Leah H Somerville
Biographic Data
| ID | 1660293 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Leah H Somerville |
| GIVEN NAMES | Leah H |
| FAMILY NAME | Somerville |
| SIGNATURE | SOMERVILLE L H |
| AFFILIATIONS | Harvard University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3747-6884 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 17 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 41 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 17 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2010 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Social Contexts Requiring Adjudication between Self- and Peer-Interest Differentially Alter Risk Preferences Across Adolescence
Adolescence is a period of escalated rates of risk taking and a dynamic social landscape with peers taking on an important role in shaping one’s decisions. Choosing to engage in risk rarely impacts only the decision maker, but also those around them. With a cohort of typically developing adolescent and young adult friend dyads (N = 128, 11–22 years), the current study investigates how peer-relevant social contexts influence risk preferences at di…
Emotion word production tasks grant insight into the development of emotion word organization and accessibility
Children are often instructed to "use their words" to communicate their emotions, which requires them to quickly access words that best describe their feelings. Adults vary in their ability to bring both nonemotion and emotion words to mind (two capacities called verbal fluency and emotion fluency ). However, no studies have examined how emotion fluency emerges across development, despite the fact that mastering emotion language is an important d…
Multimodal Measurement of Pubertal Development: Stage, Timing, Tempo, and Hormones
Using data from the Human Connectome Project in Development (N = 1304; ages 5–21 years; 50% male; 59% White, 17% Hispanic, 13% Black, 9% Asian), multiple measures (self-report, salivary hormones) and research designs (longitudinal, cross-sectional) were used to characterize age-related changes and sex differences in pubertal development. Both sexes exhibit a sigmoid trajectory of pubertal development; females show earlier pubertal timing and incr…
Perceptual sensitivity to labeling stereotyped emotion expressions: Associations with age and subclinical psychopathology symptoms from childhood through early adulthood
This study investigates (a) age-related differences in how the intensity of stereotyped facial expressions influence the emotion label children, adolescents, and adults assign to that face and (b) how this perceptual sensitivity relates to subclinical symptoms of psychopathology. In 2015-2016, 184 participants aged 4-25 years viewed posed stereotypes of angry, fearful, sad, and happy expressions morphed with neutral expressions at 10%-90% intensi…
Risk and Protective Effects of Need for Approval on Self-Injury in Adolescent Girls
Examining the Association between Punishment and Reward Sensitivity and Response Inhibition to Previously-Incentivized Cues across Development
Shifting qualities of negative affective experience through adolescence: Age-related change and associations with functional outcomes
Research shows negative affect increases in healthy adolescents, and this normative change is paralleled by increasing risk for the onset of psychopathology. However, research is limited in characterizing qualitative differences in the type of negative affect experienced beyond the positive-negative valence dimension. In the current study, we establish the relationship between different forms of negative affect and functioning outcomes (i.e., dif…
Effects of peer observation on risky decision-making in adolescence: A meta-analytic review
Contains fulltext : 292677.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Open Access)
Making the Sentencing Case: Psychological and Neuroscientific Evidence for Expanding the Age of Youthful Offenders
Youthful offenders convicted of serious crimes continue to be sentenced to death and life without parole in the United States based on legal arguments that cast them as incorrigible and permanent dangers to society. Yet psychological and neuroscientific evidence contradicts these arguments and unequivocally demonstrates significant changes in brain, behavior, and personality throughout the life course, especially during adolescence as it extends …
Use of linguistic distancing and cognitive reappraisal strategies during emotion regulation in children, adolescents, and young adults
Regulating one's emotions is an important psychological skill at all ages. Cognitive reappraisal-changing the meaning of a stimulus to alter its emotional impact-is an effective emotion regulation technique. Prior work shows that adults spontaneously reduce their use of present tense verbs and first-person singular pronouns (e.g., I, me, mine ) when engaging in cognitive reappraisal, a linguistic shift that is thought to track increased psycholog…
Charting the development of emotion comprehension and abstraction from childhood to adulthood using observer-rated and linguistic measures
This study examined two facets of emotion development: emotion word comprehension (knowing the meaning of emotion words such as "anger" or "excitement") and emotion concept abstraction (representing emotions in terms of internal psychological states that generalize across situations). Using a novel emotion vocabulary assessment, we captured how a cross-sectional sample of participants aged 4-25 ( N = 196) defined 24 emotions. Smoothing spline reg…
Increasing verbal knowledge mediates development of multidimensional emotion representations
The unique roles of intrapersonal and social factors in adolescent smoking development
