled as more positive or negative than they actually were. While positive recall biases may contribute to well-being, negative recall biases may promote internalizing symptoms, such as social anxiety. Adolescence is characterized by increased salience of peers and peak incidence...

Understanding risk factors for financial exploitation (FE) and ways these risk factors may interact is an important step toward identifying vulnerable populations and developing interventions. In three studies, we surveyed 1918 demographically and socioeconomically diverse participants to examine putative risk factors for self-reported FE. We focus...

People lose tens of billions of dollars a year to financial exploitation in the United States alone. Few studies have examined how preferences for trust and fairness in economic activities may contribute to risk for financial exploitation. Furthermore, few studies have examined the interaction between risk factors. In three studies, we attempt to a...

Although prior research has demonstrated enhanced striatal response when sharing rewards with close social connections, less is known about how individual differences affect ventral striatal (VS) activation and connectivity when experiencing rewards within social contexts. Given that self-reported reward sensitivity and level of substance use have...

Many decisions happen in social contexts such as negotiations, yet little is understood about how people balance fairness versus selfishness. Past investigations found that activation in brain areas involved in executive function and reward processing was associated with people offering less with no threat of rejection from their partner, compared...

Self-serving biases (e.g., beliefs that one tends to perform better than peers) are generally associated with positive psychological outcomes like increased self-esteem and resilience. However, this tendency may be problematic in the context of collective action problems, wherein individuals are reliant on others’ pro-social behaviors to achieve la...

Objectives: Extant research supports a positive relationship between weight-related abuse (WRA) and disordered eating constructs. Individuals who face marginalization and who are more likely to live in larger bodies, such as Black and Hispanic individuals in the United States (U.S.), may be at a heightened risk of WRA. This study is aimed at under...

Aggression elicited by social rejection is costly, prevalent, and often lethal. Attempts to predict rejection-elicited aggression using trait-based data have had little success. This may be because in-the-moment aggression is a complex process influenced by current states of attention, arousal, and affect which are poorly predicted by trait-level c...

Memory is a reconstructive process with biases toward remembering events in line with prior higher orderbeliefs. This can result in events being remembered as more positive or negative than they actually were.While positive recall biases may contribute to well-being, negative recall biases may promote internalizingsymptoms, such as social anxiety....

Social support can benefit recipients when it is provided effectively, but giving effective support can be demanding. Prior research outlines givers’ traits (e.g., compassion) and choices of methods that can make support more beneficial, but it remains unclear how givers regulate their own internal processes to provide optimal support. Through the...

Background Violence exacts staggering personal and financial costs – a burden disproportionally born by adolescents and young adults. This may be partially due to an increased sensitivity to social rejection during this critical phase of development. Irritability, a transdiagnostic symptom, is often elicited by social interactions. Yet, little is k...

Elevated irritability during adolescence predicts mental health issues in adulthood. Social interactions commonly elicit symptoms of irritability. Prior research has traditionally examined neural activity during the anticipation of, and immediate reaction to, social feedback separately in irritable adolescents. However, studies suggest that irritab...

Substance use (SU) has been linked to alterations in reward processing in the ventral striatum (VS). However, less is known about how SU relates to striatal activation and connectivity during social rewards (e.g., positive peer feedback). In this pre-registered study, we hypothesized that SU would be associated with activation and functional connec...

Objective: The COVID-19 pandemic is one of the largest collective stressors in recent history. Consistent with prior research, this stress has led to impactful eating behavior change. While prior life traumas also impact eating behavior, it is unclear whether the current stress experienced during COVID-19, and prior life traumas (overall, socially...

In day-to-day social interactions, we frequently use cues and contextual knowledge to make perceptual decisions regarding the presence or absence of threat in facial expressions. Such perceptual decisions are often made in socially evaluative contexts. However, the influence of such contexts on perceptual discrimination of threatening and neutral e...

Social rejection elicits profound feelings of distress. From an evolutionary perspective, the best way to alleviate this distress is to behave prosocially, minimizing the likelihood of further exclusion. Yet, examples ranging from the playground to the pub suggest rejection commonly elicits aggression. Opposing theoretical perspectives and discorda...

Perturbations in dopamine system function may increase risk of substance use disorder (SUD). We recently demonstrated that neuromelanin (NM) MRI signal in the substantia nigra, a non-invasive index of dopamine system function, is elevated in long term cocaine users (Cassidy et al., 2020). However, it is unclear whether elevated NM-MRI signal is lin...

