Is the Peer Presence Effect on Heightened Adolescent Risky Decision-Making only Present in Males?

Abstract

Social neurodevelopmental imbalance models posit that peer presence causes heightened adolescent risk-taking particularly during early adolescence. Evolutionary theory suggests that these effects would be most pronounced in males. However, the small but growing number of experimental studies on peer presence effects in adolescent risky decision-making showed mixed findings, and the vast majority of such studies did not test for the above-described gender and adolescent phase moderation effects. Moreover, most of those studies did not assess the criterion validity of the employed risky decision-making tasks. The current study was designed to investigate the abovementioned hypotheses among a sample of 327 ethnically-diverse Dutch early and mid-adolescents (49.80% female; Mage = 13.61). No main effect of peer presence on the employed risky-decision making task (i.e., the stoplight game) was found. However, the results showed a gender by peer presence moderation effect. Namely, whereas boys and girls engaged in equal levels of risks when they completed the stoplight game alone, boys engaged in more risk-taking than girls when they completed this task together with two same-sex peers. In contrast, adolescent phase did not moderate peer presence effects on risk-taking. Finally, the results showed that performance on the stoplight game predicted self-reported real-world risky traffic behavior, alcohol use and delinquency. Taken together, using a validated task, the present findings demonstrate that individual differences (i.e., gender) can determine whether the social environment (i.e., peer presence) affect risk-taking in early- and mid-adolescents. The finding that performance on a laboratory risky decision-making task can perhaps help identify adolescents that are vulnerable to diverse types of heightened risk behaviors is an important finding for science as well as prevention and intervention efforts.

Preference uncertainty accounts for developmental effects on susceptibility to peer influence in adolescence

“…As this is not a direct replication study of a previously reported investigation, it may, however, also be dependent on precise methodological details and the specific demographics of our sample, e.g. on the fact that our sample did not include very young adolescents for whom strong susceptibility effects have been reported previously 4,5 (but also note 73 ). Our findings stress the importance of longitudinal designs for developmental psychology.…”

Adolescent Brain Development and Contextual Influences: A Decade in Review

“…In addition to the findings, this study was seminal in demonstrating the feasibility of conducting an fMRI study that better approximated how adolescents make decisions "in real life"-in the presence of peers-than previous studies had done. This ecologically-informed approach has since been adopted in many other studies (e.g., Defoe, Dubas, Dalmaijer, & van Aken, 2020;van Hoorn, McCormick, Rogers, Ivory, & Telzer, 2018;Op de Macks et al, 2018) and forced the field to call into question whether the standard imaging approaches whereby participants are asked to complete cognitive tasks alone were actually capturing neural response to more ecologically-relevant behaviors such as risk-taking.…”

The Influence of Social Isolation on Social Orientation, Sociability, Social Novelty Preference, and Hippocampal Parvalbumin-Expressing Interneurons in Peripubertal Rats – Understanding the Importance of Meeting Social Needs in Adolescence

“…Our results are also in agreement with the finding in humans that social seeking is low in early adolescence ( Dubey et al, 2017 ) and additionally indicate that such a result may actually reflect that the surveyed group had met basic belongingness needs , making such findings applicable to a part rather than to all early-adolescents (which to some extent explains the discrepancy in the results of studies examining the developmental course of sociability). The results of the present study are also useful in the context of neurodevelopmental imbalance and evolutionary models of adolescent risky decision-making, with the former arguing that peer presence causes increased risk-taking, particularly during early adolescence ( Crone and Dahl, 2012 ), and the latter suggesting that effects would be the most pronounced in males for both early- and mid-adolescents ( Defoe et al, 2020 ). Motivational arousal due to peer presence could be expected in those who grow up in a social environment that does not support their social needs, particularly in early adolescence, so previous social experience in addition to age ( Crone and Dahl, 2012 ) and gender ( Defoe et al, 2020 ) should be taken into consideration when analyzing the influence of “the mere peer presence” in adolescence.…”

“…The results of the present study are also useful in the context of neurodevelopmental imbalance and evolutionary models of adolescent risky decision-making, with the former arguing that peer presence causes increased risk-taking, particularly during early adolescence ( Crone and Dahl, 2012 ), and the latter suggesting that effects would be the most pronounced in males for both early- and mid-adolescents ( Defoe et al, 2020 ). Motivational arousal due to peer presence could be expected in those who grow up in a social environment that does not support their social needs, particularly in early adolescence, so previous social experience in addition to age ( Crone and Dahl, 2012 ) and gender ( Defoe et al, 2020 ) should be taken into consideration when analyzing the influence of “the mere peer presence” in adolescence. This presumption is in agreement with the findings that the promotion of social wanting and the activation of the motivational/dopaminergic reward system in the midbrain happen in the presence of social cues in isolated both mice ( Matthews et al, 2016 ) and humans ( Tomova et al, 2020 ) and that a hyper-responsive motivational-reward system can undermine self-regulation in the presence of peers ( Albert et al, 2013 ).…”

“…Considering all of the above mentioned, the present study aimed to examine the influence of early-adolescent and early-to-mid-adolescent SI on motivated social behavior and the hippocampal PVI in peripubertal male rats as the rodent model of adolescence. Male rats were used in view of the findings that the influence of peer-related stimuli on the reward system and adolescent decision making ( Albert et al, 2013 ) is modulated by gender, i.e., exists only in males ( Defoe et al, 2020 ). The behavioral correlates of social orientation, sociability, and social novelty preference were addressed using alive animals (the three-chamber test, Templer et al, 2018 ) as well as social odors as cues to gain insights into the developmental role of social odors in motivated social behavior ( Haskal et al, 2020 ; Contestabile et al, 2021 ).…”