Food choice in transition: adolescent autonomy, agency, and the food environment.

Dietary intake during adolescence sets the foundation for a healthy life, but adolescents are diverse in their dietary patterns and in factors that influence food choice. More evidence to understand the key diet-related issues and the meaning and context of food choices for adolescents is needed to increase the potential for impactful actions. The aim of this second Series paper is to elevate the importance given to adolescent dietary intake and food choice, bringing a developmental perspective to inform policy and programmatic actions to improve diets.

Context, Development, and Digital Media: Implications for Very Young Adolescents in LMICs.

The rapidly expanding universe of information, media, and learning experiences available through digital technology is creating unique opportunities and vulnerabilities for children and adolescents. These issues are particularly salient during the developmental window at the transition from childhood into adolescence. This period of early adolescence is a time of formative social and emotional learning experiences that can shape identity development in both healthy and unhealthy ways.

Enhancing Human-Centered Design With Youth-Led Participatory Action Research Approaches for Adolescent Sexual and Reproductive Health Programming.

Existing participatory research approaches have failed to identify innovative methods that overcome the persistent barriers to adolescent sexual and reproductive health service demand and access. Increasingly, programmers have turned to human-centered design (HCD), a problem-solving process that centers the needs, perspectives, and experiences of people, when developing solutions to complex SRH challenges. This article describes the application of a youth-engaged version of HCD as part of Adolescents 360, a transdisciplinary initiative to increase 15- to 19-year-old girls' use of modern contraception in Nigeria, Ethiopia, and Tanzania.

Importance of investing in adolescence from a developmental science perspective.

This review summarizes the case for investing in adolescence as a period of rapid growth, learning, adaptation, and formational neurobiological development. Adolescence is a dynamic maturational period during which young lives can pivot rapidly-in both negative and positive directions. Scientific progress in understanding adolescent development provides actionable insights into windows of opportunity during which policies can have a positive impact on developmental trajectories relating to health, education, and social and economic success.

Social status strategy in early adolescent girls: Testosterone and value-based decision making.

There has been strong interest, spanning several disciplines, in understanding adolescence as a developmental period of increased risk-taking behavior. Our goals focus on one line of investigation within this larger developmental risk framework. Specifically, we examined levels of pubertal hormones in girls in relation to their willingness to take greater financial risks to gain social status.

Dissociable effects of age and testosterone on adolescent impatience.

The onset of adolescence is associated with an increase in transgressive behaviours-from juvenile delinquency to substance use and unprotected sex-that are often attributed to increased impulsiveness. In the past, this increase was ascribed to "raging hormones"; more recently, to an imbalance in the maturation of different brain regions. However, it remains unclear how these large-scale biological changes impact specific processes that result in impulsive decisions, namely, sensitivity to immediate rewards and general discounting of future options.

Leveraging Neuroscience to Inform Adolescent Health: The Need for an Innovative Transdisciplinary Developmental Science of Adolescence.

In this article, we consider how to leverage some of the rapid advances in developmental neuroscience in ways that can improve adolescent health. We provide a brief overview of several key areas of scientific progress relevant to these issues. We then focus on two examples of important health problems that increase sharply during adolescence: sleep problems and affective disorders.

Research in the Integration of Behavioral Health for Adolescents and Young Adults in Primary Care Settings: A Systematic Review.

Despite the recognition that behavioral and medical health conditions are frequently intertwined, the existing health care system divides management for these issues into separate settings. This separation results in increased barriers to receipt of care and contributes to problems of underdetection, inappropriate diagnosis, and lack of treatment engagement. Adolescents and young adults with mental health conditions have some of the lowest rates of treatment for their conditions of all age groups.

Becoming a sexual being: The 'elephant in the room' of adolescent brain development.

The onset of adolescence is a time of profound changes in motivation, cognition, behavior, and social relationships. Existing neurodevelopmental models have integrated our current understanding of adolescent brain development; however, there has been surprisingly little focus on the importance of adolescence as a sensitive period for romantic and sexual development. As young people enter adolescence, one of their primary tasks is to gain knowledge and experience that will allow them to take on the social roles of adults, including engaging in romantic and sexual relationships.

Readability of Educational Materials to Support Parent Sexual Communication With Their Children and Adolescents.

Sexual communication is a principal means of transmitting sexual values, expectations, and knowledge from parents to their children and adolescents. Many parents seek information and guidance to support talking with their children about sex and sexuality. Parent education materials can deliver this guidance but must use appropriate readability levels to facilitate comprehension and motivation.

School-Based Sex Education and Neuroscience: What We Know About Sex, Romance, Marriage, and Adolescent Brain Development.

Background: Many school-based abstinence-only sex education curricula state that sexual activity outside of marriage is likely to have harmful psychological effects. Recent advances in neuroscience have expanded our understanding of the neural underpinnings of romantic love, marriage, sexual desire, and sexual behavior and improved our understanding of adolescent brain development.

Methods: In this article, we review recent advances in neuroscience and clarify what is known about the link between neural development and adolescent romantic and sexual behavior and what opportunities exist for future research.

Multiple dimensions of peer influence in adolescent romantic and sexual relationships: a descriptive, qualitative perspective.

Adolescents undergo critical developmental transformations that increase the salience of peer influence. Peer interactions (platonic and romantic) have been found to have both a positive and negative influence on adolescent attitudes and behaviors related to romantic relationships and sexual behavior. This study used qualitative methodology to explore how peers influence romantic and sexual behavior.

Motivations for sex among low-income African American young women.

African American young women exhibit higher risk for sexually transmitted infections, including HIV/AIDS, compared with European American women, and this is particularly true for African American women living in low-income contexts. We used rigorous qualitative methods, that is, domain analysis, including free listing (n = 20), similarity assessment (n = 25), and focus groups (four groups), to elicit self-described motivations for sex among low-income African American young women (19-22 years). Analyses revealed six clusters: Love/Feelings, For Fun, Curiosity, Pressured, For Money, and For Material Things.