Social influence in adolescence as a double-edged sword

Self-Diagnosis of Mental Disorders: A Qualitative Study of Attitudes on Reddit

There is concern that a growing number of individuals, especially adolescents, are diagnosing themselves with mental disorders. However, there has been limited empirical research into this phenomenon: why it might happen, what the costs and benefits might be, and what the implications are for anyone who is experiencing distress. To address this, this study used reflexive thematic analysis to explore attitudes toward self-diagnosis of mental disorders as expressed on the discussion website Reddit. From 1195 user comments, five themes were generated: (1) There is tension over who is the expert in diagnosis; (2) Self-diagnosis is a route to self-understanding in an inaccessible system; (3) Teenagers on social media are the problem; (4) Self-diagnosis can become self-fulfilling, and (5) Now no one is believed. Together, these themes highlight that there is considerable anger, derision, and criticism targeted toward people who self-diagnose with mental disorders, and that this is particularly targeted toward adolescents who self-diagnose on or as a result of social media. The findings have important implications for understanding how to support and validate people, particularly adolescents, who (sometimes accurately) use diagnostic language to express how they are feeling.

Why people follow rules

Why people follow rules, especially laws and social norms, is debated across the human sciences. The importance of intrinsic respect for rules is particularly controversial. To reveal the behavioural principles of rule-following, we develop CRISP, an interdisciplinary framework that explains rule-conformity C as a function of intrinsic respect for rules R, extrinsic incentives I, social expectations S and social preferences P. We deploy CRISP in four series of online experiments with 14,034 English-speaking participants. In our baseline experiments, 55-70% of participants conform to an arbitrary costly rule, even though they act anonymously and alone, and violations hurt no one. We show that people expect rule-conformity and view it as socially appropriate. Rule-breaking is contagious but remains moderate. Pro-social motives and extrinsic incentives increase rule-conformity, but unconditional rule-following and social expectations explain most of it. Our results demonstrate that respect for rules and social expectations are basic elements of rule-conformity that can explain why people follow laws and social norms even without extrinsic incentives and social preferences.

Moral Learning and Decision-Making Across the Lifespan

Moral learning and decision-making are crucial throughout our lives, from infancy to old age. Emerging evidence suggests that there are important differences in learning and decision-making in moral situations across the lifespan, and these are underpinned by co-occurring changes in the use of model-based values and theory of mind. Here, we review the decision neuroscience literature on moral choices and moral learning considering four key concepts. We show how in the earliest years, a sense of self/other distinction is foundational. Sensitivity to intention versus outcome is crucial for several moral concepts and is most similar in our earliest and oldest years. Across all ages, basic shifts in the influence of theory of mind and model-free and model-based learning support moral decision-making. Moving forward, a computational approach to key concepts of morality can help provide a mechanistic account and generate new hypotheses to test across the whole lifespan.

Individual and social-environmental factors among young drivers informing decisions to ride with an impaired driver and drive impaired: A sequential mixed methods assessment

OBJECTIVE

To contextually examine facilitators of young driver decisions to ride with an impaired driver (RWI) or drive while impaired (DWI).

METHODS

Data were from the NIH's NEXT Generation Health Study (NEXT), a 7-year longitudinal nationally representative study with a U.S. probability cohort of 10th graders starting in 2009-2010. Using a multistage sequential explanatory mixed methods approach, we conducted latent class analysis (n = 2,783) to identify RWI/DWI trajectories from adolescence to young adulthood (Stage-1). We then conducted in-depth qualitative interviews with purposively sampled young adults (N = 105, 26.30 ± 0.43 y/o) from four identified RWI/DWI trajectory classes (Stage-2): 31 Abstainers (consistently low probability), 33 Escalators (low-to-high probability), 14 Decliners (high-to-low probability), and 27 Persisters (consistently high probability). In Stage-2, the qualitative interview guide was informed by Stage-1 findings and Ecodevelopmental Theory. Using directed content analysis, we applied inductive and deductive theory-grounded codes to interview transcripts. With data immersion, reflexivity, and team dialogue, we derived themes from the code, "Facilitators of RWI and/or DWI". Demographics and validated measures of resiliency, health-related quality of life, Timeline Follow Back for alcohol and marijuana, and recent engagement in RWI/DWI were collected during the interviews.

RESULTS

Based on the interview transcripts, five themes emerged around RWI/DWI facilitators during and after high school: (1) beliefs about alcohol/drug effects; (2) trust of others; (3) trust of self; (4) parental disapproval; and (5) transportation factors. Participants who RWI confidently placed their trust in their assessment of the driver's impairment and their own in the context of close relationships. Those who DWI described desire to maintain simple/easy vehicle access while avoiding tickets/towing. The joint display of the quantitative and qualitative data is presented.

CONCLUSIONS

Notable misperceptions exist about how alcohol/drugs impact driving in the RWI/DWI context, particularly regarding the subtle signs of impairment. Youth commonly relied on their own assessment of impairment before driving themselves or riding with a potentially impaired driver, sometimes to avoid parental disapproval. Some engage in RWI/DWI to avoid discord with parents. DWI may relate to needing easy/immediate vehicle access. Pragmatic remedy considerations could include educating youth and young drivers about impairment, enhancing safe public transportation, and expanding ride-share programing.

