Emotion Regulation in Adolescence: A Social Affective Neuroscience Approach

描述(由申请人提供)：青春期的心理和行为健康是一个严重的公共卫生问题，因为从儿童到青春期后期，发病率和死亡率增加了200-300%。这些严重健康问题的一个主要方面与情绪控制困难有关。为了了解青春期情绪调节的挑战如何导致特定的健康问题，研究人员需要更好的工具来衡量这一发育阶段的情绪反应和调节。该项目应用发育知情的社会情感神经科学观点来开发一种新的“工具箱”，用于研究青春期的情绪反应和调节。这需要发展精神病理学、社会神经科学和情感神经科学领域的整合。将这些学科的关键要素结合起来将有助于开发以神经科学为基础的工具，这些工具也具有更广泛的发展、临床和社会相关性。由于社会领域在青春期的重要性，我们将重点放在与社会相关的范式上，这些范式将有助于理解社会影响(如父母、同龄人、媒体)如何促进青少年的情绪性，以及神经生物学基础如何支撑社会和情绪过程。具体地说，我们将开发和完善三套工具：(A)实验室瞳孔和功能磁共振成像(FMRI)社交-情绪信息处理任务；(B)利用并发的瞳孔数据对亲子情感互动进行行为观察；以及(C)基于手机的生态瞬间评估(EMA)方案，衡量青少年在自然社交环境中的情绪反应和调节。我们的目标是(1)开发和建立这些测量的初步心理测量学特性，(2)在不同的背景和时间水平上整合这些测量方法，以及(3)检验这些方法在区分临床群体和检测发育/青春期情绪反应和调节差异方面的有效性。作为第一步，我们将特别关注这些方法在青春期抑郁症研究中的效用--青春期抑郁症是一种常见的、令人衰弱的青春期健康问题，与成年前的慢性和反复损伤有关。这项工作的创新方面包括开发采样“真实世界”现象的新方法，通过开发利用社会过程的实验室范例将神经科学与社会环境相结合，以及通过开发可用于收集同时进行的神经生物学、行为和观察数据的同辈和亲子互动任务，改进对共同发生的社会和生物过程的评估。最终，这些工具可能对研究人员跨学科检查广泛的青少年健康问题有用，包括高风险研究、治疗和预防、纵向发展研究、心理学、神经科学和行为医学领域的研究人员。开发新的生物和生态工具来衡量情绪反应和调节与NICHD、NIMH、NIDA和NIAAA的使命相关，因为情绪调节已被确定为儿童和青少年正常发育、精神健康问题、药物和酒精滥用以及导致广泛健康后果的冒险和鲁莽行为中的一个关键但知之甚少的领域。开发工具有助于更好地了解情绪反应和调节有助于青少年健康的机制是至关重要的，因为它可以导致现有预防和干预计划的改进或调整，基于新的科学发现开发新的预防和干预计划，以及根据情绪特征更好地将患者与特定治疗方案相匹配。在这段相对可塑性的时期，可以识别情绪调节的初始干扰并促进早期干预的工具，可能会导致与健康相关的成本和成年后痛苦的长期减少。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Mental and behavioral health during adolescence is an area of critical public health concern because morbidity and mortality rates increase 200-300% from childhood to late adolescence. A major dimension of these serious health problems is related to difficulties with the control of emotions. In order to understand how challenges to emotion regulation during adolescence contribute to specific health problems, researchers need better tools for measuring emotional reactivity and regulation during this developmental period. This project applies a developmentally informed social affective neuroscience perspective to the development of a new "toolbox" for studying emotional reactivity and regulation in adolescence. This requires an integration of the fields of developmental psychopathology, social neuroscience, and affective neuroscience. Combining key elements of these disciplines will facilitate the development of tools grounded in neuroscience that also have broader developmental, clinical, and social relevance. Because of the importance of the social sphere in adolescence, we focus on socially relevant paradigms that will facilitate an understanding of how social influences (e.g. parents, peers, media) contribute to adolescents' emotionality, and how neurobiological substrates underlie social and emotional processes. Specifically, we will develop and refine 3 sets of tools: (a) laboratory pupillary and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) social-emotional information processing tasks; (b) behavioral observation of parent-child affective interactions with concurrent pupillary data; and (c) a cell-phone based Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA) protocol measuring adolescents' emotional reactivity and regulation in natural social contexts. Our aims are to (1) develop and establish initial psychometric properties for these measures, (2) integrate these measurement approaches across levels of context and time, and (3) examine the validity of these approaches in discriminating clinical groups and detecting developmental/pubertal differences in emotional reactivity and regulation. As first steps, we will focus specifically on the utility of these methods in research on adolescent depression--a common and debilitating adolescent health problem associated with chronic and recurrent impairment into adulthood. Innovative aspects of this work include the development of new methodologies for sampling "real-world" phenomena, integration of neuroscience with the social environment by developing laboratory paradigms that tap social processes, and improvements in the assessment of co-occurring social and biological processes through the development of mood inductions and peer and parent-child interaction tasks that can be used to collect concurrent neurobiological, behavioral and observational data. Ultimately, these tools could be useful for investigators examining a wide range of adolescent health problems across disciplines, including researchers in the areas of high risk research, treatment and prevention, longitudinal developmental research, psychology, neuroscience, and behavioral medicine. Developing new biological and ecological tools for measuring emotional reactivity and regulation is relevant to the missions of NICHD, NIMH, NIDA, and NIAAA in that emotion regulation has been identified as a critical yet poorly understood domain in normative child and adolescent development and in the development of problems in mental health, drug and alcohol abuse, and risk-taking and reckless behavior that leads to a broad range of health consequences. Developing tools that can facilitate a better understanding of the mechanisms through which emotional reactivity and regulation contribute to adolescent health is critical because it could lead to improvements or adaptations of existing prevention and intervention programs, the development of new prevention and intervention programs based on new scientific discoveries, and better matching of patients to specific treatment protocols based on emotional profiles. Tools that can identify initial disruptions in emotion regulation and facilitate early intervention during this period of relative plasticity could lead to long-term reductions in health-related cost and suffering in adulthood.