The Development of Emotion Regulation Mechanisms Impacting Health

描述(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，容易出现焦虑和抑郁，进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，或者消费酒精、香烟或受管制物质来立即获得满足的机会。无论你这样做是为了缓解心情不好，还是因为它们本身是快乐的，当随着时间的推移，体重控制、药物滥用或其他相关的健康问题出现时，短期的收益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，这项应用采取了跨学科的方法，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。最重要的目标是了解神经机制的发展，这些神经机制使我们能够调节潜在不健康物质(例如使人发胖的食物或药物)的胃口拉动，以及可能促使一个人首先寻求这些物质的不愉快情绪的厌恶推动。我们的重点是从儿童后期到青春期这些机制的发展--这段时间对于自我调节能力的发展和前额叶-皮质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，否则不可能适当地定制未来的干预措施--特别是针对可能产生最大差异的年龄范围和个人。为此，我们的应用有两个具体目标：目标1--绘制支持儿童和青春期行为变化的情绪调节机制的发展轨迹；以及目标2--将根据目标1收集的行为、生理和神经测量与健康和健康行为的测量相联系，包括体重指数和物质使用。为了实现这些目标，我们将在两个基本上独立的研究文献之间架起桥梁。第一个实验使用了一个生态上有效的延迟满足任务，在这个任务中，儿童时期的表现可以预测成人的健康结果，比如体重指数和物质使用。第二种是使用脑成像来确定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感和更广泛地调节情感冲动。将这些方法与进食障碍、体重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变化基本机制的新假设，包括行为变化如何依赖于在青春期成熟的前额叶-皮质下相互作用的核心集合，以及皮质下驱动的情感反应和前额叶控制能力的个体和发育差异模式如何表明哪些个人最有可能出现不适应的健康行为。 与公共健康相关：越来越多的证据表明，童年和青春期是情绪调节能力发展的关键时期，情绪调节能力需要自适应地平衡情感冲动及其可能促进的有害健康行为。这项应用结合了行为和功能成像方法，旨在绘制情绪调节机制的发展图，使我们能够控制情感冲动，并将这些机制与它们可以促进的不适应健康行为的衡量标准联系起来。最终目标是明确哪些人的适应不良健康行为的风险最大，在什么年龄这种风险最大，以及在发育过程的特定阶段，哪些自我调节机制可以作为未来干预措施(例如CBT)的目标。

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.