Andrew Fuligni

• Ph.D.
• Professor at University of California, Los Angeles

The objective of the present study was to evaluate the interdependency of parent-adolescent inflammation trends across time and to examine whether shared family socioeconomic characteristics explained between-family differences in parents' and adolescents' risk for inflammation. A total of N = 348 families, consisting of one parent and one adolesce...

As an intensely social species, humans demonstrate the propensity to contribute to other individuals and groups by providing support, resources, or helping to achieve a shared goal. Accumulating evidence suggests that contribution benefits the givers as well as the receivers. The need to contribute during adolescence, however, has been underappreci...

Introduction Social relationships offer the opportunity to provide support and resources to others. Feeling needed and useful to others has been understudied during adolescence, despite being shown to predict health and well‐being during adulthood. The current study examined this underappreciated way in which family and peer relationships may shape...

The message that one’s contributions are devalued can be a significant way that youth experience marginalization during the transition into adulthood. Participants ( N = 298, M age = 19.47 years, 51% female) reported having their ideas, opinions, and contributions being unwelcomed due to their ethnicity and gender. African American, Latinx, and Asi...

Prosocial behavior during adolescence becomes more differentiated based on the recipient of the action as well as the perceived value or benefit, relative to the cost to self, for the recipients. The current study investigated how functional connectivity of corticostriatal networks tracked the value of prosocial decisions as a function of target re...

Adolescents, especially female youth, who have more family meals tend to be at lower risk for substance use. The present study tested whether family meals relate to substance use count and frequency during high school, whether associations differ by gender, and whether other family‐related variables explain these associations. A community sample of...

Although stress is often related to substance use, it remains unclear whether substance use is related to individual differences in how adolescents respond to stress. Therefore the present study examined associations between substance use and daily emotional reactivity to stress within a year across adolescence. Adolescents ( N = 330; Mage = 16.40,...

In the past two decades in the United States, research has surged on familism , a multidimensional construct encompassing attitudes and behaviors related to strong attachment, identification, and obligation to the family. In this article, we define familism and argue that it is a crucial way for adolescents to contribute to their social world and a...

The present study examined whether everyday discrimination relates to the frequency of adolescents' positive and negative daily social interactions and whether these associations are driven by anger and positive emotion. Adolescents ( N = 334) participated in a three‐wave longitudinal study, in which they completed surveys regarding everyday discri...

Trust plays an important role during adolescence for developing social relations. Although prior developmental studies give us insight into adolescents' development of differentiation between close (e.g., friends) and unknown (e.g., unknown peers) targets in trust choices, less is known about the development of trust to societal targets (e.g., memb...

Emotion reactivity refers to the intensity of changes in positive and negative emotion following a stimulus, typically studied with respect to daily stressors (e.g., arguments, demands) or laboratory stressors, including the Trier Social Stress Test (TSST). Yet, it is unclear whether emotion reactivity to daily and to laboratory stressors are relat...

Restorative sleep is a fundamental component of adolescent wellbeing, and the COVID-19 pandemic presented both challenges and opportunities for adolescents' sleep. In this review, we synthesize emergent themes from the growing scientific evidence for the impact of the pandemic on adolescent sleep behavior across different stages of the pandemic and...

This is a preprint of an article published in Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience. The final authenticated version is available online at https://doi.org/10.1162/jocn_a_02055. Trust plays an important role during adolescence for developing social relations. While prior developmental studies give us insight into adolescents’ development of differentia...

Background: Early life adversity (ELA) has long been associated with increased risk for stress-related psychopathology, particularly depression. The neuroimmune network hypothesis posits that ELA increases sensitivity to psychosocial stress, moderating the association between increases in peripheral markers of inflammation and decreases in reward...

Alterations in immune system gene expression have been implicated in psychopathology, but it remains unclear whether similar associations occur for intraindividual variations in emotion. The present study examined whether positive emotion and negative emotion were related to expression of pro-inflammatory and antiviral genes in circulating leukocyt...

