2. Reward-related neural response during risky decision making reflects adolescents’ social network clustering structure

• In Event: How adolescents’ behaviors and brain shape and are shaped by their peer social networks

Abstract

Social groups, reflected as clusters in social networks, are fundamental for self-identity, physical health, and psychological well-being (Gavin & Furman, 1989; Newman & Newman, 1976; Parks-Yancy, 2006). Forging relationships with new social groups involves taking risks (e.g., approaching unknown others at the risk of being rejected), and fosters adaptive adolescent development (Brown et al., 1986). Previous work has started to investigate how individual differences in personality and neural characteristics can contribute to the formation of social network structures (e.g., Dziura & Thompson, 2014). Yet, it is unclear whether risk taking is associated with the formation of social groups, and what neural processes might support this relationship. Across two studies, we investigated our hypotheses that (1) behavioral risk taking is positively associated with the number of clusters in adolescents’ social networks; and (2) this association is supported by reward-related neural processes during risk taking. In Study 1, sixty-two adolescent males (16 – 17 years old) provided access to their online Facebook social network and completed the Balloon Analogue Risk Task (BART) while undergoing fMRI. We measured reward-related neural activity in meta-analytically defined regions (Bartra et al., 2013) of the ventral striatum (VS) and ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC) during BART risk taking. Clusters in social networks were computed using community detection techniques (Blondel et al., 2008) on objective logs of participants’ Facebook friendship networks. We found that adolescents with higher VS and VMPFC activity during risk taking in the lab had greater numbers of clusters within their social networks, whereas behavioral risk taking was not associated with social network clusters. In Study 2, we investigated the association between behavioral risk taking in BART and social network clusters in a larger online sample (N = 385 U.S. adolescents and young adults, Mage = 16.8, SDage = 1.01). Social networks were measured through participants’ self-report using a name-generation based method. We found that behavioral risk taking was positively associated with the number of social network clusters, indicating that adolescents who took more general risks tended to have more clusters in their social networks. Together, our results show that higher reward-related activation during risk taking may contribute to adolescents’ tendencies to take more risks (including taking risks in social domain), resulting in more groups in their social networks. This work highlights one of the important implications of heightened risk taking during adolescence: social exploration and fostering more groups of friends.

Authors

• Rui Pei, Stanford University
  Presenting Author

• Nina Lauharatanahirun, Penn State University

• Emily B. Falk, University of Pennsylvania