- João Guassi Moreira
- Mothers and the Teen Brain: The Contribution of Maternal Presence on Neural Reward Processing and Decision Making during Adolescence
- Psychology
Describe
your research
experience
I am interested in the influence of close relationships on adolescent neural development and well-being.
Adolescent neural development is marked by heighted reward sensitivity and slow-to-develop cognitive control abilities, contributing to higher levels of risky decision making. However, recent research has demonstrated that the social context can affect the extent to which adolescents make risky decisions. Specifically, a mother’s presence alters the way in which teens process rewards, leading to safer decision making. Despite this, it remains unknown whether this is unique to maternal presence or generalizes to other authority figures. To answer this question, 23 adolescents underwent an fMRI scan, completing a risk-taking task in the presence of their mothers and again in the presence of an authority figure. Results suggest that the effect of maternal presence on adolescent risk-taking does not generalize to other authority figures, as evidenced by an increase in the rewarding nature of safe decisions and a decrease in the rewarding nature of risky decisions.
As one of the recipient's of OUR's Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowships (2015), the results of João's research can be found here.