This project in developmental neuroscience examines the influence parents and peers exert on adolescents' willingness to engage in risky behavior at the neural circuitry level. Adolescent risk seeking behavior presents health and safety risks. This research has to potential to contribute significantly to national health and welfare by informing the design of effective interventions with youth at risk for emotional, behavioral, or social difficulties. This project has the potential to challenge and shift current research, update models of adolescent brain development, and ultimately inform the design of early interventions to prevent the rise in adolescent risk taking.
Risk 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. Emerging evidence from developmental neuroscience suggests that risk taking behavior increases during adolescence partly due to changes in the brain's neural circuitry. Despite these advances, there currently is little understanding of how neurobiological development interacts with social processes during the adolescent period. This is an important limitation given that adolescence is a period marked by increasingly complex social development, and adolescent decision making most often occurs under conditions of socio-emotional arousal. With support from the National Science Foundation, Dr. Telzer will measure how family and peers differentially impact the neurobiology of adolescent risk taking. Adolescents will be scanned using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) as they engage in a risk taking task and cognitive control task alone, in the presence of a peer, and in the presence of their parent. Adolescents will be followed for one year to measure self-reported risk taking behaviors in order to examine whether social influence on neuro-cognition predicts longitudinal changes in real-world risk taking. Although self-reported intentions predict some variability in future risk taking behavior, self-reports are not sufficient to capture the multidimensional nature of risk taking, particularly among adolescents. The ability to prospectively predict future engagement in risk taking based on adolescents' current neural sensitivity can have profound effects on our ability to develop early prevention programs.
