Behavioral Measurement of Negative Reinforcement in Adolescent Alcohol Use/Abuse

描述（由申请人提供）：尽管大规模的公共卫生努力减少其发生率和流行率，但青少年滥用酒精的问题仍在继续增长。为了加强预防工作，理论家们试图了解导致酒精滥用的病因和维持的因素。有几个模型来理解人格因素导致青少年酒精开始和随后的滥用。这些模型主要关注正强化的某些方面，即冒险行为如何受到与饮酒相关的新奇、兴奋和/或觉醒的影响。行为测量已经被开发出来，以一种不那么透明但可能比相关的自我报告测量更准确的方式捕捉寻求奖励的瞬间。尽管结果很有希望，但这些任务只利用了积极的强化/寻求奖励的过程，并没有解决青少年对厌恶刺激的反应，包括应对消极的感觉或经历。后者的重要性在成瘾的负强化理论（以及其他相关理论，如自我药物治疗和压力应对）中得到强调。因为像BART这样的评估风险的任务旨在获得一些积极的影响，它们没有提供关于风险的信息，这些风险可能是由负强化维持的酒精滥用的基础。目前还没有可用的行为工具来评估潜在风险的负强化过程。我们建议开发和验证一个基于负强化的任务，基于我们开发的一个基于正强化的任务，即气球模拟风险任务（BART），以增加与青少年酒精和酒精相关风险行为相关的实验室风险评估措施的全面性和解释力。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The problem of alcohol misuse in adolescence continues to grow despite large-scale public health efforts to reduce both its incidence and prevalence. To enhance prevention efforts, theorists have attempted to understand factors that contribute to the etiology and maintenance of alcohol misuse. There exist several models to understand the personality factors that lead adolescents to alcohol initiation and subsequent misuse. Predominantly, these models focus on some aspect of positive reinforcement, that is, how risk taking is influenced by the novelty, excitement and/or arousal associated with alcohol use. Behavioral measures have been developed to capture snap shots of reward seeking in a less transparent and potentially more accurate way than relevant self-report measures. Despite promising results, these tasks tap only positive reinforcement/reward seeking processes and do not address adolescents' use of alcohol in response to aversive stimuli, including coping with negative feelings or experiences. The importance of the latter is underscored in the negative reinforcement theory of addiction (as well as other related theories such as self- medication and stress-coping). Because tasks like the BART assess riskiness aimed at acquiring some positive effect, they provide no information about riskiness that may underlie alcohol misuse as maintained by negative reinforcement. There are currently no available behavioral instruments that assess negative reinforcement processes underlying riskiness. We propose to develop and validate a negative reinforcement- based task, based on a positive reinforcement-based task we have developed referred to the Balloon Analogue Risk Task (BART), to increase the comprehensiveness and explanatory power of laboratory risk assessment measures in relation to alcohol and alcohol-related risk behaviors in youth. PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE: The goal of the current application is to develop and validate an assessment tool that focuses on adolescent alcohol use to avoid and/or ameliorate negative emotions and experiences, a process referred to as negative reinforcement. If successful, this task will help understand the role of negative reinforcement processes underlying alcohol use and problems, and may be useful for the development of prevention efforts targeting this vulnerability.