Family conflict shapes how adolescents take risks when their family is affected

Abstract

Numerous studies have established that the social context greatly affects adolescent risk taking. However, it remains unexplored whether adolescents' decision-making behaviors change when they take risks that affect other individuals such as a parent. In the current study, we sought to investigate how the social context influences risky decisions when adolescents' behavior affects their family using a formalized risk-taking model. Sixty-three early adolescents (M = 13.3 years; 51% female) played a risk-taking task twice, once during which they could make risky choices that only affected themselves and another during which their risky choices only affected their parent. Results showed that adolescents reporting high family conflict made more risky decisions when taking risks for their parent compared to themselves, whereas adolescents reporting low family conflict made fewer risky decisions when taking risks for their parent compared to themselves. These findings are the first to show that adolescents change their decision-making behaviors when their risks affect their family and have important implications for current theories of adolescent risk taking.

Individual differences in accumbofrontal tract integrity relate to risky decisions under stress in adolescents and adults

“…The Cups Task ( Levin and Hart, 2003 ; Levin et al, 2007 ) measures DM under uncertainty, and has been used to examine DM in developmental populations (e.g., Galván and McGlennen, 2012 ; Guassi Moreira and Telzer, 2018 ; Levin et al, 2007 ) ( Fig. 1 ).…”

“…To assess the effects of stress on risky DM, we used the Cups Task, which has reliably elicited variation in risky DM and is developmentally-appropriate for adolescents ( Galván and McGlennen, 2012 ; Guassi Moreira and Telzer, 2018 ; Levin et al, 2007 ; Uy and Galván, 2017b , 2017a). The Cups Task consists of decision trials that vary on explicit probabilities and reward value, and thus vary in expected value, under two contextual frames – a reward-motivated context (gain frame) and a non-rewarding context (lose frame).…”

A simultaneous [11C]raclopride positron emission tomography and functional magnetic resonance imaging investigation of striatal dopamine binding in autism

“…Because the sample size of the current study is smaller than other fMRI studies of reward processing in ASD 7 , and because our a priori hypotheses were focused on the striatum, a structure that is comprised of anatomically small regions that typically do not survive stringent correction, we applied a small volume correction for the striatum, with a voxel-wise threshold of Z > 2.3 (p < 0.012) and minimum cluster size of 20, as has been done in prior fMRI studies examining the striatum [49][50][51] .…”

Computational and Motivational Mechanisms of Human Social Decision Making Involving Close Others

“…Drawing broad inferences about social decision making from paradigms that involve anonymous others is problematic because close relationship status, and even general familiarity, can profoundly influence social behavior (1)(2)(3)(4)(5)(6)(7). For example, individuals are inclined to be highly generous to close others, sometimes even at a cost to oneself, but less so to strangers (2,(8)(9)(10). This suggests that social decisions are strongly impacted by the identity of the individuals affected by one's decisions.…”

“…First, it is unknown whether or not individuals consistently prioritize the same close others when different outcomes are at stake (e.g., do I choose to spend both money and time on my parent instead of my friend?). This gap in knowledge stems from the fact that prior social decision making work involving close others has only examined decision making preferences when monetary outcomes are at stake (8,9,11,12). This is critical to address because social consequences can have profound impacts (e.g., on relationships, health, etc.…”