Substance use increases dramatically during college and is associated with significant negative effects for individuals and society. To improve the efficacy of interventions designed to decrease collegiate substance use, we must identify risk factors that are amenable to change. Whereas numerous established risk factors (e.g., gender, SES, ethnicity) are difficult or impossible to change, poor self-regulation is malleable. Substance use and addiction is somewhat more common in poor self-regulators, as assessed by self-reports and experimental paradigms with limited ecological validity (e.g., stop-signal, Go-NoGo). Employing more meaningful appetitive self-regulation paradigms (e.g., craving reappraisal) may help clarify the relationship between self-regulation and substance use in late adolescence. Currently, most extant work on reappraisal during this time has relied on experimental paradigms instructing participants to regulate their affective or appetitive reactions to stimuli. However, in late adolescence, when many individuals leave the family home, intrinsic motivation and the ability to autonomously self-regulate consummative behavior in the absence of external cues becomes a crucial asset likely to promote positive developmental trajectories. Research strongly supports the relationship between autonomy and health and well-being, and autonomy enhances self- regulation and is associated with distinct patterns of neural activity. Pilot data from our lab further suggests that neural activity during autonomous regulation is a better predictor than controlled (extrinsically motivated) regulation of various substance use outcomes during the transition to college. In order to better understand the role self-regulation plays in late adolescent substance use, this proposal aims to 1) validate the use of food craving reappraisal as a developmentally appropriate model of appetitive self-regulation in the context of substance use, and 2) characterize the ability of autonomous and controlled regulation to predict substance use trajectories during the transition to college, above and beyond other established risk factors. Appetitive self-regulation will be assessed during neuroimaging, using a paradigm designed to examine autonomous and controlled reappraisal of the desire to consume personally-craved foods. We propose to use personally- craved foods as a developmentally appropriate model for resisting a broader range of potentially harmful temptations encountered during the transition to college. Substance use will be assessed four times: once immediately prior to starting college and again each quarter during freshman year. This will allow us to investigate individual differences in changes in substance use and related outcomes. The proposed program of research will help refine neurobiological theories about self-regulation during periods of significant change in external regulatory scaffolding, and is essential to the development of targeted interventions aimed at helping adolescents autonomously resist the temptation to engage in substance use behaviors.
The proposed project investigates the neural mechanisms underlying autonomous (intrinsically motivated) self- regulation of appetitive cues (personally-craved foods, as a model for other addictive primary rewards like drugs and alcohol) in late adolescence during the transition to college. Furthermore, it uses neural activity during autonomous regulation to predict and explain unique variance (beyond other established risk factors) in changes in substance use, in comparison to self-reported indices of self-regulation, behavioral regulation success, or the neural correlates of controlled (extrinsically motivated) regulation . The ultimate goal is to reveal which cognitive and motivational processes (autonomous regulation in particular, or self-regulation in general) are optimal targets of self-regulation training, so as to facilitate the development of interventions to prevent trajectories of substance abuse, academic problems, risky sex, and other negative health consequences associated with drug and alcohol use during the transition to college.
| Cosme, Danielle; Mobasser, Arian; Zeithamova, Dagmar et al. (2018) Choosing to regulate: does choice enhance craving regulation? Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci 13:300-309 |
