Alcohol & Peer Context Effects on Behavior & Neural Correlates of Risks in Youths

描述（由申请人提供）：对年轻人冒险决策影响最大的两个因素是饮酒和社会环境。然而，首席研究员的每一个因素在单独诱导青少年冒险行为的已知潜力，和首席研究员的频率，年轻人消费酒精在他们的同龄人面前，没有以前的研究试图检查他们的并发和潜在的相互作用的影响。在我们的青春期和青年期决策模型中，大脑认知控制和奖励处理系统的异步成熟变化产生了一段风险倾向增加的时期，并增加了对决策特定影响的敏感性。我们假设，酒精和同伴的影响有其主要影响大脑的决策回路的独立组件，酒精影响区域最密切相关的认知控制，和同伴的影响作用于奖励处理系统。这些个别有害影响的组合可能因此产生一种强大的“冒险鸡尾酒”，破坏大脑决策回路中正常抵消成分的处理，从而增加了参与具有潜在严重后果的冒险行为的倾向（例如鲁莽驾驶，危险的性活动，犯罪）。本申请包括行为研究，旨在测试急性酒精消费和同伴影响对年轻人关于风险的决定的主要和交互作用，以及功能磁共振成像研究，旨在测试我们的青少年和年轻人决策的神经生物学框架以及关于酒精和社会影响的单独神经位点的相关假设。为了进行这些研究，一个研究小组与执行功能的认知神经科学，青少年和年轻人的心理社会发展，以及酒精对认知和影响的综合专业知识，已经组装。拟议的研究将对社会背景和酒精对年轻人冒险行为的影响产生根本性的见解，并将为制定更有效的预防和干预策略提供信息。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Two of the strongest influences on young adult risk taking decisions are alcohol use and social context. Yet the principal investigator the known potency of each factor in individually inducing risk-taking among youth, and the principal investigator the frequency with which young people consume alcohol in the presence of their peers, no prior research has sought to examine their concurrent and potentially interactive effects. In our model of decision-making in adolescence and young adulthood, asynchronous maturational changes in the brain's cognitive control and reward processing systems yield a period of increased proclivity for risk, and increased susceptibility to specific influences on decision-making. We hypothesize that alcohol and peer influences have their primary impacts on separate components of the brain's decision-making circuitry, with alcohol-affecting regions most closely linked to cognitive control, and peer influence acting upon the reward processing system. The combination of these individually deleterious influences may thus create a powerful "risk-taking cocktail" that disrupts processing within normally offsetting components of the brain's decision-making circuitry, and thereby increases the tendency to engage in risk-taking behaviors with potentially serious consequences (e.g. reckless driving, risky sexual activity, crime). The present application includes behavioral studies designed to test the main and interactive effects of acute alcohol consumption and peer influence on young adults' decisions about risk, as well as an fMRI studies designed to test our neurobiological framework for adolescent and young adult decision-making and the associated hypothesis regarding the separate neural loci of alcohol and social influences. In order to conduct these studies, a research team with combined expertise in the cognitive neuroscience of executive function, the psychosocial development of adolescents and young adults, and the influences of alcohol on cognition and affect, has been assembled. The proposed studies will yield fundamental insights into the effects of social context and alcohol on young adults' risk-taking behaviors, and will inform the development of more effective prevention and intervention strategies.