CAREER: Psychological and Neurodevelopmental Mechanisms of Social Influence on Adolescent Decision-Making

在青少年时期，个人开始做出越来越独立的决定，包括权衡他们行为的潜在风险和利益。虽然青少年和成年人在许多情况下做出的决定是相似的，但在某些情况下，青少年会做出更冒险的决定。这就是社会环境中的情况：青少年（而不是成年人）在同龄人面前往往会做出更冒险的选择。虽然同龄人对青少年冒险行为的影响在现实世界的犯罪统计、健康统计和受控实验室实验中都有记载，但同龄人如何独特地影响青少年仍然知之甚少。本研究的总体目标有三个方面：a)通过展示决策的哪些方面容易受到同伴影响来完善对青少年冒险行为的理解；b)确定发育中的大脑如何对青少年冒险行为的同伴影响作出贡献；c)评估同伴影响的实验室测量与日常生活中实际的危险行为之间的关系。为了完成这项工作，一组青少年和一组年轻人将完成一系列决策任务，这些任务旨在量化风险选择的组成部分。例如，数学分解分析可以分离出一个人为了获得潜在的回报愿意承受多大的风险。参与者在不同社会评价程度的实验配置中完成这些任务。同伴要么缺席，要么在场并监控参与者的风险水平，要么在场但无法监控参与者的风险水平。这些同伴配置建立在利亚·萨默维尔（Leah Somerville）和其他人最近的发现之上，这些发现表明，仅仅是同伴的存在就足以让青少年做出更冒险的选择。对这三种情况下的风险选择进行比较，将理清依赖于同伴对风险选择的意识的同伴影响的来源，与仅仅由同伴的存在引起的同伴影响的来源相比。此外，保密调查将衡量日常生活中的冒险行为。他们将被用来通过分析来连接实验室和现实世界，这些分析询问了双染色体的哪些特征，以及个体风险的哪些特征与他们基于实验室的选择有关。功能性磁共振成像（fMRI）用于测量仍在发育中的大脑如何独特地处理有关社会评价的信息，以及这些过程如何与决策过程相互作用。该项目旨在建立关于青春期神经发育如何影响复杂社会行为发展的基础知识。更广泛地说，这项工作可以扩展到帮助预测导致青少年冒不健康风险的情况的特定“成分”。此外，该项目生成关键数据，以解决青少年与同龄人犯罪的法律-伦理问题。

During adolescence, individuals begin to make increasingly independent decisions that involve weighing the potential risks and benefits of their actions. Although the decisions adolescents and adults make are similar in many situations, there are certain contexts that lead to more risky decisions by adolescents. This is the case in social contexts: adolescents (but not adults) tend to make riskier choices in the presence of peers. Although peers' influence on adolescent risk-taking is documented in real-world crime statistics, health statistics, and in controlled laboratory experiments, just how peers uniquely influence adolescents remains poorly understood. The overarching goals of this research are threefold: a) to refine understanding of adolescent risky behavior by demonstrating what aspects of decisions are vulnerable to peer influence, b) to identify how the developing brain contributes to peer influence on adolescent risk taking, and c) to evaluate how laboratory measures of peer influence relate to actual risky behavior in daily life.To carry out this work, dyads of adolescents and dyads of young adults will complete a series of decision making-tasks designed to quantify components of risky choices. For instance, mathematical decomposition analyses can isolate how much risk an individual is willing to tolerate in order to obtain a potential reward. Participants complete these tasks in experimental configurations that vary in their degree of social evaluation. Peers are either absent, present and monitoring the participant's level of riskiness, or present but unable to monitor the participant's level of riskiness. These peer configurations build on recent findings by Leah Somerville and others showing that the mere presence of a peer may be sufficient to evoke riskier choices in adolescents. Comparisons of risky choices in these three contexts will disentangle the sources of peer influence that depend on the peer awareness of risky choices, compared to sources of peer influence that are evoked merely by the presence of a peer. In addition, confidential surveys will measure risk-taking in everyday life. They will be used to bridge the laboratory and the real world through analyses that ask what characteristics of the dyads, and what characteristics of individual's riskiness relate to their laboratory-based choices. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is used to measure how the still-developing brain uniquely processes information about social evaluation, and how these processes interact with decision-making processes. This project stands to build foundational knowledge about how neurodevelopment during adolescence shapes the development of complex social behavior. More broadly, this work can be extended to help predict the particular 'ingredients' of a situation that lead adolescents to take unhealthy risks. Further, this project generates key data to address legal-ethical issues of youth culpability for crimes committed with peers.