CAREER: Psychological and Neurodevelopmental Mechanisms of Social Influence on Adolescent Decision-Making

职业：社会影响青少年决策的心理和神经发育机制

• 批准号: 1452530
• 负责人: Leah Somerville
• 金额: $ 75万
• 依托单位: Harvard University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Continuing Grant
• 财政年份: 2015
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2015-05-01 至 2022-04-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1452530&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: CAREER; Psychological; Neurodevelopmental; Mechanisms; Social

During adolescence, individuals begin to make increasingly independent decisions that involve weighing the potential risks and benefits of their actions. Although the decisions adolescents and adults make are similar in many situations, there are certain contexts that lead to more risky decisions by adolescents. This is the case in social contexts: adolescents (but not adults) tend to make riskier choices in the presence of peers. Although peers' influence on adolescent risk-taking is documented in real-world crime statistics, health statistics, and in controlled laboratory experiments, just how peers uniquely influence adolescents remains poorly understood. The overarching goals of this research are threefold: a) to refine understanding of adolescent risky behavior by demonstrating what aspects of decisions are vulnerable to peer influence, b) to identify how the developing brain contributes to peer influence on adolescent risk taking, and c) to evaluate how laboratory measures of peer influence relate to actual risky behavior in daily life.To carry out this work, dyads of adolescents and dyads of young adults will complete a series of decision making-tasks designed to quantify components of risky choices. For instance, mathematical decomposition analyses can isolate how much risk an individual is willing to tolerate in order to obtain a potential reward. Participants complete these tasks in experimental configurations that vary in their degree of social evaluation. Peers are either absent, present and monitoring the participant's level of riskiness, or present but unable to monitor the participant's level of riskiness. These peer configurations build on recent findings by Leah Somerville and others showing that the mere presence of a peer may be sufficient to evoke riskier choices in adolescents. Comparisons of risky choices in these three contexts will disentangle the sources of peer influence that depend on the peer awareness of risky choices, compared to sources of peer influence that are evoked merely by the presence of a peer. In addition, confidential surveys will measure risk-taking in everyday life. They will be used to bridge the laboratory and the real world through analyses that ask what characteristics of the dyads, and what characteristics of individual's riskiness relate to their laboratory-based choices. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is used to measure how the still-developing brain uniquely processes information about social evaluation, and how these processes interact with decision-making processes. This project stands to build foundational knowledge about how neurodevelopment during adolescence shapes the development of complex social behavior. More broadly, this work can be extended to help predict the particular 'ingredients' of a situation that lead adolescents to take unhealthy risks. Further, this project generates key data to address legal-ethical issues of youth culpability for crimes committed with peers.

在青春期，个体开始做出越来越独立的决定，包括权衡他们行为的潜在风险和收益。虽然青少年和成年人在许多情况下做出的决定是相似的，但也有某些情况会导致青少年做出更危险的决定。在社会环境中就是这种情况：青少年（而不是成年人）往往在同龄人面前做出风险更大的选择。虽然同龄人对青少年冒险行为的影响在现实世界的犯罪统计数据、健康统计数据和受控实验室实验中都有记录，但人们对同龄人如何独特地影响青少年仍然知之甚少。本研究的总体目标有三个：a）通过证明哪些方面的决定容易受到同伴影响来加深对青少年冒险行为的理解，B）确定发育中的大脑如何促进同伴对青少年冒险行为的影响，以及c）评估同伴影响的实验室测量与日常生活中实际冒险行为的关系。青少年和年轻成年人的二人组将完成一系列旨在量化风险选择组成部分的决策任务。例如，数学分解分析可以分离出一个人为了获得潜在的回报愿意忍受多少风险。参与者在不同的社会评价程度的实验配置中完成这些任务。同伴要么缺席，要么在场并监控参与者的风险水平，要么在场但无法监控参与者的风险水平。这些同伴结构建立在Leah萨默维尔和其他人的最新研究结果的基础上，这些研究结果表明，仅仅是同伴的存在就足以引起青少年做出更冒险的选择。在这三种情况下的风险选择的比较将解开的同伴影响的来源，依赖于同伴意识的风险选择，相比之下，同伴影响的来源，仅仅是由同伴的存在引起的。此外，保密调查将衡量日常生活中的冒险行为。他们将被用来连接实验室和真实的世界，通过分析，问什么特点的二元组，以及什么特点的个人的风险与他们的实验室为基础的选择。功能性磁共振成像（fMRI）用于测量仍在发育中的大脑如何独特地处理有关社会评价的信息，以及这些过程如何与决策过程相互作用。该项目旨在建立关于青春期神经发育如何塑造复杂社会行为发展的基础知识。更广泛地说，这项工作可以扩展到帮助预测导致青少年承担不健康风险的特定“成分”。此外，该项目还产生了关键数据，以解决青年与同龄人一起犯罪的法律道德问题。