Incorporating the Social Context into Neurocognitive Models of Adolescent Risk Taking

 描述（由申请人提供）：承担风险是许多行为和健康问题的基础，这些问题导致青少年时期的公共卫生负担。发展神经科学的最新进展已经确定了青少年冒险行为的关键神经生物学基础，但对这些神经过程如何与关键社会过程相互作用以促进或防止冒险行为的了解甚少。这是一个重要的限制，因为青春期是一个社会发展日益复杂的时期，青少年的决策往往发生在社会情感唤起的条件下。因此，研究社会环境如何塑造青少年冒险行为的神经生物学的时机已经成熟。本研究将探讨三种重要的社会影响--家庭、同侪和权威--如何塑造神经认知发展。青少年将在功能性磁共振成像扫描期间完成两项任务，在此期间，社会影响被操纵。产生的数据应该揭示在这个重要的发展时期，大脑功能是如何被社会环境调节的。为了了解神经激活的变化是否代表青少年冒险的风险或保护，拟议研究的一个关键目标是研究大脑变化如何随时间推移与相关行为变化共同变化。通过将关键的社会和发育过程与风险承担的神经生物学联系起来，该项目有可能挑战和改变当前的研究，并明确地告知青少年大脑发育的模型。对社会环境如何不同地调节神经认知发展和风险承担的更细致的理解将有助于我们理解可能阻碍或促进成功决策的情况，为风险行为创造脆弱性或保护。通过阐明支持这些联系的神经机制，拟议研究的结果可能有助于干预有情绪，行为或社会困难风险的青少年。与此相关，通过调查从青年到青春期的过渡过程，项目的研究结果可能会突出这一发展时期，将其作为预防和干预工作的有效切入点，以改变冒险和问题行为的上升轨迹。

 DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Risk taking underlies many behavioral and health problems that contribute to the public health burden during the adolescent period. Recent advances in developmental neuroscience have identified key neurobiological underpinnings of adolescent risk taking, but there is little understanding of how these neural processes interact with key social processes in order to promote or prevent risk taking. This is an important limitation given that adolescence is a period marked by increasingly complex social development, and adolescent decision making most often occurs under conditions of socio-emotional arousal. Thus, the time is ripe to examine how social contexts shape the neurobiology of adolescent risk taking. This study will examine how three important social influences - family, peers, and authority - shape neurocognitive development. Adolescents will complete two tasks during a functional magnetic resonance imaging scan during which social influence is manipulated. The data generated should reveal how brain function is modulated by social contexts during this important period of development. In order to understand whether changes in neural activation represent risk or protection for adolescent risk taking, a key aim is of the proposed research is to examine how brain changes co-vary with relevant behavioral changes over time. By connecting key social and developmental processes to the neurobiology of risk taking over time, this project has the potential to challenge and shift current research and unambiguously inform the model of adolescent brain development. A more nuanced understanding of how social contexts differentially modulate neurocognitive development and risk taking will help us to understand the situations that may hinder or promote successful decision-making, creating vulnerabilities or protection for risky behavior. By shedding light on the neural mechanisms supporting these linkages, findings from the proposed study may be useful in intervening with youth at risk for emotional, behavioral, or social difficulties. Relatedy, by investigating such processes as youth transition through puberty, project findings may highlight this developmental period as an effective point of entry for prevention and intervention efforts in deflecting upward trajectories of risk taking and problem behavior.