Explore the vast range of titles available.

Dietary intake during adolescence sets the foundation for a healthy life, but adolescents are diverse in their dietary patterns and in factors that influence food choice. More evidence to understand the key diet-related issues and the meaning and context of food choices for adolescents is needed to increase the potential for impactful actions. The aim of this second Series paper is to elevate the importance given to adolescent dietary intake and food choice, bringing a developmental perspective to inform policy and programmatic actions to improve diets. We describe patterns of dietary intake, then draw on existing literature to map how food choice can be influenced by unique features of adolescent development. Pooled qualitative data is then combined with evidence from the literature to explore ways in which adolescent development can interact with sociocultural context and the food environment to influence food choice. Irrespective of context, adolescents have a lot to say about why they eat what they eat, and insights into factors that might motivate them to change. Adolescents must be active partners in shaping local and global actions that support healthy eating patterns. Efforts to improve food environments and ultimately adolescent food choice should harness widely shared adolescent values beyond nutrition or health.

This review summarizes the case for investing in adolescence as a period of rapid growth, learning, adaptation, and formational neurobiological development. Adolescence is a dynamic maturational period during which young lives can pivot rapidly—in both negative and positive directions. Scientific progress in understanding adolescent development provides actionable insights into windows of opportunity during which policies can have a positive impact on developmental trajectories relating to health, education, and social and economic success. Given current global changes and challenges that affect adolescents, there is a compelling need to leverage these advances in developmental science to inform strategic investments in adolescent health. Insights into windows of opportunity that will have strong positive impacts on the trajectories of health, education, social and economic success of adolescents are reviewed. Economic essence of adolescence Adolescence is a distinctive developmental period involving rapid growth, learning and neurobiological changes, with the potential for both positive and negative outcomes. This Perspective summarizes our current understanding of developmental processes that occur during adolescence, as well as the learning needed to develop the skills and self-regulatory capacity necessary for becoming independent and integrating into adult society. A more nuanced understanding of the distinctive features of adolescence, especially the enhanced social learning and exploration, may inform policy and interventions seeking to maximize windows of opportunity for shaping the future trajectories of the health, wellbeing and economic success of adolescents.

Existing participatory research approaches have failed to identify innovative methods that overcome the persistent barriers to adolescent sexual and reproductive health service demand and access. Increasingly, programmers have turned to human-centered design (HCD), a problem-solving process that centers the needs, perspectives, and experiences of people, when developing solutions to complex SRH challenges. This article describes the application of a youth-engaged version of HCD as part of Adolescents 360, a transdisciplinary initiative to increase 15- to 19-year-old girls’ use of modern contraception in Nigeria, Ethiopia, and Tanzania. Youth-adult design teams (including 111 “youth designers” trained in HCD methods) undertook formative research to inform the design and implementation of interventions. We reflect on the practical implications of using instrumental strategies of HCD with a youth-led participatory approach. Our experience indicates that (1) engaging youth as project partners in transdisciplinary teams requires planned and dedicated financial and human resources; (2) involving youth as action researchers can help identify opportunities to improve program empathy and responsiveness; (3) it is difficult to recruit “extreme users” as project partners because of the high competencies needed in HCD; (4) centering empathy and employing design standards during prototyping can drive decision-making and resolve questions raised by conflicting evidence claims in existing bodies of literature; and (5) testing tangible services and products in real-world settings continues long after the intervention design phase. Youth-adult partnership should continue throughout this iterative and adaptive phase to ensure that the adolescent experience of the intervention remains at the core of intervention delivery.

While school-based sex education is one of the key program and policy solutions to improve adolescent sexual health outcomes, new efforts are needed to strengthen its overall impact. 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. Thus, one approach to advancing current understanding of these complex issues is to leverage emerging knowledge in developmental affective neuroscience over the past 15 years, which suggests some potentially promising innovations that may inform new educational directions to improve adolescent sexual health. Exploring the conceptual and empirical advances in understanding adolescent brain development through the lens of the conceptualization, implementation, and evaluation of sex education, this article provides new perspectives that encourage the testing of innovative approaches to sex education policy and practice.

Pubertal maturation creates dynamic changes in parent-child relationships. For many parents, transitioning from parenting a child to parenting an adolescent can create stress, uncertainty, and vulnerability. In this article, we use a developmental science lens to examine the unique opportunities created by this period of dynamic growth, development, and change. We provide a brief overview of emerging research in social and affective neuroscience that examines how pubertal maturation initiates a cascade of adaptive and transformative neurodevelopmental transitions. We consider both challenges and opportunities in the parent-child relationship created by these transitions, highlight how effective parenting during this key developmental window can help establish positive trajectories throughout adolescence, and offer recommendations for both further understanding this transition and improving the precision and scope of resources intended to enhance parents' skills in the context of this transition.

Adolescents undergo critical developmental transformations that increase the salience of peer influence. Peer interactions (platonic and romantic) have been found to have both a positive and negative influence on adolescent attitudes and behaviors related to romantic relationships and sexual behavior. This study used qualitative methodology to explore how peers influence romantic and sexual behavior. Forty adolescents participated in individual semi-structured interviews. All interviews were audio recorded and transcribed, and analyzed using a modified grounded theory approach. The concept of peer influence on romantic relationships and sexual behavior emerged as a key theme. Youth described that platonic peers (friends) influenced their relationships and sexual behavior including pressuring friends into relationships, establishing relationships as currency for popularity and social status, and creating relationship norm and expectations. Romantic peers also motivated relationship and sexual behavior as youth described engaging in behavior to avoid hurting and successfully pleasing their partners. Future research should explore multiple types of peer influence in order to better inform interventions to improve the quality of adolescents’ romantic and sexual relationships.

Adolescence is a period of remarkable psychosocial and neural development. Many life-long health habits are established during adolescence, making it a window of opportunity for health promotion. One way to promote adolescent health is through mass and social media campaigns. Although some health media campaigns that target adolescents are effective in changing health-relevant cognitions and behaviors, there is considerable room for improving these outcomes. Recent advancements combining neuroimaging tools and health persuasion have suggested key neural mechanisms underlying behavior change and retransmission of health-relevant ideas and norms in adults. This line of work highlights the integral role of the brain's value system in health persuasion and its importance for improving campaign design and effectiveness. Less is known about how these insights could be leveraged to inform adolescent health persuasion. In this article, we review what is known and unknown about the development of the brain's value system and its connections with cognitive control and social cognition systems across adolescence. Combining these insights, we propose that neuroimaging tools offer unique possibilities that could improve adolescent media health campaigns and promote adolescent well-being.

African American young women exhibit higher risk for sexually transmitted infections, including HIV/AIDS, compared with European American women, and this is particularly true for African American women living in low-income contexts. We used rigorous qualitative methods, that is, domain analysis, including free listing (n = 20), similarity assessment (n = 25), and focus groups (four groups), to elicit self-described motivations for sex among low-income African American young women (19-22 years). Analyses revealed six clusters: Love/Feelings, For Fun, Curiosity, Pressured, For Money, and For Material Things. Focus groups explored how African American women interpreted the clusters in light of condom use expectations. Participants expressed the importance of using condoms in risky situations, yet endorsed condom use during casual sexual encounters less than half the time. This study highlights the need for more effective intervention strategies to increase condom use expectations among low-income African American women, particularly in casual relationships where perceived risk is already high.

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.