Mothers know best: redirecting adolescent reward sensitivity toward safe behavior during risk taking

Mothers know best: redirecting adolescent reward sensitivity toward safe behavior during risk taking.

Despite being one of the healthiest developmental periods, morbidity and mortality rates increase dramatically during adolescence, largely due to preventable, risky behaviors. Heightened reward sensitivity, coupled with ineffective cognitive control, has been proposed to underlie adolescents' risk taking. In this study, we test whether reward sensitivity can be redirected to promote safe behavi...

Risky business: exploring adolescent risk-taking behavior.

Behavioral Control and Reward Sensitivity in Adolescents’ Risk Taking Behavior: A Longitudinal TRAILS Study

Neurodevelopmental theories of risk behavior hypothesize that low behavioral control in combination with high reward sensitivity explains adolescents' risk behavior. However, empirical studies examining this hypothesis while including actual risk taking behavior in adolescence are lacking. In this study we tested whether the imbalance between behavioral control and reward sensitivity underlies ...

Not just social sensitivity: Adolescent neural suppression of social feedback during risk taking

Adolescence is a period of sensitivity to social stimuli. In particular, research has focused on the increased sensitivity to risks and social information seen during adolescence. However, recent evidence also suggests that adolescents can flexibly use information in service of their goals, raising an interesting question: are adolescents able to selectively discount social information if it co...

Peers and Adolescent Risk Taking

Adolescent risk taking occursmost oftenwhen teens are in the presence of their peers. An extensive body of prior work has attempted to explain this phenomenon with respect to peer pressure, social conformity, and affiliation with deviant peers. Recent experimental work, however, suggests that peer influences on adolescent decision making may be rooted in an even more basic process by which soci...