Studies explain adolescents' vulnerability to addictive drugs
"Peer groups are one of the most important predictors of young adult marijuana use, and yet we know very little about the neural correlates of social rejection in those who use marijuana," explained Dr. Jodi Gilman, first author and Assistant Professor at Harvard Medical School. This led Gilman and her colleagues to conduct a neuroimaging study using a Cyberball task, where participants played a computerized game of catch while undergoing a non-invasive brain scan. They recruited 42 young adults (ages 18-25), about half of whom regularly used marijuana. Unknown to the study participants, the other 'players' in the game were computers and were programmed to exclude them for a portion of the game. The non-using subjects demonstrated activation in the right anterior insula, a region associated with negative emotion and social rejection, when being excluded from the game, but the marijuana-using subjects did not. All subjects showed activation of ventral anterior c