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Open Access Publications from the University of California

Scholarly Works (109 results)

  • Thesis
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UC Berkeley Electronic Theses and Dissertations (2013)

Although school-based sex education remains an important tool to improve adolescent health outcomes, new efforts are needed to improve its impacts. A primary reason that school-based sex education falls short may stem from the fact that the current theoretical foundation of most curricula asserts that sexual decision-making is primarily a rational, deliberative process. Far from being only a rational process, a number of affective (emotional and motivational) factors also influence adolescent sexual decision-making. The cognitive, hormonal, emotional, and physical changes that accompany the onset of puberty and occur throughout the teenage years play a significant role in aspects of adolescent sexual risk taking. Emerging brain development research and neuroscience suggest that changes in rational, affective, and social processing play a critical role in influencing adolescent behavior. While the current understanding of the neuroscience may be too formative at this time to directly translate into policy and practice, this dissertation begins to explore how conceptual and empirical advances in understanding adolescent brain development may provide new perspectives that encourage the testing of innovative approaches to sex education, which in turn may lead to more effective behavioral interventions.

The aim of this dissertation is to enhance policy and practices aimed to improve adolescent sexual health by expanding the theoretical scope of adolescent school-based sex education programs. In this body of work, I integrate concepts from the fields of neuroscience, behavioral science, public health and neuroeconomics in order to bring a better understanding to the role of emotions in adolescent sexual decision-making. To this end, in the first component of this dissertation, I explored how existing neuroscience research can be used to better inform sex education policies and practice. In the second portion of the dissertation, I tested how emotions impact adolescent risk taking in a computerized task and discuss the implications of the results in understanding the gap between intentions and behaviors in adolescent sexual decision-making. In the experiment, adolescents planned how they would wager their choices, and how they would advise a friend to wager, in three rounds based on the outcome from prior rounds. Not anticipating the negative emotional outcome of a loss in prior rounds, adolescents took greater risks than they had planned. In contrast, their advice to a peer did not reflect the same significant increase in risk-taking. In the final component of the dissertation, I conducted a qualitative assessment of the role of peer influence on adolescents' early experiences in romantic and sexual relationships and discuss how this interacts with the developmental factors contributing to adolescents' unique vulnerability to peer influence. Recognizing that this dissertation is only the first step in a long line of inquiry to better understand the role of affect in adolescent sexual decision-making, I propose directions for future research and ways to improve sex education practices and policies.

    Cover page: The Role of Emotion in Adolescent Sexual Decision Making
    • Article
    • Peer Reviewed
    UC Berkeley Previously Published Works (2016)
      Cover page: The developmental neuroscience of adolescence: Revisiting, refining, and extending seminal models
      • Article
      • Peer Reviewed
      UC Berkeley Previously Published Works (2015)
      This commentary discusses the articles in this special section with an emphasis on the specific utility of multivariate, multi-level models in developmental psychopathology for ultimately contributing to both etiologic insights and translational advances. These issues are considered not only in terms of the specific papers, but also within a larger set of questions regarding the opportunities (and challenges) currently facing the field. We describe why we believe this an exciting time for integrative team-science approaches to tackle these challenges--a time that holds great promise for rapid advances in integrative developmental science that includes a biological level of mechanistic understanding. In order to facilitate this, we outline a range of approaches within both translational neuroscience and translational developmental science that can be used as frameworks for understanding how such research can provide etiologic insights regarding real-world targets at the level of social, behavioral, and affective processes that can be modified during key developmental windows of opportunity. We conclude that a "construct validity" framework, where biological data form a critical, but not privileged, component of key etiological mechanisms, combined with a developmental perspective on key period of sensitivity to intervention effects, is most likely to provide significant translational outcomes.
        Cover page: Multi-Level Models of Internalizing Disorders and Translational Developmental Science: Seeking Etiological Insights that can Inform Early Intervention Strategies
        • Article
        • Peer Reviewed
        UC Berkeley Previously Published Works (2014)

        Background and objectives

        Inadequate sleep among adolescents has negative consequences for self-regulation, emotional well-being, and risk behaviors. Using multiple assessment methods, we evaluated the adequacy of sleep among healthy adolescents from a lower socioeconomic community and expected differences by race.

        Methods

        A total of 250 healthy high school students enrolled in public school (mean age: 15.7 years; 57% black, 54% female) from families of low to middle class according to the Hollingshead scale participated in weeklong assessments of sleep duration and fragmentation, assessed by using actigraphy; sleep duration and perceived quality, assessed by using daily diaries; and daytime sleepiness and sleep delay, assessed by using a questionnaire.

        Results

        Students slept during the school week a mean ± SD of 6.0 ± 0.9 hours per night according to actigraphy and 6.8 ± 1.1 hours according to daily diary, and during the weekend, a mean of 7.4 ± 1.2 and 8.7 ± 1.4 hours, respectively. Black participants and male participants slept less and had more fragmented sleep; female participants reported poorer quality of sleep in their daily diaries and more daytime sleepiness. The results remained significant after adjustments for age, physical activity, smoking status, and percentile BMI.

