CAREER: A Longitudinal, Cross-Cultural Investigation of Psychosocial and Neurobiological Aspects of Emotion Development in Adolescence

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Adolescence is a time of intense brain development in systems that support abstract thinking, social cognition and emotional feeling. It is also a time of intense social maturation, in which youths struggle to adapt to cultural norms and to reconcile the values and expectations of parents, peers, schools, and the broader society with their own desires and feelings. Yet, relatively little is known about how brain growth and social growth interact during this critical developmental stage, and how brain growth is influenced by the adoption of cultural norms for emotional behavior. This project examines how youths from two ethnic groups with different norms around emotional behavior, Mexican-American and Chinese-American urban adolescents, come to feel complex social emotions--emotions like admiration, inspiration, gratitude and compassion--in culturally appropriate, individually variable, ways. By combining neurobiological measures of social emotion processing with psychosocial interviews about the meaning youths make of social situations and personal experiences, the project seeks to transform knowledge about relations between adolescent brain and social development. The project has a special focus on the impact of urban community violence on youths' social connectedness, empathy and compassion, and on the ways that acculturation may promote neurobiological and psychosocial resilience over time. In addition to the possibility of contributing fundamental scientific discoveries about how neural development is shaped by socio-cultural processes, this project will make significant contributions to society through the development and testing of educational materials that promote compassion, well-being and academic achievement among at-risk urban youth. Urban adolescents from a range of ethnic groups will participate in a science summer camp in which they conduct collaborative research on the neurobiology of emotion, and in the process learn skills for scientific discourse, emotion recognition, self-reflection and cultural literacy. The impact of the camp experience will be assessed and results will inform a curriculum on emotions in academic contexts that will be broadly implemented, assessed and disseminated through strategic partnerships with Mental Health America, The Ball Foundation, SERP and Annenberg Media, and through the researcher's established series of internationally-attended workshops for teachers.