Adolescence is a vulnerable period for the initiation and peak of many harmful risk-taking behaviors such as smoking, which is among the most addictive and deadliest behaviors. Generic metatheories like the theory of triadic influence (TTI) suggest that interrelated risk factors across multiple domains (i.e., intrapersonal and social/environmental) jointly contribute to adolescent smoking behavior. Yet, studies are lacking that investigate risk f…
The Teenage Brain: Sensitivity to Social Evaluation
Relative to childhood, peer relationships take on a heightened importance during adolescence. Might adolescents be highly attuned to information that concerns when and how they are being evaluated and what their peers think of them? This review evaluates how continuing brain development—which influences brain function—partially explains and reflects adolescents’ attunement to social evaluation. Though preliminary, evidence is mounting to suggest …
Braking and Accelerating of the Adolescent Brain
Adolescence is a developmental period often characterized as a time of impulsive and risky choices leading to increased incidence of unintentional injuries and violence, alcohol and drug abuse, unintended pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases. Traditional neurobiological and cognitive explanations for such suboptimal choices and actions have failed to account for nonlinear changes in behavior observed during adolescence, relative to childho…
A time of change: Behavioral and neural correlates of adolescent sensitivity to appetitive and aversive environmental cues
The storm and stress of adolescence: Insights from human imaging and mouse genetics
The characterization of adolescence as a time of “storm and stress” remains an open debate. Intense and frequent negative affect during this period has been hypothesized to explain the increased rates of affective disorders, suicide, and accidental death during this time of life. Yet some teens emerge from adolescence with minimal turmoil. We provide a neurobiological model of adolescence that proposes an imbalance in the development of subcortic…
Braking and Accelerating of the Adolescent Brain
Adolescence is a developmental period often characterized as a time of impulsive and risky choices leading to increased incidence of unintentional injuries and violence, alcohol and drug abuse, unintended pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases. Traditional neurobiological and cognitive explanations for such suboptimal choices and actions have failed to account for nonlinear changes in behavior observed during adolescence, relative to childho…
Increasing verbal knowledge mediates development of multidimensional emotion representations
The unique roles of intrapersonal and social factors in adolescent smoking development
Adolescence is a vulnerable period for the initiation and peak of many harmful risk-taking behaviors such as smoking, which is among the most addictive and deadliest behaviors. Generic metatheories like the theory of triadic influence (TTI) suggest that interrelated risk factors across multiple domains (i.e., intrapersonal and social/environmental) jointly contribute to adolescent smoking behavior. Yet, studies are lacking that investigate risk f…
Effects of peer observation on risky decision-making in adolescence: A meta-analytic review
Contains fulltext : 292677.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Open Access)
Making the Sentencing Case: Psychological and Neuroscientific Evidence for Expanding the Age of Youthful Offenders
Youthful offenders convicted of serious crimes continue to be sentenced to death and life without parole in the United States based on legal arguments that cast them as incorrigible and permanent dangers to society. Yet psychological and neuroscientific evidence contradicts these arguments and unequivocally demonstrates significant changes in brain, behavior, and personality throughout the life course, especially during adolescence as it extends …
A time of change: Behavioral and neural correlates of adolescent sensitivity to appetitive and aversive environmental cues
The storm and stress of adolescence: Insights from human imaging and mouse genetics
The characterization of adolescence as a time of “storm and stress” remains an open debate. Intense and frequent negative affect during this period has been hypothesized to explain the increased rates of affective disorders, suicide, and accidental death during this time of life. Yet some teens emerge from adolescence with minimal turmoil. We provide a neurobiological model of adolescence that proposes an imbalance in the development of subcortic…
Braking and Accelerating of the Adolescent Brain
Adolescence is a developmental period often characterized as a time of impulsive and risky choices leading to increased incidence of unintentional injuries and violence, alcohol and drug abuse, unintended pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases. Traditional neurobiological and cognitive explanations for such suboptimal choices and actions have failed to account for nonlinear changes in behavior observed during adolescence, relative to childho…
The Teenage Brain: Sensitivity to Social Evaluation
Relative to childhood, peer relationships take on a heightened importance during adolescence. Might adolescents be highly attuned to information that concerns when and how they are being evaluated and what their peers think of them? This review evaluates how continuing brain development—which influences brain function—partially explains and reflects adolescents’ attunement to social evaluation. Though preliminary, evidence is mounting to suggest …
The unique roles of intrapersonal and social factors in adolescent smoking development
