Elizabeth Cauffman - US grants

DESCRIPTION: The Mentored Research Scientist Development Award (K01) is designed to provide training in the assessment of mental disorder, the analysis of service provision to juvenile offenders, and statistical modeling. Expertise in these areas is vital for the effective study of mental health needs and services among juvenile delinquent populations. Recent studies have indicated that the prevalence of mental health disturbances among incarcerated adolescents is exceptionally high. Although there is reason to believe that such disturbances play an important role in shaping a youth's response to services, very little is known about the fundamental issues of how well a youth's mental illness is detected and assessed, how assessments influence the types of services received, or how mental health problems and the processes of psychosocial development influence youths' engagement in services. This award will ensure that my background as a researcher in adolescent development is enriched by developing an in-depth understanding of the clinical, forensic, and service-related issues that are critical to consider in future studies of service provision to delinquent populations. In addition, this award will provide the opportunity to obtain specialized training in the use of advanced statistical techniques for modeling developmental trajectories, a skill that will be needed to assess the interactions between development and service experience in this group. Finally, this award will allow me to conduct a series of interrelated studies to address the under explored relations among the assessment process in juvenile justice, mental illness, psychosocial development, and service utilization and perception in adolescent offenders. This research will not only provide new insights about how services are prescribed for and received by adolescent offenders, but it will also provide a starting point from which more comprehensive longitudinal studies of such relations and effects can be developed. This award is designed to further my own development as an expert in mental health and juvenile justice issues, and to advance our understanding of how interventions can be tailored to the specific developmental and mental health characteristics of adolescent offenders.

It is widely recognized that adolescents exhibit poor decision-making. With regard to driving, drugs, and crime, adolescents are more likely than adults to make choices that place themselves and others in harm's way. Efforts to explain this phenomenon in terms of deficits in risk judgment have largely failed. In study after study, adolescents appear to be as capable as adults of both estimating risk and acknowledging their vulnerability to it. But, if adolescents are as capable as adults of recognizing risk, why then do they engage in more risky behavior than adults? In this Doctoral Dissertation Improvement proposal the co-PI outlines research to test an alternative hypothesis involving unconscious aspects of decision-making. Specifically, the co-PI outlines experiments designed to test the hypotheses that (a) adolescents' unconscious decisional processes are more sensitive to reward and less sensitive to cost than those of older and younger individuals; and (b) that these age differences in sensitivity to reward and cost are amplified when rewards are social in nature. Three computerized decision-making tasks will be administered to 400 individuals ranging in age from 10 to 30 years old. The tasks use time pressure, complex information, and interference with conscious cognition to assess unconscious risk evaluation. By comparing the responses of preadolescent, adolescent and adult individuals, the study will be able to identify deficits and biases in adolescents' unconscious risk judgments that may influence their behavior.

The proposed study has the potential to challenge current developmental theory and to inform policy-makers about the mechanisms driving risky behavior in adolescence. In addition, the findings may be used to inform current discourse about rights and responsibilities for adolescents that hinge on their decision-making capacities, such as criminal culpability, medical decisions, informed consent, and the right to vote.

With over two million youth arrested annually, it is critical to understand how contact with the juvenile justice system impacts development. Though prior studies have found that contact with the system - typically measured as an arrest or a court appearance - might be related to undesirable outcomes (e.g., high school dropout, adult unemployment, adult crime), methodological limitations (e.g., biased sampling, the use of existing retrospective panel and cross-sectional datasets) in prior studies render the interpretations of these findings tentative. Furthermore, prior studies have yet to demonstrate how or why this contact precedes undesirable outcomes and whether the impact of contact varies developmentally.

Although youth who violate the law are typically processed by the juvenile justice system, many youth who engage in the same illegal behaviors go undetected by law enforcement. As such, this study builds on the limitations in prior studies by recruiting and comparing two groups of similarly delinquent youth: (1) youth who are processed by the juvenile justice system; and (2) youth who evade law enforcement. In particular, this study follows these youth for 6 months and investigates: (1) whether contact is, in fact, related to subsequent delinquency and academic achievement; (2) whether contact is more detrimental for younger youth compared with older youth; and (3) how this contact is related to subsequent delinquency and academic outcomes.

Data from this study can be used to target two potential loci for change: the juvenile offenders and the justice systems that serve them. In so doing, these data have the potential to inform public policies that might deflect at-risk youth from the revolving door of the juvenile justice system.