Neural response to rewards predicts risk-taking in late but not early adolescent females

Abstract

Highlights Risk-taking peaked in mid adolescence such that mid adolescents took more risks than early and later adolescents. Reward sensitivity, measured with the Reward Positivity, predicted risk-taking only in late but not early adolescence. Developmental stage is important to consider when investigating how neural response to rewards contributes to risk-taking.

Intergenerational transmission of depression risk: Mothers’ neural response to reward and history of depression are associated with daughters’ neural response to reward across adolescence.

“…Another possibility is that preexisting liabilities (e.g., blunted response to reward in early adolescence; Kujawa et al, 2020) change the way that individuals interact with their environments and that these changes have dynamic effects over time (Forbes & Casement, 2019). For example, individuals in early adolescence who have blunted reward responsivity might experience rewards as less pleasurable (Bress & Hajcak, 2013) and have heightened responses to stress (Ethridge et al, 2020; Mackin et al, 2019), and therefore might be less likely to take risks in order to seek out rewarding/reinforcing experiences as they develop (Freeman et al, 2020). Failure to receive reinforcements might then result in increasingly reduced sensitivity to reward over time.…”

“…It is also possible that impairments (i.e. blunting) in reward processing as a result of a family history of depression might become increasingly apparent through adolescence if an initial deficit in reward sensitivity (Kujawa et al, 2014; Kujawa et al, 2020) is associated with behavioral changes (e.g., less of a tendency to pursue positive experiences) that are, in turn, associated with further impairments in reward processing (Bress & Hajcak, 2013; Forbes & Casement, 2019; Freeman et al, 2020). Together, this evidence provides initial support for the notion that a family history of depressive symptoms might change the course of PVS development (Gotlib et al, 2020); however, relatively little work has explicitly examined how familial depression risk is associated with altered trajectories of PVS function across adolescence.…”

Adolescents and young adults differ in their neural response to and recognition of adolescent and adult emotional faces

“…All participants completed multiple computer tasks during the experiment. Other tasks completed by the adolescent participants included a social feedback task (Panier et al, 2022), a monetary reward task (described in Freeman et al, 2020), and a risk-taking task (also described in Freeman et al, 2020). Other tasks completed by the adult participants included a threat-generalization task (described in Bauer et al, 2020) and an emotional learning task.…”

“…The order of the tasks was counterbalanced across participants, with the exception of the risk‐taking task in the adolescent sample which was completed first. The results from other tasks administered during the same experimental session are presented elsewhere (e.g., Freeman et al, 2020). The magnitude of the LPP to adolescent and adult faces did not significantly differ based on the order of the faces task (i.e., second, third, or fourth; p s > .05) in the adolescent sample, nor did it significantly differ based on the order of the faces task (i.e., first, second, or third) in the young adult sample ( p s > .05).…”

Longitudinal association between interparental conflict and risk-taking behavior among Chinese adolescent: Testing a moderated mediation model

“…Adolescence is marked by a steep increase in risk-taking behavior, which can be defined as the behavior carried out by individuals in the condition of knowing potential risks or negative consequences in pursuit of a favorable result, such as violent crime, alcohol abuse, risky driving, and unsafe sex (Ben-Zur & Zeidner, 2009;Ju et al, 2020;Sanci et al, 2018). Numerous studies have demonstrated that compared to adults and children, adolescents are more likely to engage in risktaking behavior regardless of the adverse consequences, which is detrimental to their physical and mental health (Albert & Steinberg, 2011;Duell et al, 2018;Freeman et al, 2020). Therefore, it is crucial to explore factors affecting adolescents' risk-taking behavior.…”