This 2-year, 28-day study examined whether adolescents felt greater fatigue and emotional distress the same day and the day after air quality was worse. We linked objective daily air quality measurements to daily self-reports from 422 Mexican–American adolescents in Los Angeles County, California from 2009 to 2011 (50% girls, MAge = 15 years). A ro...

Socioeconomic status has been related to poorer eating behaviors, potentially due to feelings of lower status relative to peers. Despite experimental evidence that temporarily feeling of lower status can contribute to greater caloric intake, it remains unclear how feelings of lower social status relate to eating behavior in daily life. This study a...

More policymakers and practitioners should encourage exploration and discovery during youth, to prevent adolescents from reaching crisis. More policymakers and practitioners should encourage exploration and discovery during youth, to prevent adolescents from reaching crisis.

Background Higher resting parasympathetic nervous system activity, as indexed by respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA), has been considered a marker of emotion regulatory capacity and is consistently related to better mental health. However, it remains unclear how resting RSA relates to emotion reactivity to acute social-evaluative stress, a potent pr...

Adolescence is characterized by biological changes in hormonal and circadian systems that, with concurrent psychosocial changes, result in increased sleep disturbances and stress sensitivity. Sleep disturbance has been associated with heightened stress sensitivity and elevated levels of inflammation in adults and adolescents, yet the neural correla...

Objective: To investigate the associations between indices of family socioeconomic status and sleep during adolescence and to examine whether measures of hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis functioning mediate the observed associations. Methods: A total of 350 ethnically diverse adolescents (57% female; mean agewave1 = 16.4, SD = 0.7 years...

Substance use increases throughout adolescence, and earlier substance use may increase risk for poorer health. However, limited research has examined whether stress responses relate to adolescent substance use, especially among adolescents from ethnic minority and high-adversity backgrounds. The present study assessed whether blunted emotional and...

We investigated whether parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous system responses to social‐evaluative threat at age 14 were related to the number of substances used between ages 14 and 16 among Mexican‐origin adolescents (N=243; 70.4% had never used substances by 14). Participants completed the Trier Social Stress Test, while cardiac measures of pa...

Adolescence is marked by an increased sensitivity to the social environment as youth navigate evolving relationships with family, friends, and communities. Prosocial behavior becomes more differentiated such that older adolescents increasingly give more to known others (e.g., family, friends) than to strangers. This differentiation may be linked wi...

The overall goal of the ISEE Assessment is to pool multi-disciplinary expertise on educational systems and reforms from a range of stakeholders in an open and inclusive manner, and to undertake a scientifically robust and evidence based assessment that can inform education policy-making at all levels and on all scales. Its aim is not to be policy p...

Background Early life adversity (ELA) has been linked to higher depression risk across the lifespan, as well as chronic inflammatory conditions that contribute to earlier mortality. In the present study we characterized innate immune responses to acute social stress in a community sample of adolescents (mean age 13.9±1.6; 46.4% female) as a potenti...

Giving is essential for forming and maintaining social relationships, which is an important developmental task for adolescents. This pre-registered fMRI study investigated behavioral and neural correlates of adolescents’ (N = 128, ages 9 – 19 years) small versus large size giving in different social contexts related to target (i.e., giving to a fri...

Background Childhood sleep problems are common and among the most frequent and impairing comorbidities of childhood psychiatric disorders. In adults, sleep disturbances are heritable and show strong genetic associations with brain morphology; however, little is known about the genetic architecture of childhood sleep and potential etiological links...

Parasympathetic nervous system activity can downregulate inflammation, but it remains unclear how parasympathetic nervous system activity relates to antiviral activity. The present study examined associations between parasympathetic nervous system activity and cellular antiviral gene regulation in 90 adolescents (M_(age) = 16.28, SD = 0.73; 51.1% f...