Background The amygdala-prefrontal cortex circuit is involved in processing socio-emotional cues and may partially mediate social impairment in autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Past task-based fMRI studies in ASD indicate a mix of hypo- and hyper-connectivity in response to socio-emotional stimuli whereas resting state studies report hypoconnectivit...

Preventing the negative impacts of major, intersectional social issues hinges on personal concern and willingness to take action. This research examines social comparison in the context of climate change, racial injustice, and COVID‐19 during Fall 2020. Participants in a U.S. university sample (n = 288), reported personal levels of concern and acti...

Study Objectives Insufficient sleep and social stress are associated with weight gain and obesity development in adolescent girls. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) research suggests that altered engagement of emotion-related neural networks may explain overeating when under stress. The purpose of this study is to explore the effects of...

Adolescent males and females differ in their responses to social threat. Yet, threat processing is often probed in non-social contexts using the error-related negativity (ERN; Flanker EEG Task), which does not yield sex-specific outcomes. fMRI studies show inconsistent patterns of sex-specific neural engagement during threat processing. Thus, the r...

Preventing the negative impacts of major, intersectional U.S. social issues hinges on personal concern and willingness to take action. We examined social comparison of COVID-19, racial injustice, and climate change during Fall 2020. Participants in a U.S. university sample (n = 288), reported personal levels of concern and action taken on these iss...

We must often give and receive constructive feedback in various contexts. Constructive feedback offers unique benefits including improvements in performance, goal-pursuit, self-awareness, and self-efficacy. However, it is challenging to give and receive. This may be due to threats to self-concept that giving and receiving constructive feedback pose...

Prior work on has demonstrated that irritability and anxiety are associated with bullying perpetration and victimization, respectively. Even though symptoms of irritability and anxiety often occur concurrently, few studies have tested their interactive effects on perpetration or victimization. The current study recruited 131 youths from a broader p...

An aberrant neural response to rewards has been linked to both depression and social anxiety. Most studies have focused on the neural response to monetary rewards, and few have tested different modalities of reward (e.g., social) that are more salient to particular forms of psychopathology. In addition, most studies contain critical confounds, incl...

Thinking one is better than peers is generally associated with positive psychological outcomes like increased self-esteem and resilience. However, this tendency may be problematic in the context of collective action problems, wherein individuals are reliant on others’ prosocial behaviors to achieve larger goals. We examined this question in the con...

Peer-based aggression following social rejection is a costly and prevalent problem for which existing treatments have had little success. This may be because aggression is a complex process influenced by current states of attention and arousal, which are difficult to measure on a moment to moment basis via self report. It is therefore crucial to id...

This report describes an ongoing R03 grant that explores the links between trait reward sensitivity, substance use, and neural responses to social and nonsocial reward. Although previous research has shown that trait reward sensitivity and neural responses to reward are linked to substance use, whether this relationship is impacted by how people pr...

This report describes an ongoing R03 grant that explores the links between trait reward sensitivity, substance use, and neural responses to social and nonsocial reward. Although previous research has shown that trait reward sensitivity and neural responses to reward are linked to substance use, whether this relationship is impacted by how people pr...

Adolescence is a sensitive period for the development of adaptive social behaviors and social anxiety, possibly due to aspects of brain development. However, research is needed to examine interactions among age, social anxiety, and social dynamics previously shown to influence neural responding. The current functional magnetic resonance imaging (fM...

Objective: This meta-analysis advances a framework to understand correspondence among units of analysis of the social processing construct within Research Domain Criteria (RDoC). Method: As requested for this special issue, eligible studies cited an RDoC-initiative paper or mentioned RDoC in the abstract, title, or keywords were empirical and pe...

Anxiety and depression often emerge in adolescence. A normative increase in the desire for peer acceptance may be one of many contributing factors. This occurs during a phase of development in which neural reward networks, including the ventral striatum, undergo critical changes. Despite the salience of peer feedback during adolescence, neural resp...

Objective: This meta-analysis advances a framework to understand correspondence among units of analysis of the social processing construct within Research Domain Criteria (RDoC). Method: As requested for this special issue, eligible studies cited an RDoC-initiative paper or mentioned RDoC in the abstract, title or keywords, were empirical and peer-...

Social feedback is highly salient and particularly relevant when investigating the pathophysiology of depression and social anxiety. A bourgeoning body of research has demonstrated an association between reward-related delta activity and psychopathology. However, a critical limitation is that these findings are derived from neural responses to mone...