Adolescence is a vulnerable period for the initiation and peak of many harmful risk-taking behaviors such as smoking, which is among the most addictive and deadliest behaviors. Generic metatheories like the theory of triadic influence (TTI) suggest that interrelated risk factors across multiple domains (i.e., intrapersonal and social/environmental) jointly contribute to adolescent smoking behavior. Yet, studies are lacking that investigate risk f…
Increasing verbal knowledge mediates development of multidimensional emotion representations
Use of linguistic distancing and cognitive reappraisal strategies during emotion regulation in children, adolescents, and young adults
Regulating one's emotions is an important psychological skill at all ages. Cognitive reappraisal-changing the meaning of a stimulus to alter its emotional impact-is an effective emotion regulation technique. Prior work shows that adults spontaneously reduce their use of present tense verbs and first-person singular pronouns (e.g., I, me, mine ) when engaging in cognitive reappraisal, a linguistic shift that is thought to track increased psycholog…
Charting the development of emotion comprehension and abstraction from childhood to adulthood using observer-rated and linguistic measures
This study examined two facets of emotion development: emotion word comprehension (knowing the meaning of emotion words such as "anger" or "excitement") and emotion concept abstraction (representing emotions in terms of internal psychological states that generalize across situations). Using a novel emotion vocabulary assessment, we captured how a cross-sectional sample of participants aged 4-25 ( N = 196) defined 24 emotions. Smoothing spline reg…
Making the Sentencing Case: Psychological and Neuroscientific Evidence for Expanding the Age of Youthful Offenders
Youthful offenders convicted of serious crimes continue to be sentenced to death and life without parole in the United States based on legal arguments that cast them as incorrigible and permanent dangers to society. Yet psychological and neuroscientific evidence contradicts these arguments and unequivocally demonstrates significant changes in brain, behavior, and personality throughout the life course, especially during adolescence as it extends …
Shifting qualities of negative affective experience through adolescence: Age-related change and associations with functional outcomes
Research shows negative affect increases in healthy adolescents, and this normative change is paralleled by increasing risk for the onset of psychopathology. However, research is limited in characterizing qualitative differences in the type of negative affect experienced beyond the positive-negative valence dimension. In the current study, we establish the relationship between different forms of negative affect and functioning outcomes (i.e., dif…
Effects of peer observation on risky decision-making in adolescence: A meta-analytic review
Contains fulltext : 292677.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Open Access)
Perceptual sensitivity to labeling stereotyped emotion expressions: Associations with age and subclinical psychopathology symptoms from childhood through early adulthood
This study investigates (a) age-related differences in how the intensity of stereotyped facial expressions influence the emotion label children, adolescents, and adults assign to that face and (b) how this perceptual sensitivity relates to subclinical symptoms of psychopathology. In 2015-2016, 184 participants aged 4-25 years viewed posed stereotypes of angry, fearful, sad, and happy expressions morphed with neutral expressions at 10%-90% intensi…
Risk and Protective Effects of Need for Approval on Self-Injury in Adolescent Girls
Examining the Association between Punishment and Reward Sensitivity and Response Inhibition to Previously-Incentivized Cues across Development
Social Contexts Requiring Adjudication between Self- and Peer-Interest Differentially Alter Risk Preferences Across Adolescence
Adolescence is a period of escalated rates of risk taking and a dynamic social landscape with peers taking on an important role in shaping one’s decisions. Choosing to engage in risk rarely impacts only the decision maker, but also those around them. With a cohort of typically developing adolescent and young adult friend dyads (N = 128, 11–22 years), the current study investigates how peer-relevant social contexts influence risk preferences at di…
Emotion word production tasks grant insight into the development of emotion word organization and accessibility
Children are often instructed to "use their words" to communicate their emotions, which requires them to quickly access words that best describe their feelings. Adults vary in their ability to bring both nonemotion and emotion words to mind (two capacities called verbal fluency and emotion fluency ). However, no studies have examined how emotion fluency emerges across development, despite the fact that mastering emotion language is an important d…
Multimodal Measurement of Pubertal Development: Stage, Timing, Tempo, and Hormones
Using data from the Human Connectome Project in Development (N = 1304; ages 5–21 years; 50% male; 59% White, 17% Hispanic, 13% Black, 9% Asian), multiple measures (self-report, salivary hormones) and research designs (longitudinal, cross-sectional) were used to characterize age-related changes and sex differences in pubertal development. Both sexes exhibit a sigmoid trajectory of pubertal development; females show earlier pubertal timing and incr…
Psychology (17 works) · Developmental psychology (16 works) · Child and Adolescent Psychosocial and Emotional Development (11 works) · Social Psychology (11 works) · Cognitive psychology (8 works) · Cognition (7 works) · Social Psychology (7 works) · Clinical Psychology (5 works) · Medicine (5 works) · Neuroscience (5 works)