        Conclusions

        Most students slept less than the 8 to 9 hours suggested by the guidelines of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Black male participants had the least amount of sleep, which may play a role in the substantial risks experienced by this demographic group. Our findings are consistent with recommendations that pediatricians should routinely screen their adolescent patients about their sleep, especially those from at-risk subgroups.
          Cover page: Sleep in Healthy Black and White Adolescents
          • Article
          • Peer Reviewed
          UC Berkeley Previously Published Works (2014)
            Cover page: Response to Helfinstein & Casey
            • Article
            • Peer Reviewed
            UC Berkeley Previously Published Works (2017)
            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. These examples illustrate how an integrative, developmental science approach provides new insights into treatment and intervention. They also highlight a cornerstone principle: how a deeper understanding of potentially modifiable factors-at key developmental inflection points along the trajectory toward clinical disorders-is beginning to inform, and may eventually transform, a broad range of innovative early intervention strategies to improve adolescent health.
              Cover page: Leveraging Neuroscience to Inform Adolescent Health: The Need for an Innovative Transdisciplinary Developmental Science of Adolescence
              • Article
              • Peer Reviewed
              UC Berkeley Previously Published Works (2019)
                Creative Commons 'BY-NC-SA' version 4.0 license
                • Article
                • Peer Reviewed
                UC Berkeley Previously Published Works (2022)
                In humans, puberty initiates a period of rapid growth, change, and formative neurobehavioral development. Brain and behavior changes during this maturational window contribute to opportunities for social learning. Here we provide new insights into adolescence as a unique period of social learning and development by describing field studies of our closest living relatives, chimpanzees. Like humans, chimpanzees have a multiyear juvenile life stage between weaning and puberty onset followed by a multiyear adolescent life stage after pubertal onset but prior to socially-recognized adulthood. As they develop increasing autonomy from caregivers, adolescent chimpanzees explore and develop many different types of social relationships with a wide range of individuals in a highly flexible social environment. We describe how adolescent social motivations and experiences differ from those of juveniles and adults and expose adolescents to high levels of uncertainty, risk, and vulnerability, as well as opportunities for adaptive social learning. We discuss how these adolescent learning experiences may be shaped by early life and in turn shape varied adult social outcomes. We outline how future chimpanzee field research can contribute in new ways to a more integrative interdisciplinary understanding of adolescence as a developmental window of adaptive social learning and resilience.
                  Cover page: Puberty initiates a unique stage of social learning and development prior to adulthood: Insights from studies of adolescence in wild chimpanzees
                  • Article
                  • Peer Reviewed
                  UC Berkeley Previously Published Works (2018)
                  We provide a developmental perspective on two related issues: (a) why traditional preventative school-based interventions work reasonably well for children but less so for middle adolescents and (b) why some alternative approaches to interventions show promise for middle adolescents. We propose the hypothesis that traditional interventions fail when they do not align with adolescents' enhanced desire to feel respected and be accorded status; however, interventions that do align with this desire can motivate internalized, positive behavior change. We review examples of promising interventions that (a) directly harness the desire for status and respect, (b) provide adolescents with more respectful treatment from adults, or (c) lessen the negative influence of threats to status and respect. These examples are in the domains of unhealthy snacking, middle school discipline, and high school aggression. Discussion centers on implications for basic developmental science and for improvements to youth policy and practice.
                    Cover page: Why Interventions to Influence Adolescent Behavior Often Fail but Could Succeed
                    • Article
                    • Peer Reviewed
                    UC Berkeley Previously Published Works (2020)
                    As technologies continue to evolve at exponential rates, online platforms are becoming an increasingly salient social context for adolescents. Adolescents are often early adopters, savvy users, and innovators of technology use. This not only creates new vulnerabilities but also presents new opportunities for positive impact-particularly, the use of technology to promote healthy learning and adaptation during developmental windows of opportunity. For example, early adolescence appears to represent a developmental inflection point in health trajectories and in technology use in ways that may be strategically targeted for prevention and intervention. The field of adolescent health can capitalize on technology use during developmental windows of opportunity to promote well-being and behavior change in the following ways: (1) through a deeper understanding of the specific ways that developmental changes create new opportunities for motivation and engagement with technologies; (2) by leveraging these insights for more effective use of technology in intervention and prevention efforts; and (3) by combining developmental science-informed targeting with broader-reach technologic approaches to health behavior change at the population level (e.g., leveraging and changing social norms). Collaboration across disciplines-including developmental science, medicine, psychology, public health, and computer science-can create compelling innovations to use digital technology to promote health in adolescents.
                      Cover page: Leveraging Technology to Improve Health in Adolescence: A Developmental Science Perspective
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