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Category: Project

Description: Parents and peers are two reference groups that are particularly salient and important for the type of risk attitudes that are learned and adopted as one’s one (i.e., internalized) throughout adolescence. However, less is known about the extent to which adolescents differentially integrate the perceived risk attitudes of their parents vs. peers into constructing their own risk attitudes over time. Given ongoing functional changes that occur in social and motivational brain systems during adolescence (Crone & Dahl, 2012), it is important to understand how age-related changes in brain systems associated with social influence may constrain the extent to which the brain encodes and integrates the perceived risk attitudes of others in the development of risk attitudes across adolescence. The proposed study has two goals: (1) Examine age-related changes in the extent to which adolescents internalize the perceived risk attitudes of their parents vs. peers when constructing their own risk attitudes; and (2) Examine whether trajectories of adolescents’ risk attitudes are shaped by the extent to which the adolescent brain differentially utilizes internalized perceptions of their parents’ or peers’ risk attitudes over time, with a focus on brain systems implicated in social decision making (vmPFC, mPFC, dmPFC, dACC).