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Beginning college involves changes that can increase one's vulnerability to loneliness and associated negative outcomes. Parent and friend relationships are potential protective factors against loneliness given their positive association with adjustment. The present longitudinal study, with data collection at baseline, 1 month, and 2 months later, assessed the comparative effects of self-reported parent and friend relationship quality on loneliness in first-year college students (N = 101; 80 female, Mage = 18.36). At baseline, parent and friend relationship quality were negatively associated with loneliness. Longitudinal data revealed that friend relationship quality interacted with time, such that its effects on loneliness attenuated over the course of 2 months. By contrast, parent relationship quality continued to predict lower loneliness 2 months post-baseline. These results highlight the importance of close relationships and suggest that targeting relationship quality could be effective in helping youth transition to college.

Understanding adolescent decision-making is significant for informing basic models of neurodevelopment as well as for the domains of public health and criminal justice. System-based theories posit that adolescent decision-making is guided by activity amongst reward and control processes. While successful at explaining behavior, system-based theories have received inconsistent support at the neural level, perhaps because of methodological limitations. Here, we used two complementary approaches to overcome said limitations and rigorously evaluate system-based models. Using decision-level modeling of fMRI data from a risk-taking task in a sample of 2000+ decisions across 51 human adolescents (25 females, mean age = 15.00 years), we find support for system-based theories of decision-making. Neural activity in lateral prefrontal cortex and a multivariate pattern of cognitive control both predicted a reduced likelihood of risk-taking, whereas increased activity in the nucleus accumbens predicted a greater likelihood of risk-taking. Interactions between decision-level brain activity and age were not observed. These results garner support for system-based accounts of adolescent decision-making behavior.SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT:Adolescent decision-making behavior is of great import for basic science, and carries equally consequential implications for public health and criminal justice. While dominant psychological theories seeking to explain adolescent decision-making have found empirical support, their neuroscientific implementations have received inconsistent support. This may be partly due to statistical approaches employed by prior neuroimaging studies of system-based theories. We used brain modeling-an approach that predicts behavior from brain activity-of univariate and multivariate neural activity metrics to better understand how neural components of psychological systems guide decision behavior in adolescents. We found broad support for system-based theories such that neural systems involved in cognitive control predicted a reduced likelihood to make risky decisions, whereas value-based systems predicted greater risk-taking propensity.