A more complete understanding of the role of social relationships during the transition to young adulthood should include the extent to which adolescents believe that others see them as needed and useful. Two samples of late adolescents (Ns = 237, 298) aged 18 to 25 years completed measures of feeling needed and useful by family and friends. Feelin...

Parasympathetic nervous system activity can downregulate inflammation, but it remains unclear how parasympathetic nervous system activity relates to antiviral activity. The present study examined associations between parasympathetic nervous system activity and cellular antiviral gene regulation in 90 adolescents (Mage = 16.3, SD = 0.7; 51.1% female...

Parasympathetic nervous system activity can downregulate inflammation, but it remains unclear how parasympathetic nervous system activity relates to antiviral activity. The present study examined associations between parasympathetic nervous system activity and cellular antiviral gene regulation in 90 adolescents (Mage = 16.3, SD = 0.7; 51.1% female...

Supporting healthy youth development depends on recognizing how anti-Black racism intersects with the core needs and opportunities of adolescence and working to mitigate and eliminate these effects. A new report from the National Scientific Council on Adolescence (NSCA), housed at the Center for the Developing Adolescent (CDA) at UCLA, summarizes r...

Parasympathetic nervous system activity can downregulate inflammation, but it remains unclear how parasympathetic nervous system activity relates to antiviral activity. The present study examined associations between parasympathetic nervous system activity and cellular antiviral gene regulation in 90 adolescents (Mage = 16.3, SD = 0.7; 51.1% female...

Hypothalamic pituitary adrenal gland (HPA) axis functioning has been linked with daily demands during adolescence. A ubiquitous, yet understudied daily demand in the lives of youth is the commute to school, which may be associated with the diurnal rhythm of cortisol as demonstrated in prior research among adults. The current study hypothesized that...

Adolescent sleep research has focused heavily on duration and quality with less work examining chronotype, defined as individual differences in sleep–wake timings driven by the circadian rhythm. This study filled a gap in the literature by utilizing actigraphy-based sleep estimates in an accelerated longitudinal design in order to better understand...

Sleep disturbance may be a central, yet underappreciated mechanism by which early adversity has a long-term impact upon mental and physical health. The fundamental regulatory processes shaped by early adversity – neural, neuroendocrine, and immune – are also central to sleep. Sleep problems, in turn, lead to a similar constellation of chronic healt...

Despite growing public and scientific interest in the positive benefits of prosociality, there has been little research on the causal effects of performing kind acts for others on psychological well-being during adolescence. Developmental changes during adolescence, such as greater perspective taking, can promote prosociality. It was hypothesized t...

The current study examined adolescent psychological reactivity to daily family experiences, an important feature of emotion regulation that could have significant implications for psychopathology. A total of 428 Mexican-heritage adolescents (Mage = 15.02 years, range: 13-18 years) completed daily diary checklists for 14 days and again 1 year later....

Background Childhood sleep problems are common and among the most frequent and impairing comorbidities of childhood psychiatric disorders. However, little is known about the genetic architecture of childhood sleep and potential etiological links between sleep, brain morphology, and pediatric-onset psychiatric symptoms. Methods Using data from the...

Adolescents have a fundamental need to contribute to other people, social groups, and the larger society. Giving support and resources to others assists canonical developmental tasks such as autonomy and identity and is beneficial for psychological and physical health. As with the resources received by youths, inequalities along well-known social g...

Purpose This study investigated the extent to which multiple sleep dimensions are associated with inflammation during adolescents' transition to young adulthood, a developmental period when sleep difficulties and systemic inflammation levels are on the rise. Additionally, the moderating roles of socioeconomic status (SES) and ethnicity were explore...

Objective: Both lower subjective social status (SSS)—or viewing oneself as having lower status relative to others—and greater early life stress consistently relate to poorer health in adolescence. Early life stress can also negatively influence one’s social relationships and may thereby shape social status. The present studies investigated how earl...

