4 99 Neural and affective responses to prolonged eye contact with parents and unfamiliar others in depressed and non-depressed adolescents group × target (p = .491), group × gaze direction (p = .154), or between group × target × gaze direction (p = .441). Neuroimaging findings To examine differences in neural responses in DEP versus HC adolescents within the ROIs, we examined the main effect of group and their interactions with gaze direction and target on adolescents’ neural responses, while controlling for multiple comparisons (p <.05/5) in five separate mixed regression model analyses in R. These analyses revealed a main effect of group in left IFG (B = 0.65, SE = 0.24, t(76) = 2.68, p = .009, d = 0.73), showing diminished BOLDactivation in this brain region in DEP versus HC adolescents, irrespective of gaze direction or target. There was also a main effect of group in dmPFC (p = .026) and right FG (p = .017), but these effects did not survive corrections for multiple comparisons. There were no significant interactions between group × target (all ≥ p = .207) or between group × gaze direction (all ≥ p = .204), nor a significant interaction between group × gaze direction × target (all ≥ p = .069) on adolescents’ neural responses in the ROIs. To test for differences in task-related BOLD-activation in brain regions outside the ROIs between DEP and HC adolescents in response to direct and averted gaze of the targets, we conducted complementary whole brain analyses. The analyses revealed an overall hypoactivation in left secondary visual cortex in DEP versus HC adolescents when performing the eye contact task (main effect of group: MNI peak-coordinate [-8, -87, -9], Z = 5.23, pcluster-level <.001, k = 4746). There were no significant interactions between group × gaze direction, group × target, or group × gaze direction × target. Neural responses to prolonged eye contact over time As preregistered, we tested whether we could replicate a finding in adults who exhibited increased activation within the dmPFC with increasing duration of eye contact (MNI peak-coordinate: [2, 38, 47] (Wever et al., 2022). We performed a ROI analysis using an 8-mm spherical ROI around the peak-coordinate on the contrast of direct minus averted gaze videos pooled over all ‘other’ conditions (i.e., parent, unfamiliar peer, unfamiliar adult) for HC adolescents. We split each trial into three epochs of equal length and subsequently tested for parametric increases and decreases with presentation duration [-1 0 1]. We did not find a significant increase in BOLDactivation over the course of prolonged eye contact duration in this region of the dmPFC in HC adolescents. Between-group differences in parametric increases and decreases of neural responses with increasing durations of eye contact were tested with an independent t-test between DEP and HC adolescents, using a whole-brain approach. We found a parametric decrease over time in
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