Johanna Jarcho
Temple University, PA·Psychology
Adolescence is when peers start to matter most, and also when social difficulties in autism and social anxiety often grow or take hold. How the brain responds to rewards like being liked, and how it remembers social successes and failures, may help explain who struggles.
- Fields
Psychology
Neuroscience
- Topics
autism spectrum disorder
social anxiety
adolescence
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Nov 2028
What they work on
- Compare brain responses to social reward (being liked by peers) and non-social reward (winning money) in autistic and neurotypical adolescents aged 10–15, using a purpose-built fMRI feedback task.
- Measure midbrain dopamine system function in autistic versus neurotypical youth with neuromelanin-sensitive MRI, and test whether it shapes the link between autism and blunted reward response.
- Map how memory bias for negative peer feedback relates to social anxiety trajectories in 255 youths followed from ages 10–11 to 12–13, with symptom assessments every six months.
- Test whether memory bias explains the link between medial prefrontal cortex–striatal connectivity and social anxiety persistence, and whether dopamine function measured by NM-MRI moderates this link.
More about the research
These two projects use brain imaging in young adolescents to study these processes. A shared tool is neuromelanin-sensitive MRI (NM-MRI). NM-MRI is a non-invasive scan that serves as a stand-in measure of the brain's dopamine system, which is central to reward and motivation.
Why it matters
Gold-standard treatments for adolescent social anxiety rarely produce full remission, and autism therapies depend on intact reward processing. Identifying brain and memory mechanisms could point to new intervention targets for socially anxious youth before symptoms become lifelong. For autism, a brain scan of dopamine function may help predict who benefits most from reward-based therapies and suggest new drug targets.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Alexandra Cohen
Emory University, GA·Psychology·Early-career
Test how emotions triggered by wins and losses in a probabilistic reinforcement learning task affect memory and dopamine- and norepinephrine-linked brain function, comparing children, adolescents and adults.
Kathleen Gunthert
American University, DC·Neuroscience
Test whether excitatory or inhibitory non-invasive neuromodulation of right cerebellar lobule VII (RVII) selectively changes social learning, comparing it with sham stimulation in neurotypical adults and adults with autism.
Howard Gritton
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, IL·Neuroscience
Test whether developmental phthalate exposure reduces anatomical and functional connectivity among frontal, sensory and limbic brain regions in mice, using whole-brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).
The school
Temple University: 22 labs on PI Pages, $315M a year on research, 238 research doctorates a year.
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