A social neuroscience approach to understanding adolescent delinquency and bullying

The issue of adolescent delinquency – both how it should be understood and how it should be addressed – has been at the forefront of psychology for some time. Recently, neuroscientific examinations have addressed issues related to the development of delinquency primarily from two distinct research lines: i) as an outcome related to psychopathological functioning; or ii) as an unfortunate side effect of normative adolescent development. However, much of this work may not be adequately capturing the scope of the problem, either as a function of limiting the theoretical frameworks used to address delinquency or as a function of simply not including actively delinquent samples. To remedy these issues, my research program examined processes implicated in adolescent delinquency from a broader social motivation theory, with an explicit focus on including actively delinquent adolescents and comparing their performance (both behavioral and neural) to their normatively developing peers. In study 1, I examined how emotion regulation difficulties in adolescence were often contextual, as actively delinquent adolescents show differential behavioral and neural patterns corresponding to disruption. In study 2, I examined how adolescent’s antisocial behaviors ought to be more thoroughly examined, as they may guide neural processing of exploitive social scenarios. Finally, in study 3, I examined how antisocial motivations guided both attentional processing and social decision-making. By taking a social neuroscience approach, I have highlighted how previously held findings may be limited in scope and highlighted a need for researchers to examine how antisocial behaviors and motivations develop and sustain delinquency. Given the cost of the problem, exploring the motivational underpinnings of delinquency through neuroscientific techniques may prove fertile ground for making significant treatment inroads