The Development of Emotion Regulation Mechanisms Impacting Health

描述（由申请人提供）：在当今世界，保持健康并不容易。一方面，我们日常生活中的挑战和不确定性可能会造成损失，产生压力和对焦虑和抑郁的敏感性，从而导致从心脏病到糖尿病等慢性身体疾病。另一方面，我们面临着通过吃美味但不健康的食物，或消费酒精，香烟或受管制的物质来获得即时满足的机会。不管一个人是把这些方法当作一种解药，还是因为它们本身就是一种快乐，随着时间的推移，体重控制、药物滥用或其他相关健康问题的发展，短期的收获可能会变成长期的痛苦。怎样才能改变这些不健康的行为呢？为了解决这个问题，本应用程序采用跨学科的方法，将社会，认知和情感神经科学的理论和方法与社会和发展心理学的理论和方法相结合。首要目标是了解神经机制的发展，使我们能够调节潜在不健康物质（如使人发胖的食物或药物）的食欲，以及可能促使人们首先寻求这些物质的不愉快情绪的厌恶推动。我们的重点是这些机制从童年晚期到青春期的发展，这段时间对这些自我调节能力的发展和前额叶-皮层下相互作用的成熟至关重要。我们的前提是，除非我们了解情绪调节能力正常发展的边界条件和潜在机制，否则就不可能适当地调整未来的干预措施——特别是针对可能产生最大差异的年龄范围和个人。为此，我们的应用程序有两个具体目标：目标1 -绘制支持儿童和青少年行为改变的情绪调节机制的发展轨迹；目标2 -将目标1中收集的行为、生理和神经测量与健康和健康行为测量（包括BMI和物质使用）联系起来。为了达到这些目的，我们将把两个很大程度上独立的研究文献联系起来。第一项研究使用了一个生态学上有效的延迟满足任务，在这个任务中，童年的表现可以预测成年后的健康结果，比如体重指数和物质使用。第二种是使用脑成像来识别注意力控制和重新评估策略的神经基础，这些策略用于延迟满足和更广泛地调节情感冲动。将这些方法与饮食失调、身体质量指数和物质使用的评估相结合，将使我们能够测试关于行为改变基本机制的新假设，包括它如何依赖于青春期成熟的一组核心前额叶-皮层下相互作用，以及皮层下驱动的情感反应和前额叶控制能力的个体和发育变化模式如何表明哪些个体最容易出现适应不良的健康行为。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): In today's world, keeping healthy is not easy. On one hand, the challenges and uncertainties of our daily lives can take a toll, generating stress and susceptibilities to anxiety and depression that in turn contribute to chronic bodily ailments ranging from heart disease to diabetes. On the other hand, we are faced with opportunities for immediate gratification through eating tasty but unhealthy food, or consuming alcohol, cigarettes or controlled substances. Whether one acts in these ways as an antidote to feeling bad, or because they are pleasurable in their own right, a short-term gain can become a long-term pain when over time weight control, substance abuse or other related health problems develop. What can be done to change these unhealthy behaviors? To address this question, this application takes an interdisciplinary approach that combines the theories and methods of social, cognitive and affective neuroscience with the theories and methods of social and developmental psychology. The over-arching goal is to understand the development of the neural mechanisms that enable us to regulate the appetitive pull of potentially unhealthy substances (e.g. fattening foods or drugs) and the aversive push of unpleasant emotions that might motivate one to seek these substances in the first place. Our focus is on the development of these mechanisms from late childhood through adolescence - time periods critical for the development of these self-regulatory abilities and the maturation of the prefrontal-subcortical interactions underlying them. Our premise is that unless we understand the boundary conditions and underlying mechanisms for normal development of emotion regulatory abilities, it will not be possible to tailor future interventions appropriately - particularly for the age ranges and individuals for whom it could make the biggest difference. Towards this end, our application has two specific aims: Aim 1 - To chart the developmental trajectory of emotion regulatory mechanisms that support behavior change through childhood and adolescence; and Aim 2 - To relate the behavioral, physiological and neural measures collected under Aim 1 to measures of health and health behaviors, including BMI and substance use. To achieve these aims we will bridge two largely separate research literatures. The first uses an ecologically valid delay of gratification task for which childhood performance predicts adult health outcomes like BMI and substance use. The second uses brain imaging to identify the neural bases of the attentional control and reappraisal strategies used to delay gratification and regulate affective impulses more generally. Combining these methods with assessments of disordered eating, BMI, and substance use will allow us to test novel hypotheses about the basic mechanisms of behavior change, including how it may depend on a core set of prefrontal-subcortical interactions that mature during adolescence, and how patterns of individual and developmental variation in subcortically-driven affective reactivity and prefrontal control abilities may indicate which individuals are at greatest risk for maladaptive health behaviors. PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE: There is growing evidence that childhood and adolescence are critical times for development of the emotion regulatory abilities needed to adaptively balance affective impulses and the deleterious health behaviors they can promote. Using a combination of behavioral and functional imaging methods, this application aims to chart the development of the emotion regulatory mechanisms that enable us to rein in affective impulses and to relate these mechanisms to measures of the maladaptive health behaviors they can promote. The ultimate goal is to specify which individuals are at greatest risk for maladaptive health behaviors, at what age this risk is greatest, and which self-regulatory mechanisms could be targeted in future interventions (e.g. CBT) during particular points in the developmental course.