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. 2023 Oct:63:101291.
doi: 10.1016/j.dcn.2023.101291. Epub 2023 Aug 22.

Risk-related brain activation is linked to longitudinal changes in adolescent health risk behaviors

Nina Lauharatanahirun  1 , Dominique F Maciejewski  2 , Jungmeen Kim-Spoon  3 , Brooks King-Casas  4
Affiliations

Risk-related brain activation is linked to longitudinal changes in adolescent health risk behaviors

Nina Lauharatanahirun et al. Dev Cogn Neurosci. 2023 Oct.

Abstract

Middle adolescence is the period of development during which youth begin to engage in health risk behaviors such as delinquent behavior and substance use. A promising mechanism for guiding adolescents away from risky choices is the extent to which adolescents are sensitive to the likelihood of receiving valued outcomes. Few studies have examined longitudinal change in adolescent risky decision making and its neural correlates. To this end, the present longitudinal three-wave study (Nw1 = 157, Mw1= 13.50 years; Nw2 = 148, Mw2= 14.52 years; Nw3 = 143, Mw3= 15.55 years) investigated the ontogeny of mid-adolescent behavioral and neural risk sensitivity, and their baseline relations to longitudinal self-reported health risk behaviors. Results showed that adolescents became more sensitive to risk both in behavior and the brain during middle adolescence. Across three years, we observed lower risk-taking and greater risk-related activation in the bilateral insular cortex. When examining how baseline levels of risk sensitivity were related to longitudinal changes in real-life health risk behaviors, we found that Wave 1 insular activity was related to increases in self-reported health risk behaviors over the three years. This research highlights the normative maturation of risk-related processes at the behavioral and neural levels during mid-adolescence.

Keywords: Adolescence; Health risk behaviors; Insular cortex; Longitudinal; Risky decision making.

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Conflict of interest statement

Declaration of Competing Interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
A) Adolescents made 72 decisions between pairs of risky gambles in an economic lottery choice task (Holt and Laury, 2002). Each gamble consisted of a high and low monetary outcome with an associated probability. Outcomes and probabilities were represented with corresponding colors (pink and blue). The time course of a given trial included a decision phase followed by a jittered fixation interval and an outcome phase, in which participants were shown the results of their choice followed by a jittered inter-trial interval (ITI). B) Distribution of behavioral risk sensitivity scores within each wave, where lower values indicate greater risk aversion. The dotted lines represent the mean. C) Distribution of behavioral reward sensitivity scores within each wave. Higher values indicate greater reward seeking. The dotted lines represent the mean.
Fig. 2
Fig. 2
Mean Neural Response to Increasing Risk during the Decision Phase Across Waves. Using a longitudinal whole-brain group analysis, mean neural responses to parametrically increasing coefficient of variation (CV, i.e., risk) for chosen options were identified in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC; especially the anterior cingulate cortex, ACC), bilateral insular cortex, and bilateral ventral striatum (VS). All neuroimaging analyses used a false discovery rate (FDR) multiple comparisons correction with a threshold of p < .05.
Fig. 3
Fig. 3
Linear Change in Neural Responses to Increasing Risk Across Waves. Longitudinal whole-brain analysis showed a significant linear change in risk-related responses to increasing coefficient of variation (CV, i.e., risk) for chosen options across the three waves within the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC, including the anterior cingulate cortex, ACC), right insular cortex, and bilateral ventral striatum. All neuroimaging analyses used a false discovery rate (FDR) multiple comparisons correction with a threshold of p < .05.
Fig. 4
Fig. 4
Individual risk sensitivity estimates (averaged across three waves for each individual) correlated with mean risk-related BOLD responses, where decreased behavioral risk sensitivity (i.e., risk aversion) was related to responses associated with increasing risk (coefficient of variation; CV) in the medial prefontal cortex (mPFC, including the anterior cingulate cortex, ACC), bilateral insular cortex, and ventral striatum. All neuroimaging analyses used a false discovery rate (FDR) multiple comparisons correction with a threshold of p < .05.
Fig. 5
Fig. 5
Relation between Wave 1 risk-related brain activation in the right insular cortex and the change in health risk behaviors from Wave 1 to Wave 3.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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