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

Abstract

Imbalance models of adolescent brain development attribute the increasing engagement in substance use during adolescence to within-person changes in the functional balance between the neural systems underlying socio-emotional, incentive processing, and cognitive control. However, the experimental designs and analytic techniques used to date do not lend themselves to explicit tests of how within-person change and within-person variability in socio-emotional processing and cognitive control place individual adolescents at risk for substance use. For a more complete articulation and a more stringent test of these models, we highlight the promise and challenges of using intensive longitudinal designs and analysis techniques that encompass many (often >10) within-person measurement occasions. Use of intensive longitudinal designs will lend researchers the tools required to make within-person inferences in individual adolescents that will ultimately align imbalance models of adolescent substance use with the methodological frameworks used to test them.

Neural heterogeneity underlying late adolescent reward processing is linked to individual differences in behavioral sensation seeking.

“…Connectivity studies, however, have the potential to map patterns among integrated neural networks (Beltz, 2018;Lydon-Staley & Bassett, 2018). Specifically, connectivity overcomes limitations of functional localization by evaluating the covariation, or functional dynamics, among regional activations, which is emphasized in most theories of the neural underpinnings of adolescent risk-taking behavior (Beltz, 2018;Meisel et al, 2019).…”

“…This is important because there is growing evidence of extreme individual differences in both neural function (Becht & Mills, 2020;Gordon et al, 2017;Finn et al, 2017;Poldrack, 2017) and in adolescent brain development (Lydon-Staley & Bassett, 2018).…”

“…One promising way to accurately capture individual differences in the neural networks underlying adolescent reward processing is to use a person-specific connectivity approach that avoids assumptions about uniformity (Beltz, 2018;Lydon-Staley & Bassett, 2018). Given the heterogeneity of functional networks (Finn et al, 2017) and adolescent behaviors (Bjork & Pardini, 2015), modeling person-specific covariation among regional activations may capture effects that are only present, or only particularly strong, in a subset of individuals or even that are unique to a single individual (see Beltz & Gates, 2017).…”

Associations of developmental imbalance between sensation seeking and premeditation in adolescence and heavy episodic drinking in emerging adulthood

“…However, several methodological limitations have impeded examinations of whether within‐person imbalance between these systems predicts real‐world drinking behaviors (Johnson et al, 2009; Meisel et al, 2019). First, few studies have utilized an appropriate longitudinal design that can characterize the within‐person developmental change hypothesized in dual systems theory (King et al, 2018; Lydon‐Staley & Bassett, 2018), requiring concurrent assessment of sensation seeking, premeditation, and drinking behavior spanning the course of the adolescent and young adult period. Second, few researchers have used analytic practices that directly quantify within‐person differences between these developing systems.…”

The Influence of Autoregressive Relation Strength and Search Strategy on Directionality Recovery in GIMME

“…Many of these models were initially developed to characterize temporal and network dynamics of interactions between brain regions in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data, leading to recent advances in the field's understanding of the neural correlates of cognition and psychiatric syndromes (Beltz et al, 2018;Elbich et al, 2019;Gates et al, 2014;Litvina et al, 2019;Mumford & Ramsey, 2014;Nichols et al, 2014;Price, Lane, et al, 2017;Weigard et al, 2019;Wu et al, 2019). Applications of similar network models to data from daily diary and ambulatory assessment studies have also begun to provide key insights into the within-person dynamics of basic psychological phenomena (Bar-Kalifa & Sened, 2019;Hofmans et al, 2019;Lydon-Staley & Bassett, 2018;Yang et al, 2019) and to elucidate person-specific structures, and determinants, of psychopathology Dotterer et al, 2019;Ellison et al, 2019;Jongeneel et al, 2019;Stroe-Kunold et al, 2016;Wright et al, 2015;Yang et al, 2018). A unique strength of these approaches is their ability to account for heterogeneity in neural and psychological processes by characterizing personspecific relations between variables .…”