The connecting brain in context: How adolescent plasticity supports learning and development.

Puberty initiates significant neurobiological changes that amplify adolescents' responsiveness to their environment, facilitating neural adaptation through processes like synaptic pruning, myelination, and neuronal reorganization. This heightened neuroplasticity, combined with their burgeoning social curiosity and appetite for risk, propels adolescents to explore diverse new environments and forge social bonds. Such exploration can accelerate experiential learning and the formation of social networks as adolescents prepare for adult independence.

Anxiety may alter the role of fronto-striatal circuitry in adolescent risky decision-making.

Background: Anxiety disorders often emerge in adolescence and are associated with risk aversion. Risk aversion conflicts with the typical adolescent approach-motivated phenotype and can interfere with learning and contribute to symptom maintenance.

Methods: We investigated the neural and behavioral correlates of risk avoidance in a diverse sample of adolescents (N = 137; M = 11.

Sleep variability over a 2-week period is associated with restfulness and intrinsic limbic network connectivity in adolescents.

Study Objectives: Sleep duration and intraindividual variability in sleep duration undergo substantial changes in adolescence and impact brain and behavioral functioning. Although experimental work has linked acute sleep deprivation to heightened limbic responding and reduced regulatory control, there is limited understanding of how variability in sleep patterns might interact with sleep duration to influence adolescent functioning. This is important for optimal balancing of length and consistency of sleep.

A Neurodevelopmental Shift in Reward Circuitry from Mother's to Nonfamilial Voices in Adolescence.

The social worlds of young children primarily revolve around parents and caregivers, who play a key role in guiding children's social and cognitive development. However, a hallmark of adolescence is a shift in orientation toward nonfamilial social targets, an adaptive process that prepares adolescents for their independence. Little is known regarding neurobiological signatures underlying changes in adolescents' social orientation.

Characterizing trajectories of anxiety, depression, and criminal offending in male adolescents over the 5 years following their first arrest.

Youth in the juvenile justice system evince high rates of mental health symptoms, including anxiety and depression. How these symptom profiles change after first contact with the justice system and - importantly - how they are related to re-offending remains unclear. Here, we use latent growth curve modeling to characterize univariate and multivariate growth of anxiety, depression, and re-offending in 1216 male adolescents over 5 years following their first arrest.

Exploring Disproportionate Minority Contact in the Juvenile Justice System Over the Year Following First Arrest.

Minority youth are disproportionately represented in the juvenile justice system. Examining how racial disparities relate to biased entry into and continued involvement with the system, while accounting for past and current offending, can provide context about the mechanisms behind overrepresentation. 1,216 adolescents were examined after first arrest to explore associations between race and history of self-reported offending, likelihood of formal processing, and likelihood of rearrest.

Threat or thrill? the neural mechanisms underlying the development of anxiety and risk taking in adolescence.

Anxiety is common in adolescence and has been linked to a plethora of negative outcomes across development. While previous studies of anxiety have focused on threat sensitivity, less work has considered the concurrent development of threat- and reward-related neural circuitry and how these circuits interact and compete during puberty to influence typical adolescent behaviors such as increased risk taking and exploration. The current review integrates relevant findings from clinical and developmental neuroimaging studies to paint a multidimensional picture of adolescent-onset anxiety against the backdrop of typical adolescent development.

Neural activity moderates the association between sleep and risky driving behaviors in adolescence.

The biological, environmental, and psychosocial changes that occur in adolescence engender an increase in risk taking often linked to the high rates of motor vehicle crashes amongst young drivers. Most U.S.

Impaired voice processing in reward and salience circuits predicts social communication in children with autism.

Unlabelled: Engaging with vocal sounds is critical for children's social-emotional learning, and children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) often 'tune out' voices in their environment. Little is known regarding the neurobiological basis of voice processing and its link to social impairments in ASD. Here, we perform the first comprehensive brain network analysis of voice processing in children with ASD.

Neural circuits underlying mother's voice perception predict social communication abilities in children.

The human voice is a critical social cue, and listeners are extremely sensitive to the voices in their environment. One of the most salient voices in a child's life is mother's voice: Infants discriminate their mother's voice from the first days of life, and this stimulus is associated with guiding emotional and social function during development. Little is known regarding the functional circuits that are selectively engaged in children by biologically salient voices such as mother's voice or whether this brain activity is related to children's social communication abilities.