Adolescence and Addiction

The Promise and Challenges of Intensive Longitudinal Designs for Imbalance Models of Adolescent Substance Use

“…Department of Health and Human Services, 2012). From the perspective of imbalance models of risk-taking (Casey and Jones, 2010; Lydon et al, 2015), adolescents are particularly vulnerable to drug use due to normative increases in the activity of limbic and paralimbic regions involved in socio-emotional processes such as incentive processing (Ernst et al, 2005; Galvan et al, 2006) alongside continued immaturities in the functioning of prefrontal regions involved in cognitive control (Hwang et al, 2010; Ordaz et al, 2013). This configuration results in an imbalance of limbic relative to prefrontal control that renders adolescents more sensitive to rewarding stimuli and less likely to inhibit impulses to approach rewards relative to children and adults (Somerville et al, 2011).…”