Deflections from adolescent trajectories of antisocial behavior: contextual and neural moderators of antisocial behavior stability into emerging adulthood.

BACKGROUND: Early adulthood is a critical period when young men involved in antisocial behavior (AB) may desist. Factors including marriage and employment have been shown to predict desistance, but little work has examined whether biological factors (e.g. neural reactivity) predict deflections from lifelong AB trajectories.

METHODS: We examined the continuity of, or desistance from, AB in early adulthood using group-based trajectories of AB across adolescence in a sample of 242 men from low-income, urban families. We examined contextual factors (romantic relationship quality, employment, neighborhood danger) and neural factors (amygdala reactivity to fearful faces, ventral striatum reactivity to reward) as moderators of the continuity of AB from adolescence (age 10-17) into early adulthood (age 22-23), and whether these pathways differed by race.

RESULTS: High relationship satisfaction and employment at age 20 predicted decreased AB at age 22-23, but only among men with adolescent-onset/moderate AB trajectories. Ventral striatum reactivity predicted continued AB, but only among African-American men with early-starting AB. Amygdala reactivity to fearful faces was related to later AB for those in the early-starting group, but in divergent directions depending on race: amygdala reactivity to fearful faces was positively related to AB in European-Americans and negatively related to AB among African-Americans.

CONCLUSIONS: Contextual factors only predicted deflections of AB in those engaged in late-starting, moderate levels of AB, whereas neural factors predicted continued AB only in those with early-starting, severe AB, and in divergent ways based on participant race. Though there is limited power to infer causality from this observational design, research on desistance broadly can contribute to informing personalized interventions for those engaged in serious adolescence AB.