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Effects of pubertal development on self-regulation of behaviour and its relation with present and past life conditions
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Description: Unlike most of the literature, which center on studying the effects of chronological age on development, this project aims, through a series of subprojects, to examine the role of pubertal status and its reciprocal effects with many past and present biopsychosocial factors on behavior, with a focus of adolescents’ self-regulations abilities, known to impacts mental and physical health and quality of life in adulthood. The study will be cross-sectional and will include 300 9-15 year-old male and female Brazilian participants from a wide range of backgrounds. Measures of pubertal status include self-assessed Tanner ratings of pubic hair and genital/breast development, self- and parental-ratings with the Pubertal Development Scale (PDS), salivary biomarkers (kisspeptin, dehydroepiandrosterone and testosterone) and fundamental voice frequency. The psychosocial factors investigated include present ratings of morningness-eveningness preferences, daytime sleepiness, behavior (parent rated child behavioral check list, CBCL), self-esteem, mastery, subjective social status, satisfaction with body shape, use of alcohol, and how they are related to participants’ background [socioeconomic status, socioeconomic risk factors, family environment), among others]. Measures related to health and allostatic load during pubertal development include anthropometric variables, self-rated physical activity, blood pressure, metabolic, endocrine and immunological biomarkers collected with minimally invasive procedures [hair, urine, saliva and capillary blood to quantify cortisol, DHEA, lipid profile, glycated hemoglobin, interleukin 6 (Il-6), tumor necrosis factor alpha (TNF-alpha), brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BNDF), and markers of global methylation (long interspersed element 1, LINE-1)]. The cognitive measures of self-regulation under study are those based on logical reasoning (cool functions based on the unity and diversity model of executive functions) and emotions (hot functions/impulsivity, assessed with the short UPPS-P scale and a delay discounting paradigm), working memory capacity (running memory span), markers of intelligence (Vocabulary and Block Design) and complexity of connected spoken language/oral productions (story retelling task). In order democratize cognitive/behavioral testing and increase the reproducibility of our findings and we will mainly use measures that are in the public domain and cost-effective biomarkers that are only slightly invasive or not so. Factors susceptible to interventions to improve self-regulation in adolescence will be determined and the results will be disseminated to the scientific community and the general public. This is an umbrella project being conducted at the Department of Psychobiology at the Universidade Federal de São Paulo, in Brazil, financed by FAPESP (general project number 2016/14750-0), CAPES, CNPq and AFIP. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
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