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Abstract
Adolescence has been noted as a period of increased risk taking. The literature on normative neurodevelopment implicates aberrant activation of affective and regulatory regions as key to inhibitory failures. However, many of these studies have not included adolescents engaging in high rates of risky behavior, making generalizations to the most at-risk populations potentially problematic. We conducted a comparative study of nondelinquent community (n = 24, mean age = 15.8 years, 12 female) and delinquent adolescents (n = 24, mean age = 16.2 years, 12 female) who completed a cognitive control task during functional magnetic resonance imaging, where behavioral inhibition was assessed in the presence of appetitive and aversive socioaffective cues. Community adolescents showed poorer behavioral regulation to appetitive relative to aversive cues, whereas the delinquent sample showed the opposite pattern. Recruitment of the inferior frontal gyrus, medial prefrontal cortex, and tempoparietal junction differentiated community and high-risk adolescents, as delinquent adolescents showed significantly greater recruitment when inhibiting their responses in the presence of aversive cues, while the community sample showed greater recruitment when inhibiting their responses in the presence of appetitive cues. Accounting for behavioral history may be key in understanding when adolescents will have regulatory difficulties, highlighting a need for comparative research into normative and nonnormative risk-taking trajectories.
Highlights
IntroductionAdolescence is often described as a paradoxical time, where relative improvements in certain domains (e.g. abstract reasoning) are often coupled with suboptimal decision making in other domains (e.g. health risk behaviors; Brener et al, 2013)
Adolescence is often described as a paradoxical time, where relative improvements in certain domains are often coupled with suboptimal decision making in other domains
The community sample showed greater inhibitory failures to appetitive cues, whereas the delinquent sample showed greater inhibitory failures to aversive cues. These findings suggest emotion-regulation difficulties for members of each group differ based on the socioaffective context, as the delinquent sample shows a different pattern of emotion regulation disruption compared to their community counterparts
Summary
Adolescence is often described as a paradoxical time, where relative improvements in certain domains (e.g. abstract reasoning) are often coupled with suboptimal decision making in other domains (e.g. health risk behaviors; Brener et al, 2013). A number of studies have found that aversive stimuli—such as fearful faces (Grose-Fifer, et al, 2014; Monk et al, 2003), negative affective images (Cohen-Gilbert & Thomas, 2013), and threat cues (Dreyfuss et al, 2014)—are deleterious to regulatory capacities, whereas others have found that compromised regulation may be more specific to appetitive stimuli—such as happy faces (Somerville et al, 2011), positive affective images (Perino et al, 2016), and the presence of peers (Chein et al, 2011) The nature of this discrepancy is of great importance, as it suggests adolescent dysregulation in response to socioaffective stimuli is complex and likely driven by more than merely the type of stimuli observed
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