Adolescent School-Based Sex Education: Using Developmental Neuroscience to Guide New Directions for Policy and Practice

Abstract 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

Social status strategy in early adolescent girls: Testosterone and value-based decision making

There has been strong interest, spanning several disciplines, in understanding adolescence as a developmental period of increased risk-taking behavior. Our goals focus on one line of investigation within this larger developmental risk framework. Specifically, we examined levels of pubertal hormones in girls in relation to their willingness to take greater financial risks to gain social status. To this end, we tested the hypothesis that higher levels of testosterone during the ages of pubertal maturation are associated with a greater willingness to sacrifice money for social admiration. Sixty-three girls ages 10-14 (Mage=12.74) participated in laboratory measures and completed at-home saliva sample collection. The Pubertal Development Scale (PDS) and basal hormone levels (testosterone, estradiol, DHEA) measured pubertal maturation. We made use of a developmentally appropriate version of an Auction Task in which adolescents could take financial risks in order to gain socially motivated outcomes (social status). PDS and testosterone were each associated with overall levels of financial risk taking over the course of the Auction Task. In hierarchical models, PDS and testosterone were predictors of the slope of overbidding over the course of the task. Results provide evidence for the role of testosterone and pubertal maturation in girls' motivations to engage in costly decision making in order to gain social status. Findings contribute to our understanding of the developmental underpinnings of some interesting aspects of adolescent risk behavior