Laurence Steinberg - US grants

[unreadable] DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): This is an application to extend the NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development (SECCYD) into its fourth phase. The SECCYD is a collaborative, prospective, longitudinal study of a cohort of 1,073 adolescents and their families, first enrolled at one month of age and studied intensively through sixth grade in Phase lll of this cooperative agreement. The primary study aims of Phase IV are (1) to investigate how earlier functioning and experiences, in concert with contextual and maturational factors in adolescence, influence social relationships, health, adjustment, and intellectual and academic development during middle adolescence; and (2) to extend into middle adolescence an intensive and extensive study of patterns of health and human development from infancy onward, which can be used by the broader scientific community to study a wide range of basic and applied questions. Primary data collection in Phase IV occurs when the adolescents are 15 years old, and again, at 16. At 15, a home visit occurs in which parent-adolescent interactions are videotaped and the adolescents and their parents (or parental figures) complete questionnaires and structured interviews. During lab visits at ages 15 and 16, adolescents' achievement is assessed and adolescents complete self-report measures. The age 15 data collection also includes an extensive assessment of the adolescent's cognitive functioning, cortisol reactivity, and physical activity. In addition, yearly examinations of pubertal status and health are conducted. Finally school personnel complete questionnaires and adolescents' school transcripts are coded at the end of middle school and Grade 10. These data, in concert with data from earlier Phases, will be used to test four models of developmental processes. [unreadable] [unreadable] [unreadable]

[unreadable] DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Although risk-taking behavior, including substance use and abuse, unprotected sex, delinquent activity, and reckless driving, is a primary cause of physical and psychological problems in adolescence, interventions designed to reduce teenagers' risky behavior have proven largely ineffective. This application describes a series of experiments designed to examine the neural underpinnings of age differences in the impact of peer influence on risk-taking. Previous research has shown that the presence of peers increases risk-taking among adolescents, but not adults. In the proposed research, individuals in three age groups (adolescents, young adults, and adults) will be administered a series of computer-based risk-taking tasks, as well as a series of tasks assessing reward salience, preference for immediate versus delayed rewards, planning, and response inhibition while neural activity is assessed using fMRI. Individuals will come to the imaging facility with two friends of their choosing and will be situated in a room with the capacity for simultaneous computer display of the subject's task performance. Using a within-subjects design, the presence or absence of peers' knowledge of the participant's task performance will be manipulated experimentally and disclosed to the subject. Individuals' behavior and neural activity when performing the tasks while their friends are observing them will be compared to their behavior and activity while performing the tasks alone. Specific aims are to (a) test the hypothesis that disruptive impact of peer influence on risk-taking and decision-making is stronger during adolescence than adulthood; (b) test the hypothesis that patterns of brain activation observed among adolescents engaged in risk-taking tasks show relatively more engagement of socio-emotional brain systems and relatively less engagement of cognitive control brain systems, when peers are present than when peers are absent, but that the relative engagement of these systems among adults will not differ as a function of the peer context; and (c) examine the potential mediating roles of reward salience, reward immediacy, planning, and response inhibition in accounting for these age differences. The proposed research has the potential to inform the designing of more effective interventions to reduce adolescent risk-taking by expanding our understanding of the mechanisms through which teenagers are influenced by their friends to engage in health-compromising behavior. [unreadable] [unreadable] [unreadable]

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 scholar investigating risky behavior in adolescents, using interdisciplinary approaches drawn from neuroscience, cognitive science and developmental psychology. Adolescent risk-taking is a significant threat to public health, and contributes to a variety of adverse outcomes, including drug and alcohol abuse, teen pregnancy and STIs, and violent crime. Two elements are known to contribute significantly to likelihood to engage in risk-taking: first, youth are more likely to take risks in the presence of peers, and second, risk-taking increases when youth are under the influence of alcohol. While alcohol consumption often takes place in a social setting, little research has considered how alcohol use and peer presence interact to influence adolescent decision-making. The present study uses a neurobiological framework to examine how the combination of peer presence and alcohol consumption affects brain responses during risk-taking tasks. Specifically, the project examines how peer presence and alcohol affect connections between brain areas known to be involved in risky decision-making. The project also examines how individual differences in brain responses relate to individual tendency to engage in risk-taking, give in to peer pressure, and abuse drugs and alcohol. Ultimately, the goal of this project is to develop a more sophisticated understanding of the mechanisms underlying suboptimal decision-making in adolescence, and to identify potential neural or behavioral factors that predispose some youth to greater risk.

Adolescence is a time of considerable brain development, and a significant body of research suggests that two neural systems mature along different trajectories throughout this period. The differing developmental time courses of 1) cognitive control and 2) affective/reward processing are thought to contribute to adolescents' tendency to engage in risk-taking. The neural regions involved in these processes are well-characterized in the literature. However, much less is known about the way these regions interact during development, and how this interaction is affected by contextual factors that impact risk-taking. Previous research has identified two contextual factors that contribute significantly to adolescents? likelihood to engage in risky decision-making: first, adolescents are more likely to take risks in the presence of peers, and second, risk-taking increases when youth are under the influence of alcohol. While alcohol consumption in adolescence often takes place in a social setting, little research has considered how alcohol use and peer presence interact to influence decision-making. The present project addresses the limitations in the current literature by 1) utilizing fMRI analytic techniques that test models of interaction between multiple neural systems and 2) investigating the combined role of peer presence and alcohol intoxication on adolescent decision-making in a single experimental design. This project tests the hypothesis that peer presence and alcohol intoxication significantly diminish connectivity between cognitive control and affective processing regions during decision-making, thereby contributing to increased risk-taking. The project will also examine how neural responses relate to individual tendency to take risks and give in to peer pressure. In the field of developmental cognitive neuroscience, the predominant theories of adolescent decision-making posit a causal relationship between brain activity in multiple neural systems during risk-taking. However, the extant literature has relied on analytic approaches that are not designed to test causal interactions between brain regions. This project utilizes fMRI analytic approaches that test functional and effective connectivity between regions (Psychophysiological Interaction and Dynamic Causal Modeling), in order to directly investigate the way these regions interact and the direction of effects. Furthermore, this project will shed light on the combined role of peers and alcohol during risky decision-making, leading to a more sophisticated understanding of the way biological and sociocultural factors interact to produce outcomes in adolescence. The project and postdoctoral training require an interdisciplinary approach, utilizing analytic techniques from cognitive neuroscience, theories from developmental psychology, and experimental methods drawn from both clinical psychology and functional neuroimaging.