Understanding this multifinality will require designs accounting for within-person and contextual differences among youth. Recent youth cannabis studies, including the 2017 National Academies of Science cannabis report, also reflect negative neurocognitive and health sequelae associated with cannabis use during this developmental window.The risk for negative health sequalae is higher when use is initiated in adolescence , and long-term brain changes with cannabis use are more pronounced with earlier age of initiation.Crucially, the opportunity of this period is also its challenge ; most EA have not yet fully matured in their capacity to anticipate or perceive long-term negative health outcomes. While cannabis use escalates for many throughout adolescence, for most EA, heavy cannabis use naturally resolves by age 25, cannabis grow facility often without treatment or formal intervention . In fact, given the right contextual influences, the same features of the EA brain that confer risk can also contribute to adaptive resilience within the developing EA brain .
Unfortunately, little is known about trajectories underlying EA resilience to hazardous cannabis use, as many neurodevelopmental studies focus on youth who exclusively transition into full, protracted cannabis use disorders. Despite similar rates of cannabis use prevalence across youth racial and ethnic groups,key differences in the risk for harm emerge when considering metrics of social inequality. Even when there are parallel levels of cannabis use, EA POC show disproportionately elevated levels of cannabis-related consequences as compared with their non-POC peers . In other words, the repercussions of cannabis use are much more deleterious for POC as compared with non-POC youth . This is overlaid by empirical studies reflecting differential increases in hazardous cannabis use by subjective and objective measures of social inequality, with more concerning cannabis trajectories for youth who have experienced greater social inequality. This is particularly disquieting because at least some neuroimaging research suggests that cannabis use during this developmental window may be especially neurotoxic . Nonetheless, effects are not uniform and other teams have observed otherwise . Importantly, emerging work suggests that the observed multifinality in cannabis use outcomes may be explained by the interaction of cannabis developmental risk profiles and experienced stress .
Understanding how cannabis use risk and resilience trajectories evolve in EA experiencing varying levels of social inequality represents the next essential step in informing more effective prevention and intervention programming for this important group of youth. This approach will be enhanced by examining not only topical metrics of social inequality, but also historically less well-evaluated role of subjective experiences of social inequality . Doing so will be critical for enriching our understanding of how youth experience their social advantages and is critical for informing who might be most likely to weather the storms of social inequality and mature into an adaptive adult . Emotion regulation is a complex, multi-component process that can nonetheless be broken down into constituent parts that may be studied separately. One direction for advancing our understanding of the relationship between emotion regulation and cannabis grow system use involves improved differentiation of these component processes. For example, many models of emotion regulation converge on the importance of attention , including as termed here, both “bottom-up ”or “reactive attention capture ”by emotional stimuli and “top-down control ”of attention to manage the emotional response.
Individuals may experience similar levels of elevated negative emotion due to greater reactive emotional responding to a stimulus or due to difficulty with later regulation of the emotional response, or both. While it is recognized that these systems are closely linked in actual moment to moment behavior , the components can be isolated experimentally and differentiated by their behavioral, functional, and neural correlates . Differences in bottom-up and top-down features of emotion regulation may be directly related to impaired decision- making in “high-stakes ”emotional contexts, such as decision-making around cannabis, which most frequently occurs in peer contexts; in this age group, decisions around whether/when/how much cannabis to use are often among the most stressful decision-making situations due to the elevated need to align with perceived and actual peer behavior within this developmental period , but their unique and combined contributions to functional outcomes requires further study.