CAREER: Neurodevelopmental Mechanisms of Stressor Controllability and Resilience

压力是一种普遍的人类体验，它会对心理和身体健康产生影响。压力通常在青春期增加，而发育中的大脑在这个阶段对压力特别敏感。跨越文化和世纪，青春期一直被认为是身体、大脑和行为发生巨大变化的时期。在此期间，青少年患一些神经精神疾病的风险更高，包括焦虑和情绪障碍、精神病、饮食失调、人格障碍和物质使用障碍。最近的工作已经开始揭示青少年大脑的独特方面，这可能有助于我们了解它是如何发展和应对压力的，同时，如何更好地支持青少年在他们生活中这个充满挑战的时期。该项目将研究经历如何影响大脑发育和应对压力的能力，这对于提高关于如何优化幸福感的知识至关重要。虽然青春期通常被认为是一个高风险的时期，但目前的研究将利用有关青少年大脑独特性质的知识，目的是提高适应力。更好地了解青少年大脑对压力的反应将对儿童和青少年的健康、父母教育、教育环境和公共政策产生广泛的影响。这个项目更广泛的影响包括广泛的指导和推广活动，这将扩大发展神经科学的包容性，为学生提供深入研究压力和青少年大脑发育科学的机会，同时也教育公众压力对他们生活的种类和影响。尽管压力可能具有挑战性，但最近的研究表明，并非所有的压力都有负面影响。有证据表明，经历可控的压力可以促进成年人的恢复能力，本项目将重点放在青少年这个大脑发育的独特时期，在这个时期，压力源的可控性可能对促进恢复能力特别有益。利用行为学、生理学和神经影像学方法，本项目将研究应激源可控性影响的年龄相关差异，以及将可控应激与适应性应对联系起来的机制途径。研究人员将利用与功能磁共振成像（fMRI）相结合的行为任务来研究可控压力的经历如何改变发育中的大脑。研究人员假设，两种压力，可控的和不可控的，会对情绪调节和决策所需的大脑区域之间的连通性产生不同的影响，从而在实验室和现实世界中对后来的压力源产生更好或更差的反应。他们设计了一系列行为任务，让青少年面对两种形式的压力，并对它们进行对比，希望能更好地理解潜在的神经机制，以及可控压力作为一种有益干预的效果。具体来说，目的1将研究控制压力源的经验如何通过调节涉及动机行为的大脑回路来影响对后来无法控制的压力的反应。目标2将研究可控压力（相对于不可控或无压力）如何影响对环境可控性的推断。目的3将测试可控压力的影响在多大程度上推广到现实环境中，并促进日常生活中的适应性应对行为。这项研究将揭示有关神经可塑性的关键问题，以及压力如何“进入皮肤”以形成长期的神经行为结果，以及何时以及如何干预可能最有效地促进面对压力的恢复力。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Stress is a universal human experience that can have consequences for mental and physical health. Stress often increases during adolescence, and the developing brain is particularly sensitive to stress during this phase of life. Across cultures and centuries, adolescence has been noted as a time of dramatic changes in the body, brain, and behavior. During this time, youth are at heightened risk for a number of neuropsychiatric disorders, including anxiety and mood disorders, psychosis, eating disorders, personality disorders, and substance use disorders. Recent work has begun to reveal unique facets of the adolescent brain that may help us to understand how it develops and responds to stress and, concomitantly, how to better support youth during this challenging time period in their lives. This project will examine how experiences shape brain development and the capacity to cope with stress, which is essential for advancing knowledge about how to optimize well-being. While adolescence is most commonly studied as a period of heightened risk, the current study will leverage knowledge about the unique nature of the adolescent brain with the goal to promote resilience. A better understanding of how the adolescent brain responds to stress will have broad implications for child and adolescent well-being, parenting, educational settings, and public policy. The broader impacts of this project include extensive mentorship and outreach activities, which will broaden inclusion in developmental neuroscience and provide opportunities for students to engage deeply with the science of stress and adolescent brain development, while also educating the general public about the varieties and effects of stress on their lives.Although stress can be challenging, recent research has shown that not all stress has negative effects. Building upon evidence that experiencing controllable stress can promote resilience in adults, this project focuses on adolescence as a unique period of brain development when the controllability of a stressor may be particularly beneficial for promoting resilience. Using behavioral, physiological, and neuroimaging approaches, this project will investigate age-related differences in the effects of stressor controllability and mechanistic pathways linking controllable stress to adaptive coping. Researchers will utilize behavioral tasks paired with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to study how experience with controllable stress alters the developing brain. The researchers hypothesize that two varieties of stress, controllable and uncontrollable, will have differing effects on the connectivity between brain areas needed for emotional regulation and decision-making, causing better or worse responses to later stressors in both the lab and the real world. Through a set of behavioral tasks designed to expose adolescents to both forms of stress and contrast them, they hope to gain a better understanding of the underlying neural mechanisms and the efficacy of controllable stress as a helpful intervention. Specifically, Aim 1 will examine how the experience of having control over a stressor can influence responses to later uncontrollable stress, via modulation of brain circuitry involved in motivated behavior. Aim 2 will examine how controllable stress (relative to uncontrollable or no stress) influences inferences about environmental controllability. Aim 3 will test the extent to which the effects of controllable stress generalize to real-world settings and promote adaptive coping behaviors in daily life. This research will inform critical questions about neuroplasticity and how stress “gets under the skin” to shape long-term neurobehavioral outcomes, as well as when and how interventions may be most effective for promoting resilience in the face of stress.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.