Background Early childhood social reticence (SR) and preadolescent social anxiety (SA) symptoms increase the risk for more severe SA in later adolescence. Yet, not all at‐risk youth develop more severe SA. The emergence of distinct patterns of neural response to socially evocative contexts during pivotal points in development may help explain this...

Wariness in early childhood manifests as shy, inhibited behavior in novel social situations and is associated with increased risk for developing social anxiety. In youth with childhood wariness, exposure to a potent social stressor, such as peer victimization, may potentiate brain-based sensitivity to unpredictable social contexts, thereby increasi...

Unfamiliar people, places, and objects often elicit wariness and distress in behaviorally inhibited infants. As behaviorally inhibited infants mature through childhood and become adolescents, peer-based social situations become the driving source of this wariness. The conflict between a desire for positive social interactions and fear of negative e...

Objective: Socially anxious adolescents report distress during social decision-making, wherein their favorable view of peers directly conflicts with their expectation to be viewed negatively by peers; a phenomenon we refer to as "mismatch bias." The present study utilizes a novel paradigm with dynamic social stimuli to explore the correlates of mi...

Affective science research on reward processing has primarily focused on monetary rewards. There has been a growing interest in evaluating the neural basis of social decision-making and reward processing. The present study employed a within-subject design and compared the reward positivity (RewP), an event-related potential component that is presen...

The Screen for Child Anxiety and Related Emotional Disorder (SCARED) may be differentially sensitive to detecting specific or comorbid anxiety diagnoses in treatment-seeking and non-treatment-seeking youth. We assessed the SCARED's discriminant validity, diagnostic utility, and informant agreement using parent- and self-report from healthy and trea...

Behavioral inhibition (BI) is a temperament identified in early childhood that is associated with risk for anxiety disorders, yet only about half of behaviorally inhibited children manifest anxiety later in life. We compared brain function and behavior during extinction recall in a sample of nonanxious young adults characterized in childhood with B...

Social anxiety disorder involves biased cognition and altered neural responses to social stimuli. This study further assesses the precise ways in which neural activation associated with perceptual processing of faces differs in socially anxious and non-anxious individuals. Functional magnetic resonance imaging data were acquired as 90 anxious or he...

Social reticence is expressed as shy, anxiously avoidant behavior in early childhood. With development, overt signs of social reticence may diminish but could still manifest themselves in neural responses to peers. We obtained measures of social reticence across 2 to 7 years of age. At age 11, preadolescents previously characterized as high (n = 30...

Social development has been the focus of a great deal of neuroscience based research over the past decade. In this review, we focus on providing a framework for understanding how changes in facets of social development may correspond with changes in brain function. We argue that (1) distinct phases of social behavior emerge based on whether the org...

Objective: Perturbations in emotional conflict adaptation, an implicit regulatory process, have been observed in adult anxiety disorders. However, findings remain inconsistent and restricted to adults. The current study compares conflict adaptation in youth and adults, with and without anxiety disorders. We predicted conflict adaptation would be p...

Placebo analgesia is measured by self-report, yet current, expected, and recalled efficacy may be differentially related to brain function. Here we used a human thermal pain model to compare self-reports of expected, concurrent, and recalled efficacy of a topical placebo analgesic, and tested associations of the three measures of efficacy with chan...

Fear conditioning and extinction have been implicated in the pathogenesis of anxiety disorders. However, due to ethical and methodological limitations, few studies have examined these learning processes across development, particularly among anxious individuals. The present study examined differences in fear conditioning and extinction in anxious a...

Social anxiety disorder typically begins in adolescence, a sensitive period for brain development, when increased complexity and salience of peer relationships requires novel forms of social learning. Disordered social learning in adolescence may explain how brain dysfunction promotes social anxiety. Socially anxious adolescents (n=15) and adults (...

Behavioral inhibition (BI) is a temperament characterized by social reticence and withdrawal from unfamiliar or novel contexts and conveys risk for social anxiety disorder. Developmental outcomes associated with this temperament can be influenced by children’s caregiving context. The convergence of a child’s temperamental disposition and rearing en...

Adolescence is the time of peak onset for many anxiety disorders, particularly Social Anxiety Disorder. Research using simulated social interactions consistently finds differential activation in several brain regions in anxious (vs. non-anxious) youth, including amygdala, striatum, and medial prefrontal cortex. However, few studies examined the ant...

