Social risk in adolescence

Adolescence is defined as the period of life between puberty and adult independence (Patton et al. 2016) and represents a sensitive period of development that is characterised by important changes to both the individual's social environment and their biology. My PhD will focus on these developmental changes and will broadly be concentrated on adolescent social cognition and its relationship with risk taking, social group dynamics, and emotion.

More specifically, I intend to follow up work that I began during my rotation project, looking at social risk perception. I will test the hypothesis that adolescents will perceive socially risky behaviours (such as admitting they like a band their friend do not) as more 'risky' compared to adults, whilst health related risks will be perceived equally across ages. I have also begun to design a study that will investigate whether adolescents are more inclined than are adults to drop out of a diligence (maths) task in order to view social (vs. non-social) stimuli. Subsequently, I will relate the findings from these studies to broader questions concerning adolescent development, such as rejection sensitivity, bulling and peer influence.

Following on from these initial experiments, I plan to conduct a set of studies that concern adolescents' ability to mentalise about groups vs individuals, as well as exploring the idea that adolescents have a heightened propensity for social categorization and group level emotional contagion. I hope to investigate these questions using both behavioral and functional neuroimaging methodologies