A collaboration between UMass Amherst and Virginia Tech launched a longitudinal project examining brain and behavioral outcomes in adolescents from 14-17 years of age. A recent dataset was analyzed by UMass researchers Ann Folker and Kirby Deater-Deckard investigating how executive function (a set of cognitive skills that help people manage their thoughts, emotions, and actions) might be associated with certain predictors of substance use in adolescents. The team tested their hypothesis that higher levels of executive function would positively influence outcomes at within-person and between-person levels.
Data collection involved adolescents aged 14-17 and their parents completing annual questionnaires for four years. Also, the youth performed cognitive and behavioral tasks to measure executive function. Participants reported on their levels of sensation seeking, negative affect, and substance use.
Sensation seeking and negative affect can be mostly stable traits for an individual throughout the lifespan, but certain contexts can raise or lower this level, including influences present in group settings. The research team examined how likely a person is to pursue things that produce positive feelings, or respond to negative feelings with certain behaviors, even when behaviors are risky or harmful to their well-being.
Between-person results showed that people who were higher in sensation seeking were using more substances, and that effect was present regardless of their level of executive functioning. In contrast, within-person results found higher levels of negative affect predicted higher substance use. This was bidirectional, with substance use giving way to greater negative affect. Notably, these effects were only present for adolescents with lower executive functioning.
“[This condition] followed our hypothesis where if someone is having higher feelings of negative affect and doesn't have the cognitive skills to inhibit that response, that impulse to use substances to cope with the negative affect, they're more likely to use substances. Whereas with the adolescents with higher executive functioning, we are not seeing that negative affect to substance use association. Maybe they were able to inhibit themselves from using substances in some way, redirect and cope in different ways,” says Folker.
Teenagers are naturally going to try to gain more independence and start taking risks. The results of this study have implications that would benefit the development of more targeted interventions. Specific substance use prevention programs for individuals with high levels of sensation seeking or lower levels of executive function could be designed.
For example, unsafe sensation seeking behaviors could be redirected into more positive risk-taking behaviors such as art, sports, learning a new skill, or social justice movements. Also, motivational interviewing is a technique that has been used successfully with individuals with higher sensation seeking, which this project’s data supports. Those adolescents with higher negative affect could participate in workshops with distinctive tasks made to strengthen executive function skills and help with decision-making.
“Based on the current literature, it doesn't seem that executive functioning is the predictor of substance use, but more so that it's working with these other risk factors to either enhance risk or buffer against later substance use,” Folker conveys.
“We saw that on average there is no change in negative affect or sensation seeking from 14 to 17 years of age. But for substance use, that was increasing over time. What we also get when we run these models is what we call variance or individual differences. So even though on average the substance use was increasing there are significant individual differences, telling us that not everyone is increasing at the same rate.”
This research is crucial for learning more about the cognitive and emotional facilities that influence substance use and potential addiction. It has filled gaps in knowledge concerning how sensation seeking, negative affect, and executive function are interconnected when substance use is beginning to take place in adolescence. Optimizing new substance use prevention programs for youth with specific traits will feasibly improve outcomes, health, and well-being.