The interpersonal model of loss of control (LOC) eating proposes that socially distressing situations lead to anxious states that trigger excessive food consumption. Self-reports support these links, but the neurobiological underpinnings of these relationships remain unclear. We therefore examined brain regions associated with anxiety in relation t...

Behavioral inhibition, a temperament identifiable in infancy, is associated with heightened withdrawal from social encounters. Prior studies raise particular interest in the striatum, which responds uniquely to monetary gains in behaviorally inhibited children followed into adolescence. Although behavioral manifestations of inhibition are expressed...

Behavioral inhibition, a temperament identified in early childhood, is often associated with dysregulated attention and affective processing, particularly in response to threat. Longitudinal studies find that the manifestation of perturbed attention and affective processing often dissipates with age. Yet, childhood behavioral inhibition continues t...

The nervous system promotes adaptive responding to myriad environmental stimuli by ascribing emotion to specific stimulus domains. This affects the salience of different stimuli, facilitates learning, and likely involves the amygdala. Recent studies suggest a strong homology between adaptive responses that result from learning and those that emerge...

Social Anxiety Disorder (SAD) is a common and debilitating condition that typically manifests in adolescence. Here we describe cognitive factors engaged by brain-imaging tasks, which model the peer-based social interactions that evoke symptoms of SAD. We then present preliminary results from the Virtual School paradigm, a novel peer-based social in...

Greater responsiveness of emotional arousal circuits in relation to delivered visceral pain has been implicated as underlying central pain amplification in Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS), with females showing greater responses than males. Functional MRI was used to measure neural responses to an emotion recognition paradigm, using faces expressing...

Background: Over the past decade, the number of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies has increased dramatically. As MRI scans may be anxiety provoking, performing them in a research setting, particularly with children already prone to anxiety, raises questions about ethics as well as methodological feasibility. It is essential to a...

Central sensitization and dysregulation of peripheral substance P and neurokinin-1 receptor (NK-1R) signaling are associated with chronic abdominal pain in inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) and irritable bowel syndrome (IBS). Although positron emission tomography (PET) has demonstrated that patients with injury-related chronic pain have diminished N...

Background: Previous studies demonstrate that anxiety is characterized by biased attention toward threats, typically measured by differences in motor reaction time to threat and neutral cues. Using eye-tracking methodology, the current study measured attention biases in anxious and nonanxious youth, using unrestricted free viewing of angry, happy,...

The present study is the first to assess whether the neural correlates of cognitive control processes differ in adults with and without a behaviorally inhibited temperament during early childhood. Adults with and without childhood behavioral inhibition completed an emotional conflict task while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging scann...

Studies comparing neural correlates of reward processing across development yield inconsistent findings. This challenges theories characterizing adolescents as globally hypo- or hypersensitive to rewards. Developmental differences in reward sensitivity may fluctuate based on reward magnitude, and on whether rewards require decision-making. We exami...

Converging preclinical, and human epidemiological, neuroimaging, and genetic evidence suggests a central role for dopamine neurotransmission in modulating pain perception and analgesia. Dysregulation in dopamine signaling may modulate the experience of pain both directly, by enhancing or diminishing the propagation of nociceptive signals, and indir...

People rationalize the choices they make when confronted with difficult decisions by claiming they never wanted the option they did not choose. Behavioral studies on cognitive dissonance provide evidence for decision-induced attitude change, but these studies cannot fully uncover the mechanisms driving the attitude change because only pre- and post...

Alterations in serotonin signalling within the brain-gut axis have been implicated in the pathophysiology of irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) and is a treatment target. Acute tryptophan depletion (ATD) decreases brain serotonin (5-hydroxytryptamine; 5-HT) levels, and increases visceral perception and negative emotional bias in patients with IBS. The...

5-Hydroxytryptamine (5-HT)3 receptor (5-HT3R) antagonists are effective in treating patients with irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) and have anxiolytic effects. Their therapeutic effects are related, in part, to reducing amygdala engagement during expected visceral pain. A single nucleotide polymorphism in HTR3A, c.-42C>T;(C178T; rs1062613), is associ...

Placebos were historically defined as inert substances (e.g., sugar or bread pills) that cause symptom improvement but are now characterized more broadly to include contextual aspects of both active and inactive treatments that contribute to symptom improvement in therapeutic settings. These contexts may be associated with the environment, includin...