Effects of pubertal development on self-regulation of behaviour and its relation with present and past life conditions
Creators: name: Pompeia, Sabine
name: Miranda, Monica
name: Cogo-Moreira, Hugo
Publisher: name: Open Science Framework
Year: 2022
Subjects: subject: Behavioral Neurobiology
subject: Other Psychology
subject: Other Psychiatry and Psychology
subject: Developmental Neuroscience
subject: Cognitive Neuroscience
subject: Psychiatry and Psychology
subject: Psychiatric and Mental Health
subject: Medicine and Health Sciences
subject: Developmental Psychology
subject: Life Sciences
subject: Other Mental and Social Health
subject: Biological Psychology
subject: Child Psychology
subject: Cognitive Psychology
subject: Neuroscience and Neurobiology
subject: Cognition and Perception
subject: Mental and Social Health
subject: Behavior and Behavior Mechanisms
subject: Social and Behavioral Sciences
subject: Psychology
subject: FOS: Psychology
subject: Psychological Phenomena and Processes
subject: Other Social and Behavioral Sciences
subject: Other Neuroscience and Neurobiology
subject: pubertal status, adolescence, self-regulation, behavior, development, executive functions, socioeconomic factors, stress.

description: Unlike most of the literature, which center on studying the effects of chronological age on development, this project aims, through a series of subprojects, to examine the role of pubertal status and its reciprocal effects with many past and present biopsychosocial factors on behavior, with a focus of adolescents’ self-regulations abilities, known to impacts mental and physical health and quality of life in adulthood. The study will be cross-sectional and will include 300 9-15 year-old male and female Brazilian participants from a wide range of backgrounds. Measures of pubertal status include self-assessed Tanner ratings of pubic hair and genital/breast development, self- and parental-ratings with the Pubertal Development Scale (PDS), salivary biomarkers (kisspeptin, dehydroepiandrosterone and testosterone) and fundamental voice frequency. The psychosocial factors investigated include present ratings of morningness-eveningness preferences, daytime sleepiness, behavior (parent rated child behavioral check list, CBCL), self-esteem, mastery, subjective social status, satisfaction with body shape, use of alcohol, and how they are related to participants’ background [socioeconomic status, socioeconomic risk factors, family environment), among others]. Measures related to health and allostatic load during pubertal development include anthropometric variables, self-rated physical activity, blood pressure, metabolic, endocrine and immunological biomarkers collected with minimally invasive procedures [hair, urine, saliva and capillary blood to quantify cortisol, DHEA, lipid profile, glycated hemoglobin, interleukin 6 (Il-6), tumor necrosis factor alpha (TNF-alpha), brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BNDF), and markers of global methylation (long interspersed element 1, LINE-1)]. The cognitive measures of self-regulation under study are those based on logical reasoning (cool functions based on the unity and diversity model of executive functions) and emotions (hot functions/impulsivity, assessed with the short UPPS-P scale and a delay discounting paradigm), working memory capacity (running memory span), markers of intelligence (Vocabulary and Block Design) and complexity of connected spoken language/oral productions (story retelling task). In order democratize cognitive/behavioral testing and increase the reproducibility of our findings and we will mainly use measures that are in the public domain and cost-effective biomarkers that are only slightly invasive or not so. Factors susceptible to interventions to improve self-regulation in adolescence will be determined and the results will be disseminated to the scientific community and the general public.