Adriana Galvan - US grants

People are often forced to make decisions under stress. This is particularly true during adolescence, a developmental period with significant social, emotional and stressful changes. Increases in adolescent life stressors are paralleled by compromised decision-making and impulse control, both of which are subserved by brain regions that undergo significant maturation during this developmental window. With support from the National Science Foundation, Dr. Adriana Galvan is investigating the effects of daily stress on cognition and brain function in adolescents and an adult comparison group. Daily stress is monitored via a personal digital device that adolescents carry. It provides daily measures of stress over two weeks. On a day when adolescents report a high level of stress, and on a separate day when they report a low level of stress, they visit the laboratory to receive a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) brain scan. While receiving the brain scan, they perform computer games that are designed to measure decision-making and impulse control behavior. In addition, their stress hormone levels related to brain function are measured. By taking this multi-method approach, Dr. Galvan is learning how daily stress influences cognitive neurodevelopment in adolescents. She predicts that stress will result in worse decision-making and impulse control in both adolescents and adults. However, this effect is exaggerated in adolescents, who are even more susceptible to the effects of high stress days.

This research can have significant implications beyond providing evidence for the effects of stress on neurodevelopment. It can provide a broader conceptualization of why adolescents respond differently to their environment, and how this difference eventually influences the poor decision-making that is characteristic of adolescence. The field is in critical need of an integrated approach to brain-environment interactions. Further, this work will be the first of its kind to merge daily monitoring tools together with functional brain imaging and can, therefore, serve as a methodological template for other areas of cognitive neuroscience, beyond developmental work. The understanding of neural correlates of decision-making in development also provides an important baseline for understanding impairments in this very basic cognitive process, as manifested in a broad range of poor developmental outcomes and psychiatric disorders, including drug addiction, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, anxiety, and schizophrenia, all of which have frequent onset in adolescence. In addition, understanding the teenage brain will undoubtedly contribute to social policy decisions that hinge on age and maturation, including the juvenile justice system, driving laws, teenage pregnancy, and educational policies. As such, this project has broad health and societal implications. Finally, this research project provides training opportunities for students at the undergraduate, graduate, and post-doctoral levels, and is committed to advancing the training of students from underrepresented groups.

The Directorate of Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences offers postdoctoral research fellowships to provide opportunities for recent doctoral graduates to obtain additional training, to gain research experience under the sponsorship of established scientists, and to broaden their scientific horizons beyond their undergraduate and graduate training. Postdoctoral fellowships are further designed to assist new scientists to direct their research efforts across traditional disciplinary lines and to avail themselves of unique research resources, sites, and facilities, including at foreign locations. This postdoctoral fellowship award supports a rising interdisciplinary scholar at the intersection of neuroscience, developmental sciences and education. As children enter their teenage years and progress through middle school, they often show decreased motivation to learn. How to motivate these students and engage them in learning is a crucial but often-neglected problem facing educators. This problem is especially crucial as teens must increasingly learn to make their own decisions. Positive and negative feedback, such as praise and criticism, can serve as a powerful tool for educators, clinicians, and parents to promote learning; however, its effectiveness can be highly dependent upon how motivated the child is to learn. There are many changes in the teen brain to support learning during this crucial developmental period, including the maturation of different brain regions involved in motivation, reward processing, and self-control. These changes may make teens uniquely sensitive to positive and negative feedback during learning. Furthermore, these brain changes may also increase teens' sensitivity to motivating or demotivating aspects of their learning environment; for example, teens may be more sensitive than adults to whether a learning task is presented as a measure of their abilities versus an opportunity to practice new skills. The goal of this project is to bridge brain science, education, and psychology to uncover how interactions between the developing brain, the learning environment, and individual differences influence motivation and learning. Research in the burgeoning field of educational neuroscience has begun to investigate how learning new skills or information influences the brain; this project will take the reverse approach, by investigating how changes in the developing brain influence the ability to learn, both in the lab and in school. This project will advance the field of adolescent neurobiology and will illuminate opportunities to improve educational practice by tapping into the unique sensitivities of the developing teen brain. The findings will also pave the way for a new approach to educational neuroscience, in which neurobiological changes in the developing brain can help to inform pedagogical approaches.