Unpredictable benefits of social information can lead to the evolution of individual differences in social learning

Human ecological success is often attributed to our capacity for social learning, which facilitates the spread of adaptive behaviours through populations. All humans rely on social learning to acquire culture, but there is substantial variation across societies, between individuals and over developmental time. However, it is unclear why these differences exist. Here, we present an evolutionary model showing that individual variation in social learning can emerge if the benefits of social learning are unpredictable. Unpredictability selects for flexible developmental programmes that allow individuals to update their reliance on social learning based on previous experiences. This developmental flexibility, in turn, causes some individuals in a population to end up consistently relying more heavily on social learning than others. We demonstrate this core evolutionary mechanism across three scenarios of increasing complexity, investigating the impact of different sources of uncertainty about the usefulness of social learning. Our results show how evolution can shape how individuals learn to learn from others, with potentially profound effects on cultural diversity.

Individual-centralized seeding strategy for influence maximization in information-limited networks

Peer effects can directly or indirectly rely on interaction networks to drive people to follow ideas or behaviours triggered by a few individuals, and such effects can be largely improved by targeting the so-called influential individuals. In this article, we study the current most promising seeding strategy used in field experiments, the one-hop strategy, where the underlying interaction networks are generally too impractical or prohibitively expensive to be obtained, and propose an individual-centralized seeding approach to target influential seeds in information-limited networks. The presented strategy works by reasonable follow-up questions to respondents, such as Who do you think has more connections/friends?, and constructs the seeding set by those nodes with the most nominations. In this manner, the proposed method could acquire more information about the studied interaction network from the inference of respondents without surveying additional individuals. We evaluate our strategy on networks from various experimental datasets. Results show that the obtained seeds are much more influential compared to the one-hop strategy and other methods. We also show how the proposed approach could be implemented in field studies and potentially provide better interventions in real scenarios.

Social influence in adolescence: Behavioral and neural responses to peer and expert opinion

Social influence plays a crucial role during the teen years, with adolescents supposedly exhibiting heightened sensitivity to their peers. In this study, we examine how social influence from different sources, particularly those with varying normative and informational significance, affect adolescents' opinion change. Furthermore, we investigated the underlying neural dynamics to determine whether these two behaviorally similar influences share their neural mechanisms. Twenty-three participants (14-17 years old) gave their opinions about facial stimuli and received feedback from either a peer group or an expert group, while brain responses were recorded using concurrent magnetoencephalography. In a second rating session, we found that participants' opinions changed in line with conflicting feedback, but only when the feedback was lower than their initial evaluation. On the neural level, conflict with peers evoked stronger neural responses than conflict with experts in the 230-400 ms time window and the right frontotemporal magnetometer channels. Nevertheless, there was no greater conformity toward peers. Moreover, conflict compared to no conflict decreased neural oscillations in the beta frequency range (20-26 Hz) at the right frontal and parietal channels. Taken together, our findings do not support the general assumption that adolescent behavior is excessively vulnerable to peer norms, although we found heightened neural sensitivity to peer feedback.

Identifying who adolescents prefer as source of information within their social network

Adolescents are highly influenced by their peers within their social networks. This social influence can stem from both unsolicited peer pressure and the active search for guidance. While extensive research examined the mechanisms of peer pressure, little is known about who adolescents prefer as a source of information. To address this gap, we conducted two independent studies using a novel social search paradigm that allows participants to choose which social sources they wish to observe. In both studies, adolescents demonstrated a preference for their friends over non-friends, as well as for peers who were perceived as trustworthy. Across both studies, we found mixed evidence for the role of perceived popularity as a selection criterion. Notable, study 2 revealed the significance of "cool", "admirable" and "acting mean" as additional characteristics of preferred peers, traits that are often associated with elevated peer status. It also revealed an interest for peers perceived as being smart. These findings highlight the active role adolescents have in choosing social sources and emphasize the importance of multiple peer characteristics. Future research should investigate whether adolescents' interest in these types of peers is contingent upon specific social contexts, age groups, and peer cultures.

Developmental patterns and individual differences in responding to social feedback: A longitudinal fMRI study from childhood to adolescence

Learning to control behavior when receiving feedback underlies social adaptation in childhood and adolescence, and is potentially strengthened by environmental support factors, such as parents. This study examined the neural development of responding to social feedback from childhood to adolescence, and effects of parental sensitivity on this development. We studied these questions in a 3-wave longitudinal fMRI sample (ages 7-13 years, n = 512). We measured responses to feedback using the fMRI Social Network Aggression Task through noise blasts following peer feedback and associated neural activity, and parental sensitivity using observations of parent-child interactions during Etch-a-Sketch. Results revealed largest reductions in noise blasts following positive feedback between middle and late childhood and following negative feedback between late childhood and early adolescence. Additionally, brain-behavior associations between dorsolateral prefrontal cortex activation and noise blast durations became more differentiated across development. Parental sensitivity was only associated with noise blast duration following positive feedback in childhood, but not in adolescence. There was no relation between parental sensitivity and neural activity. Our findings contribute to our understanding of neural development and individual differences in responding to social feedback, and the role of parenting in supporting children's adaption to social feedback.