Abstract
Novelty-seeking tendencies in adolescents may promote innovation as well as problematic impulsive behaviour, including drug abuse. Previous research has not clarified whether neural hyper- or hypo-responsiveness to anticipated rewards promotes vulnerability in these individuals. Here we use a longitudinal design to track 144 novelty-seeking adolescents at age 14 and 16 to determine whether neural activity in response to anticipated rewards predicts problematic drug use. We find that diminished BOLD activity in mesolimbic (ventral striatal and midbrain) and prefrontal cortical (dorsolateral prefrontal cortex) regions during reward anticipation at age 14 predicts problematic drug use at age 16. Lower psychometric conscientiousness and steeper discounting of future rewards at age 14 also predicts problematic drug use at age 16, but the neural responses independently predict more variance than psychometric measures. Together, these findings suggest that diminished neural responses to anticipated rewards in novelty-seeking adolescents may increase vulnerability to future problematic drug use.
Highlights
Novelty-seeking tendencies in adolescents may promote innovation as well as problematic impulsive behaviour, including drug abuse
Based on previous findings implicating blunted neural responses during reward anticipation in adolescents with contemporaneous PDU22, we hypothesized that decreased neural responses during reward anticipation might predict eventual problematic drug use (PDU) in novelty-seeking adolescents, and further, that these neural markers might augment predictions afforded by more conventional psychometric measures. Consistent with these hypotheses, we find that novelty-seeking adolescents who go on to develop PDU initially show reduced neural activity during reward anticipation
The critical predictions focused on novelty-seeking adolescents, we first sought to verify that novelty seeking was associated with PDU
Summary
Novelty-seeking tendencies in adolescents may promote innovation as well as problematic impulsive behaviour, including drug abuse. Impulsive choice in adolescents has been attributed to diminished motivation, such that drug abuse may reflect attempts to compensate for motivational deficits[17,18] Support for this account has come from neuroimaging studies, suggesting that adolescents show diminished responses during anticipation of monetary rewards relative to adults[19,20,21], which are more pronounced in adolescents with contemporaneous drug use[22]. Impulsive behaviour in adolescents has been attributed to excessive motivation[7,23], which could magnify the impact of received rewards and fuel subsequent impulsive choice[8,24] Support for this countervailing view comes from neuroimaging studies, indicating that adolescents show enhanced responses to monetarily rewarding outcomes relative to adults[7,23,25]. In business, novelty seeking has been associated with creativity, entrepreneurial initiative and commercial success[33]
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