This project will bridge disparate literatures to investigate the neurobiological mechanisms underlying adolescent learning, and will set the stage for future investigations of educational strategies to enhance adolescent learning. Because the striatum plays a critical role in reinforcement learning, its peaking sensitivity during adolescence may help to scaffold learning from performance-related feedback. Feedback is an important tool educators use to guide learning, so it is important to understand how ontogenetic changes in the adolescent brain influence the ability to learn from feedback. For this project, we will utilize complementary methodologies (fMRI and physiological measurements of skin conductance), and cutting-edge effective connectivity analyses (dynamic causal modeling) to understand how interactive networks contribute to learning across different developmental stages. Using these tools, in conjunction with contextual manipulations of motivation, measurement of individual achievement goals, and teacher reports of academic performance, the proposed study will aim to (1) characterize behavioral and neural responses to feedback during learning in early to mid-adolescence relative to adults, (2) investigate contextual effects on the motivational salience and learning efficacy of positive and negative feedback during adolescence, and (3) examine the link between neural responses during learning in the laboratory and educational outcomes in school. In this study, a sample of ethnically diverse teens and adults will undergo brain scans while performing a task that assesses their behavioral and neural responses to positive and negative feedback. The proposed research will address a gap in the literature by elucidating the role of the corticostriatal reward system in facilitating learning during this important developmental stage. Through this project, we will determine how the dynamics of the developing adolescent corticostriatal system mediate contextual motivational effects on feedback-based learning and help to illuminate the relevance of developmental neuroscience for academic achievement and educational practices outside of the laboratory.

Adolescents' risky decision making and antisocial behaviors have received a great deal of public and scientific attention. Less is known about prosocial behaviors among adolescents, such as sharing and supportiveness. How do changes in the adolescent brain relate to the development of these more positive behaviors? And how does adolescents' tendency to engage in positive behaviors vary depending upon the social context? This project brings together a team of developmental and social psychologists and neuroscientists to study how one particular aspect of prosocial behavior, giving to others, changes across adolescence, and how brain changes relate to the age-related changes in prosocial behavior. One specific goal is to explore whether giving behaviors become more sensitive to the situation (such as the recipient and the cost of giving) across development. Another goal is to understand the involvement of different brain systems (such as those responsible for processing rewards and inhibiting impulsive behaviors) in giving behaviors. A final goal is to understand how other social skills such as perspective-taking and empathy relate to giving and brain developments.

A total of 120 participants at 9, 14, and 19 years of age will participate in an experimental giving task while having their brains scanned in an MRI machine. They also will complete questionnaires and daily checklists that assess social experience, perspective-taking, empathy, and values. Giving to friends and strangers is expected to increase and decrease, respectively, and giving to family will remain stable across the years of adolescence. This differential giving should correlate with greater activation and connectivity among neural networks associated with reward, mentalizing, and cognitive control when giving to friends as compared to family and strangers, and when giving to family as compared to strangers. Differential giving and neural activation according to recipient is expected to be linked with greater valuing and orientation toward peers and family, and individual differences among participants in overall giving and activation will be correlated with social experience, perspective-taking, and empathy. Findings will enrich the field's understanding of the developing adolescent brain for behavior by highlighting the role of neural development in positive, prosocial behavior and the potential impact of social experience in these dynamics.

Abstract Anxiety occurs widely among adolescents, with one in three youth meeting criteria for an anxiety disorder before the age of 18. Although evidence-based treatments exist, rates of relapse are strikingly high and treatment does little to alter the chronic, fluctuating course of symptoms. To address these concerns and to achieve the mission of ?curative therapeutics? outlined in the current NIH strategic plan, factors linked to heterogeneity in the course of anxiety must be better understood. The goal of this application is to conduct a prospective longitudinal study of youth across the full continuum of anxiety symptoms, characterizing specific neural changes that underlie the evolution of illness and impairment. Existing cross-sectional research has specified a fear circuit encompassing the amygdala (AMY) and ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) but has overlooked the role of other potentially important systems (e.g., striatum) in contributing to anxiety. Moreover, this work has failed to address multiple key questions for the field: How does identified circuitry change over time and how does this maturation relate to the course of anxiety symptoms? How do approach and avoidant processes interact and what is the role that the maturing regulatory cortex plays in modulating these limbic- based fear systems and influencing outcomes? In this study, we examine fronto-striato-limbic system development in a community sample (n=120) of youth ages 9-13, selected to exhibit the full range of anxiety symptoms with oversampling at the more severe end of the distribution. We choose this age range in light of robust evidence that it will capture significant worsening of anxiety symptom severity. Subjects will be followed annually for three years to track trajectories of change in approach/avoidance behaviors and the corresponding regulatory circuitry as well as anxiety symptom severity and related functional outcomes. We have a particular interest in tracking divergence from age-expected increases in novelty seeking and risk-taking behavior and its covariation with symptom course. At each time-point, participants will complete risky decision-making tasks while undergoing fMRI along with self-report, behavioral, and psychophysiological measures. These methods are complemented by innovative neuroimaging models that specifically test the direction of influence among target systems, which undergo substantial change in adolescence. Findings from the proposed research will shed light on the component and interactive processes by which approach-, avoidance-, and regulatory- circuitry contribute to the persistence/remittance of anxiety. The result will be a more holistic understanding of the mechanisms underlying heterogeneity in symptom course that may be used to guide the development of targeted interventions.

