Individual differences in accumbofrontal tract integrity relate to risky decisions under stress in adolescents and adults

Psychosocial stress increases risky decision-making (DM). It is widely accepted that individual variation in neural phenotypes underlie variability in this behavioral tendency in adults, but is less examined in adolescents. Our goal was to test the hypothesis that the relation between neural phenotypes and stress-related risky DM is better characterized by individual variation than by age. Using diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) tractography to characterize the accumbofrontal tract, we determined if it uniquely moderated how stress affects risky DM, over and above age. A daily diary design monitored participants’ daily stress for two weeks. Participants completed a DTI scan and performed a task in which decisions varied by expected value, once each on a day when they endorsed feeling higher (and lower) than usual levels of stress. Multilevel logistic regression analyses revealed that all participants were more likely to take risks as expected reward value increased; this behavior was greater under high versus low stress for individuals with low accumbofrontal tract integrity, whereas DM was less influenced by stress for individuals with high accumbofrontal tract integrity, regardless of age. Results suggest that individual differences in brain structure may be more germane to characterizing risky decisions in adolescents, rather than ontogeny.