CAREER: A Longitudinal, Cross-Cultural Investigation of Psychosocial and Neurobiological Aspects of Emotion Development in Adolescence

青春期是大脑在支持抽象思维、社会认知和情感感受的系统中强烈发育的时期。这也是一个社会高度成熟的时期，年轻人努力适应文化规范，并将父母、同龄人、学校和更广泛社会的价值观和期望与自己的愿望和感受调和起来。然而，相对而言，我们对大脑发育和社会发育在这个关键的发育阶段是如何相互作用的，以及大脑发育如何受到情感行为文化规范的影响知之甚少。这个项目研究了来自两个种族群体的青少年，他们在情绪行为方面有不同的规范，墨西哥裔美国人和华裔美国人的城市青少年，如何感受到复杂的社会情绪--钦佩，灵感，感激和同情等情绪--在文化上适当的，个体可变的，方式。通过将社会情绪处理的神经生物学测量与关于青少年对社会情境和个人经历的意义的社会心理访谈相结合，该项目试图改变有关青少年大脑与社会发展之间关系的知识。该项目特别关注城市社区暴力对青年的社会联系、同理心和同情心的影响，以及文化适应如何随着时间的推移促进神经生物学和心理社会复原力。该项目除了有可能就社会文化进程如何影响神经发育作出基本科学发现外，还将通过编写和测试教育材料，促进处境危险的城市青年的同情心、福祉和学业成就，为社会作出重大贡献。来自一系列民族的城市青少年将参加科学夏令营，在夏令营中，他们进行情感神经生物学的合作研究，并在此过程中学习科学话语，情感识别，自我反思和文化素养的技能。营地的经验的影响将进行评估，结果将告知情绪在学术环境中，将通过与美国心理健康，球基金会，SERP和安嫩伯格媒体的战略伙伴关系，并通过研究人员的建立一系列国际参加的教师研讨会广泛实施，评估和传播的课程。

Adolescence is a time of intense brain development in systems that support abstract thinking, social cognition and emotional feeling. It is also a time of intense social maturation, in which youths struggle to adapt to cultural norms and to reconcile the values and expectations of parents, peers, schools, and the broader society with their own desires and feelings. Yet, relatively little is known about how brain growth and social growth interact during this critical developmental stage, and how brain growth is influenced by the adoption of cultural norms for emotional behavior. This project examines how youths from two ethnic groups with different norms around emotional behavior, Mexican-American and Chinese-American urban adolescents, come to feel complex social emotions--emotions like admiration, inspiration, gratitude and compassion--in culturally appropriate, individually variable, ways. By combining neurobiological measures of social emotion processing with psychosocial interviews about the meaning youths make of social situations and personal experiences, the project seeks to transform knowledge about relations between adolescent brain and social development. The project has a special focus on the impact of urban community violence on youths' social connectedness, empathy and compassion, and on the ways that acculturation may promote neurobiological and psychosocial resilience over time. In addition to the possibility of contributing fundamental scientific discoveries about how neural development is shaped by socio-cultural processes, this project will make significant contributions to society through the development and testing of educational materials that promote compassion, well-being and academic achievement among at-risk urban youth. Urban adolescents from a range of ethnic groups will participate in a science summer camp in which they conduct collaborative research on the neurobiology of emotion, and in the process learn skills for scientific discourse, emotion recognition, self-reflection and cultural literacy. The impact of the camp experience will be assessed and results will inform a curriculum on emotions in academic contexts that will be broadly implemented, assessed and disseminated through strategic partnerships with Mental Health America, The Ball Foundation, SERP and Annenberg Media, and through the researcher's established series of internationally-attended workshops for teachers.