Date created: | Last Updated:

Category: Project

Description: 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, given that many of these studies have not included adolescents engaging in high rates of risky behavior, generalizing to the most at-risk populations may be problematic. We conducted a comparative study of community (N=24, Mage = 15.8 years, 12 female) and delinquent adolescents (N=24, Mage = 16.2 years, 12 female) who completed a cognitive control task during fMRI, where behavioral inhibition was assessed in the presence of 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 non-normative risk taking trajectories.