PROJECT SUMMARY Developmental cognitive and affective neuroscience has been a major force in the renewed focus upon adolescence as a critical period in development with life-long consequences for health and well-being. Scientific advances have highlighted the significance of brain development during this period, with a profound effect on public policy for children and youth, from Supreme Court rulings on culpability and juvenile justice to public health campaigns on smoking, concussion risk, and sexual health. The foundational contributions of research on adolescent brain and behavioral development up to this point offer promise for even broader contributions to the country's public health in the future. In order to best enhance healthy and productive adolescent development, the field will need to expand by developing research and training the next generation of scientists in four primary areas: (1) an integrative approach that incorporates both typical and atypical brain development; (2) the interaction between brain development and the social environment; (3) sophisticated approaches to examining longitudinal change over time; and (4) attention to population diversity according to ethnicity and socioeconomic resources. To our knowledge, however, there is no integrated predoctoral training program on adolescent brain and behavioral development in the U.S. Existing doctoral programs, including those at UCLA, alone cannot systematically and sustainably provide students with the training necessary to advance the future of research in the field. Key limitations include curricular and lab rotation barriers, financial constraints, and the lack of integrated professional socialization in both brain and behavioral development. At UCLA, we possess unique strengths that with the support of an Institutional Research Training Grant from NICHD, can be brought together to create a cutting-edge training program for the next generation of scholars who can advance science in the four areas describe above, and ultimately enhance the health and well-being of adolescents. We propose a predoctoral training program that supports five trainees per year for a two-year period in which students from our existing Psychology and Neuroscience Ph.D. programs enroll in new courses on substantive and methodological issues in adolescent brain and behavioral development, participate in new colloquia and scientific events, receive guidance on professional development and ethical practices, and actively engage in cutting-edge research mentored by top scientists in brain and behavioral development. Trainees will be able to take advantage of UCLA's many institutional resources and commitments to neuroscience and the training of next generation of skilled scientists from diverse backgrounds, including those traditionally underrepresented in the field. Our goal is for the proposed program to help NICHD achieve the scientific vision of ?basic and translational research that combines neuropsychological, behavioral, and social science perspectives, as well as new tools? to improve our understanding of typical and atypical development. .

Project Summary A large body of empirical work has focused on risky behavior and mental disorders during adolescence, but our knowledge of the neurobehavioral developments in prosocial behavior is quite limited. The result is a portrait of adolescent brain development that focuses risk and psychopathology over more positive behavior. This focus is unfortunate because several prosocial behaviors that involve giving to others ? ranging from volunteering to providing instrumental or social assistance ? have been linked to healthy psychological, behavioral, and physical profiles. Giving resources and assistance to others is associated with lower mortality, fewer objective and subjective health problems, and lower depression. The health benefits of giving to others warrant an increased focus on the neurobehavioral developments that underlie this core aspect of prosocial behavior during adolescence, a key point of development that sets the stage for lifelong health and well-being. We aim to advance the field by utilizing a longitudinal design to pursue four specific aims: (1) clarify developmental changes in prosocial behavior during adolescence by longitudinally examining a specific, fundamental prosocial behavior (i.e., giving) and how it increasingly depends upon the situation (i.e., the potential recipient, the cost of giving); (2) examine how neurodevelopment in the reward, mentalizing, and cognitive control neural networks tracks with giving behavior; (3) assess how social relationships, perspective- taking, empathy, and values may relate to giving and neural development; (4) explore potential gender differences in average levels of giving and neural processes. Using a cohort-sequential longitudinal design, a total of 180 participants will be assessed at three times, every two-years, across a five-year period. The total sample will consist of three overlapping age cohorts of 60 participants each and will cover the age span from 9 to 17 yrs. (Cohort 1: 9-13 yrs., Cohort 2: 11-15 yrs., Cohort 3: 13-17 yrs.). At each time point, participants will participate in an established decision-making task optimized for the fMRI scanner in which they will be asked to make real financial contributions to their families, friends, and a stranger under varying conditions of cost to themselves. While making decisions, participants' brains will be scanned for activation and functional connectivity between regions and networks that have been implicated in mentalizing, cognitive control, and reward-related behaviors. Adolescents also will complete questionnaires and daily diary checklists that will assess aspects of social relationships, perspective-taking, empathy, and values thought to predict prosocial behavior.