Amygdala habituation to emotional faces: predicting future recidivism in multi-problem young adults

Young adults must learn to navigate increasingly complex social demands. However, youth with co-morbid externalizing and internalizing psychopathology may show slower habituation to socio-emotional cues, indicative of prolonged threat reactivity or socio-affective disengagement, which could contribute to persistent aggression by reducing sensitivity to others’ affiliative and distress cues. In the current study, we test whether interacting levels of internalizing and externalizing problems are associated with amygdala habituation and whether habituation predicted recidivism. For this purpose, ninety-eight multi-problem young adults (18-27y) with a history of antisocial behavior underwent fMRI during an emotional face-matching task presenting fearful, angry, sad, happy and neutral faces. To assess habituation, a well-established habituation index was derived to study how emotional faces were processed. Internalizing and externalizing symptoms were measured with the Adult Self-Report. Recidivism was obtained from Dutch national judicial records (median follow-up 2.5 years post-scan). Amygdala responses showed emotion-dependent habituation, with the strongest habituation for happy faces and relatively weaker habituation for negative and neutral expressions. Moreover, co-occurring internalizing symptoms amplified the association between externalizing symptoms and recidivism. However, amygdala habituation was not associated with externalizing and internalizing symptom levels and neither predicted recidivism nor moderated symptom-recidivism associations. In this high-risk sample, amygdala habituation appears more pronounced for affiliative cues than for negative emotions, but individual differences in habituation did not explain prospective reoffending beyond symptom profiles. Clarifying whether affiliative cues show stronger habituation due to adaptive safety learning or reduced engagement may help refine interventions to enhance sensitivity to prosocial signals and changing social demands.Keywords: habituation, externalizing, internalizing, recidivism, amygdala, fMRI.