Neurobiology of the Adolescent Brain and Behavior
By B. Casey, Rebecca M. Jones. Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, 2010
689 citations recorded by the source corpus.
OBJECTIVE Adolescence is a developmental period that entails substantial changes in risk-taking behavior and experimentation with alcohol and drugs. Understanding how the brain is changing during this period relative to childhood and adulthood and how these changes vary across individuals are key in predicting risk for later substance abuse and dependence. METHOD This review discusses recent human imaging and animal work in the context of an emerging view of adolescence as characterized by a tension between early emerging "bottom-up" systems that express exaggerated reactivity to motivational stimuli and later maturing "top-down" cognitive control regions. Behavioral, clinical, and neurobiological evidences are reported for dissociating these two systems developmentally. The literature on the effects of alcohol and its rewarding properties in the brain is discussed in the context of these two systems. RESULTS Collectively, these studies show curvilinear development of motivational behavior and the underlying subcortical brain regions, with a peak inflection from 13 to 17 years. In contrast, prefrontal regions, important in top-down regulation of behavior, show a linear pattern of development well into young adulthood that parallels that seen in behavioral studies of impulsivity. CONCLUSIONS The tension or imbalance between these developing systems during adolescence may lead to cognitive control processes being more vulnerable to incentive-based modulation and increased susceptibility to the motivational properties of alcohol and drugs. As such, behavior challenges that require cognitive control in the face of appetitive cues may serve as useful biobehavioral markers for predicting which teens may be at greater risk for alcohol and substance dependence.
Subfields: Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience, Epidemiology, Psychiatry and Mental health
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/613c0ae6cd9d5c5901f8d1b793f96b95b1e18ae2
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In Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience
In Epidemiology
In Psychiatry and Mental health
Citations in the corpus
- The Impact of Internet Pornography on Adolescents: A Review of the Research (2012, background): “This perspective is consistent with the belief that cognitive control of impulses can be compromised in adolescents when selfregulation interacts with salient motivation drives (Casey & Jones, 2010).”
- Beyond simple models of self-control to circuit-based accounts of adolescent behavior. (2015, background): “Specifically, elevated activity of the ventral striatum during a time when prefrontal control circuitry is still immature may result in an exacerbated imbalance among these regions and a reduced capacity to regulate use and abuse-related behaviors (Casey & Jones 2010).”