Behavioral Measurement of Negative Reinforcement in Adolescent Alcohol Use/Abuse

描述（由申请人提供）：尽管大规模的公共卫生努力，以减少其发病率和患病率，但青少年酒精滥用的问题仍在继续增长。为了加强预防工作，理论家们试图了解导致酒精滥用的病因和维持的因素。有几个模型来了解导致青少年开始饮酒和随后滥用的人格因素。这些模型主要关注正强化的某些方面，即冒险行为如何受到与酒精使用相关的新奇感、兴奋感和/或觉醒感的影响。已经开发出了行为测量方法，以捕捉奖励寻求的快照，其透明度较低，但可能比相关的自我报告测量方法更准确。尽管取得了令人鼓舞的成果，但这些任务只利用了积极的强化/寻求奖励的过程，没有解决青少年在应对厌恶刺激时使用酒精的问题，包括应对负面情绪或经历。成瘾的负强化理论（以及其他相关理论，如自我药物治疗和压力应对）强调了后者的重要性。因为像BART这样的任务评估的是风险，目的是获得一些积极的效果，它们没有提供关于风险的信息，而风险可能是负强化所维持的酒精滥用的基础。目前还没有可用的行为工具来评估潜在风险的负强化过程。我们建议在我们开发的基于正强化的任务（称为气球模拟风险任务（BART））的基础上，开发和验证基于负强化的任务，以增加与酒精相关的实验室风险评估措施的全面性和解释力和青年中与酒精相关的风险行为。 公共卫生相关性：本申请的目标是开发和验证一种评估工具，该工具侧重于青少年饮酒以避免和/或改善负面情绪和经历，这一过程被称为负强化。如果成功的话，这项任务将有助于了解负强化过程的作用，酒精使用和问题的基础，并可能是有用的，针对这一脆弱性的预防工作的发展。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The problem of alcohol misuse in adolescence continues to grow despite large-scale public health efforts to reduce both its incidence and prevalence. To enhance prevention efforts, theorists have attempted to understand factors that contribute to the etiology and maintenance of alcohol misuse. There exist several models to understand the personality factors that lead adolescents to alcohol initiation and subsequent misuse. Predominantly, these models focus on some aspect of positive reinforcement, that is, how risk taking is influenced by the novelty, excitement and/or arousal associated with alcohol use. Behavioral measures have been developed to capture snap shots of reward seeking in a less transparent and potentially more accurate way than relevant self-report measures. Despite promising results, these tasks tap only positive reinforcement/reward seeking processes and do not address adolescents' use of alcohol in response to aversive stimuli, including coping with negative feelings or experiences. The importance of the latter is underscored in the negative reinforcement theory of addiction (as well as other related theories such as self- medication and stress-coping). Because tasks like the BART assess riskiness aimed at acquiring some positive effect, they provide no information about riskiness that may underlie alcohol misuse as maintained by negative reinforcement. There are currently no available behavioral instruments that assess negative reinforcement processes underlying riskiness. We propose to develop and validate a negative reinforcement- based task, based on a positive reinforcement-based task we have developed referred to the Balloon Analogue Risk Task (BART), to increase the comprehensiveness and explanatory power of laboratory risk assessment measures in relation to alcohol and alcohol-related risk behaviors in youth. PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE: The goal of the current application is to develop and validate an assessment tool that focuses on adolescent alcohol use to avoid and/or ameliorate negative emotions and experiences, a process referred to as negative reinforcement. If successful, this task will help understand the role of negative reinforcement processes underlying alcohol use and problems, and may be useful for the development of prevention efforts targeting this vulnerability.