The current study used daily assessments of sleep to examine stability and change in sleep chronotype in adolescents and their parents. The study assessed adolescent sleep chronotype according to age, gender, and parent chronotype, and evaluated its associations with emotional and behavioral problems in youth. Participants included of 417 Mexican A...

Although many facets of social status (i.e., socioeconomic status, gender, race) are fairly stable, limited work has assessed how youths' identification with their status changes over time. Subjective social status (SSS) refers to one's perception of standing or rank relative to others, and for youth status is generally in the context of society or...

Research has demonstrated that adolescence is an important time for self- and other-oriented development that underlies many skills vital for becoming a contributing member of society with healthy intergroup relations. It is often assumed that these two processes, thinking about self and thinking about others, are pitted against each other when ado...

The purpose of this study was to characterize the association between recent major life events and depressive symptoms during early adulthood, and to determine whether adolescents with chronically low positive affect or persistent sleep disturbance were more vulnerable to the link between stress and depressive symptoms. Adolescents (n = 147; 63.9%...

Sleep disturbance is a symptom of and a well-known risk factor for depression. Further, atypical functioning of the HPA axis has been linked to the pathogenesis of depression. The purpose of this study was to examine the role of adolescent HPA axis functioning in the link between adolescent sleep problems and later depressive symptoms. Methods: A...

This study examined how discrimination changes over time, how discrimination is related to health and substance use, and whether discrimination spills over to affect the health of family members. Parent–adolescent dyads (N = 341) completed measures of discrimination, physical health, mental health, and substance use over 5 years. Actor–Partner Inte...

Subjective social status (SSS) reflects one’s perception of one’s standing within society. SSS has been linked with health outcomes, over and above socioeconomic status, and is thought to influence health in part by shaping stress responsivity. To test this, the present study examined the links between SSS and psychological, hypothalamic–pituitary–...

Research on the health benefits and consequences of close relationships has suggested the linkage in daily emotions (i.e., coregulation) between close partners is an important relationship dynamic. While the coupling of daily emotions among family members (parent–child and marital dyads) has been widely documented, research examining emotional core...

Objective: Poor sleep poses negative health consequences for youth, yet few longitudinal actigraphy studies have examined basic developmental trends in sleep across adolescents' transition to young adulthood. In this longitudinal actigraphy study, stability of individual differences and trajectories of sleep during and after high school were exami...

Objective: Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is one of the most prevalent chronic conditions and leading causes of death. Although CVD clinically manifests in adulthood, underlying processes of CVD begin in the earlier decades of life. Inflammation has been shown to play a key role, but relatively little is understood about how inflammation changes ove...

Background: Rates of depression increase and peak during late adolescence and alterations in immune processes are thought to be both a risk factor and outcome of depression. However, few studies have examined depression-immune dynamics among adolescents. Using a functional genomics approach, the current study examined whether depressive symptoms w...

Psychosocial stress during childhood and adolescence is associated with alterations in the hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal (HPA) axis and with heightened inflammation, both of which are implicated in poor health; however, factors that may protect against these effects relatively early in life are not well understood. Thus, we examined whether psycho...

Variability in parental academic involvement and socialization practices could explain academic disparities among adolescents. Academic socialization during adolescence is likely to vary based on students’ educational histories and ability levels. Thus, adolescents were purposively selected, from a larger longitudinal study, to vary in their grade...

Taking a comprehensive biopsychosocial approach and using a two-wave longitudinal design, this study examines the relation between brain development and the social environment in Mexican American youth's (N = 41.56 percent female) academic achievement and substance use. We find that both Mexican American youth's structural brain development and soc...

Having been a significance source of the renewed interested in the adolescent period, developmental neuroscience now needs to build upon its achievements to date and expand in several areas in order to broaden its impact upon the field. Addressing both typical and atypical development, examining the interaction between brain development and the soc...

