Family Obligation and Assistance Among Adolescents with Mexican Backgrounds

描述（由申请人提供）：青春期是冒险行为和糟糕决策的高度脆弱性时期，这可能导致物质使用和外化行为。来自发育神经科学的新证据表明，冒险行为在青春期增加，部分原因是大脑神经回路的变化。与参与自我调节的认知控制区域（如前额叶皮层）相比，与奖励反应区域（如腹侧纹状体）的发育要慢得多，后者涉及奖励评估和敏感性。这种神经失衡可能会阻碍对风险的适当评估，并使青少年倾向于做出有风险的决定。尽管取得了这些进展，但目前对这些神经发育如何与青少年时期的基本社会过程相互作用知之甚少。来自墨西哥和其他拉丁美洲背景的家庭特别重视家庭联系和支持，通常被称为家庭主义或家庭援助。然而，对青少年来说，家庭援助可能是有益的，也可能是有压力的。我们认为，家庭援助是家庭关系的一个基本方面，它可以塑造冒险的神经生物学，这取决于青少年认为这是一种有益的还是有压力的经历，我们通过以下两个目标来解决这些可能性：(1)确定家庭援助的奖励与风险承担相关的神经机制之间的联系；(2)确定家庭援助的压力与风险承担相关的神经机制之间的联系。共有45名来自墨西哥背景的青少年参加了一项更大规模的日常家庭援助研究，他们将被招募参加一项神经成像研究。除了作为家长R01的一部分，报告14天内每天的家庭援助、奖励和压力水平外，这45名青少年将在其中4天的每天4个时间点提供唾液皮质醇。然后，青少年将被带到功能磁共振成像实验室，在那里他们将参与冒险任务，同时由一台3特斯拉西门子Trio核磁共振扫描仪按照标准扫描程序进行扫描。在对fMRI数据进行适当的预处理后，将通过关注与认知控制和奖励相关的先验兴趣区域来估计家庭援助、奖励、压力和皮质醇与神经活动的关联。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Adolescence is a time of heightened vulnerability for risk taking behavior and poor decision making that can give rise to substance use and externalizing behavior. Emerging evidence from developmental neuroscience suggests that risk taking behavior increases during adolescence partly due to changes in the brain's neural circuitry. Regions implicated in cognitive control (e.g., the prefrontal cortex), which is involved in self-regulation, develop more slowly relative to regions response to reward (e.g., the ventral striatum), which are involved in reward evaluation and sensitivity. This neural imbalance may hinder appropriate evaluation of risk and bias youth towards risky decisions. Despite these advances, there currently is little understanding of how these neurological developments interact with fundamental social processes during the adolescent period. Families from Mexican and other Latin American backgrounds place particular value on family connection and support, often referred to as familism or family assistance. Yet family assistance can be both rewarding and stressful for adolescents. We believe that family assistance is a basic aspect of family relationships that can shape the neurobiology of risk taking depending upon whether adolescents find it to be either a rewarding or stressful experience, and we address these possibilities with the following two objectives: (1) identify the links between the rewards of family assistance and the neural mechanisms associated with risk taking, and (2) identify the links between the stress of family assistance and the neural mechanisms associated with risk taking. A total of 45 adolescents from Mexican backgrounds who are participating in a larger study of daily family assistance will be recruited to participate in a neuroimaging study. In addition to reporting daily levels of family assistance, reward, and stress across a 14 day period as part of the parent R01, these 45 adolescents will provide salivary cortisol at 4 time points each day for 4 of these days. Adolescents will then be brought to an fMRI lab in which they will engage in risk taking tasks while being scanned by a 3 Tesla Siemens Trio MRI scanner using standard scanning procedures. After appropriate preprocessing of the fMRI data, the associations of family assistance, reward, stress, and cortisol with neural activity will be estimated by focusing on a priori regions of interest implicated with cognitive control and reward. PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE: Taking underlies many behavioral and health problems that contribute to the public health burden during the adolescent period, such as substance use and externalizing behavior. Recent advances in developmental neuroscience have identified key neurobiological underpinnings of adolescent risk taking, but there is little understanding of how the neural mechanisms interact with other social and biological processes in order to create or prevent risk. The primary focus of this competitive revision is to examine how a fundamental aspect of family relationships - family assistance - can shape the neurobiology of risk taking depending upon whether adolescents find such family assistance to be rewarding or stressful.