Neurodevelopmental maturation takes place in a social environment in addition to a neurobiological one. Characterization of social environmental factors that influence this process is therefore an essential component in developing an accurate model of adolescent brain and neurocognitive development, as well as susceptibility to change with the use...

Youth who do not identify with or value their families (i.e., low family centrality) are considered to be at risk for maladjustment. However, the current study investigated whether low family centrality may be adaptive in negative family contexts (i.e., high family conflict) because youth's self-worth should be less tied to the quality of their fam...

Irregular and insufficient sleep place youth at risk for adverse psychological and physical health outcomes. Recent research indicates that discrimination constitutes a type of stressor that interferes with adolescent sleep; however, the mechanisms through which discrimination affects sleep are not well understood. This study examined whether ethni...

Efforts to establish an empirical basis for recommended sleep durations during adolescence need to take into account individual differences in optimum sleep, defined as the amount of sleep at which peak functioning is observed. A total of 419 adolescents (Mage = 15.03 years) with Mexican American backgrounds reported their nightly sleep duration an...

The current study examines the association between parental support and adolescent sleep under varying levels of family stress. Participants included 316 adolescents (Mage = 16.40 years, 43% male) and their parents (Mage = 45.67 years, 91% mothers) from diverse ethnic backgrounds. Both adolescents and parents completed questionnaires and adolescent...

Purpose The goal of this study was to determine whether sleep moderates the associations between family-related stress and depressive symptoms and negative affect outcomes during adolescence. We combined traditional survey measures of stress and depressive symptoms with daily assessments of stress and negative affect to examine whether sleep differ...

Both early adversity and depression are associated with heightened inflammation. However, few studies have focused on inflammatory reactivity to psychosocial stress and examined adiposity as a potential moderator despite the fact that repeated heightened inflammatory reactivity over time is thought to contribute to low-grade chronic inflammation an...

The late adolescence version of the HOME Inventory (LA-HOME) documents actions, objects, events, and conditions connected with the home environment of children ages 16 and older still living at home. The study entailed a multi-stage process of measurement construction and validation that involved over 400 families from four states. The families wer...

To inform public health recommendations for adolescent sleep, the amounts of sleep associated with the highest levels of academic achievement and mental health were examined. The degree to which daily variability in sleep duration represents an underappreciated but functionally significant sleep behavior also was tested. A total of 421 adolescents...

Objectives: Although cortical midline structures (CMS) are the most commonly identified neural foundations of self-appraisals, research is beginning to implicate the temporal-parietal junction (TPJ) in more interdependent self-construals. The goal of this study was to extend this research in an understudied population by (a) examining both direct (...

Adolescence is a period of learning, exploration, and continuous adaptation to fluctuating environments. Response variability during adolescence is an important, understudied, and developmentally-appropriate behavior. The purpose of this study was to identify the association between performance on a dynamic risky decision making task and white matt...

The acculturation gap-distress model purports that immigrant children acculturate faster than do their parents, resulting in an acculturation gap that leads to family and youth maladjustment. However, empirical support for the acculturation gap-distress model has been inconclusive. In the current study, 428 Mexican-American adolescents (50.2 % fema...

Parental academic involvement-whether through school participation and communication, or supervision and assistance at home-often has been cited as a way to enhance academic achievement. Yet, little is known about how the financial and life pressures faced by families can compromise parents' ability to become involved in their adolescents' educatio...

As primary agents of socialization, families and schools can powerfully shape the academic adaptation of youth. Using data from the Social Identification and Academic Adaptation studies, we compare the family and school environments of Latino high school seniors living in a new destination, North Carolina, with those living in an established destin...

To do research that really makes a difference—the authors of this book argue—social scientists need a diverse set of questions and methods, both qualitative and quantitative, in order to reflect the complexity of the world. Bringing together a consortium of voices across a variety of fields, Methods That Matter offers compelling and successful exam...

The present study examined the moderating role of sleep in the association between family demands and conflict and hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis functioning in a sample of ethnically diverse adolescents (n = 316). Adolescents completed daily diary reports of family demands and conflict for 15 days, and wore actigraph watches during the...

This study examined whether Mexican-American parents' experiences with discrimination are related to adolescent psychological adjustment over time. The extent to which associations between parent discrimination and adolescent adjustment vary as a function of parents' ethnic socialization of their children was also examined. Participants included 34...

Objective: To investigate the associations between objective and subjective dimensions of adolescent sleep and C-reactive protein (CRP), a key biomarker of inflammation that predicts chronic health problems in adulthood, and whether the associations vary as a function of adolescents' age. Methods: A total of 315 adolescents (14.5-18.4 years) wor...

Parental depression is a significant risk factor for adolescents' engagement in risk taking. Yet the neural processes that mediate the link between parental depression and adolescents' functioning remain unknown. Using a longitudinal functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) design, we investigated how parental depression is associated with chan...

Social experiences can affect the relationship between depression and physical health. The current study examined how social support from parents and friends may moderate the association of depressive symptoms with hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis activity and C-reactive protein among adolescents (N = 316, Mage = 16.40, SD = .74; 57% femal...

Purpose: To examine the associations of the frequency and type of everyday discrimination with diurnal cortisol and whether those associations depend upon adolescents' ethnicity and gender. Methods: Adolescents (N=292, Mage=16. 39years, SD=0.74; 58% female) reported the frequency of perceived everyday discrimination and whether they attributed t...

In modern multicultural societies more and more individuals deal with 2 or more cultures due to the unprecedented increase in international migration. This special section brings together research about immigrants' adaptation to various life domains, about the demands of dealing with different cultural scripts and about how immigrants can successfu...

Adolescence is marked by a steep increase in risk-taking behavior. The serious consequences of such heightened risk taking raise the importance of identifying protective factors. Despite its dynamic change during adolescence, family relationships remain a key source of influence for teenagers. Using a longitudinal fMRI approach, we scanned 23 adole...

Adolescence is marked by a steep increase in risk-taking behavior. The serious consequences of such heightened risk taking raise the importance of identifying protective factors. Despite its dynamic change during adolescence, family relationships remain a key source of influence for teenagers. Using a longitudinal fMRI approach, we scanned 23 adole...

Unlabelled: Adolescence is a critical developmental phase during which risk-taking behaviors increase across a variety of species, raising the importance of understanding how brain changes contribute to such behaviors. While the prefrontal cortex is thought to influence adolescent risk taking, the specific ways in which it functions are unclear. U...

During the transformative period of adolescence, social influence plays a prominent role in shaping young people's emerging social identities, and can impact their propensity to engage in prosocial or risky behaviors. In the present study, we examine the neural correlates of social influence from both parents and peers, two important sources of inf...

In this two-wave longitudinal, daily diary study that followed up with 421 Mexican American parent–adolescent dyads (adolescents: Mage = 15 years, 50% males) after 1 year, we investigated the contingency between parental stressors and adolescents' emotional support to family members. Adolescents provided support to their parents and other family me...

Despite the known importance of sleep for brain development, and the sharp increase in poor sleep during adolescence, we know relatively little about how sleep impacts the developing brain. We present the first longitudinal study to examine how sleep during adolescence is associated with white matter integrity. We find that greater variability in s...

To assess the relation between socioeconomic status (SES) and inflammation during adolescence and determine whether daily affective and social experiences across a 15-day period mediate this relation. Adolescents (n = 316) completed daily diary reports of positive affect, negative affect, and negative social interactions for 15 days and provided wh...

The current study examined how parents' cultural socialization efforts contribute to adolescents' family obligation values and behaviors and how these processes may depend upon the relational climate at home. Utilizing survey and daily diary methodologies, 428 Mexican-American adolescents (50% males; Mage = 15 years) and their parents (83% mothers;...