Friday, May 25, 2007
A worthy journal club article: risk & rationality in adolescents
I like the look of this paper: have just skimmed through it, so cannot say definitively that it's a winner, but the preface by Stanovich is laudatory and the goal (to think theoretically about the concepts of risk and rationality) is a good one.
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3 comments:
very interesting article: a couple of noteworthy points for me
(i) The paper gives a developmental neuroscience perspective on risk taking in adolescence
(ii) As the paper points out, we know that adolescents take more risks than non-adolescents. The evidence is weak that this is due to attitudes or risk-perceptions.
(iii) the paper further argues that logical reasoning improves to about age 15 and then plateaus. What is continuously improving till well in to the twenties is psychosocial maturity. This gets in to impulse control, emotion regulation and all those other complex features associated with decision-making ability.
(iv) many of the features of adolescence he lists are very well-rehearsed in the behavioural economics literature (indeed the behavioural economics literature more or less took them from this type of work). There is a strong "dual-systems" element similar to what Micheal has been talking about.
(v) He also references the Science articles on hyperbolic discounting and the dissociation in brain areas associated with short-run and long-run trade-offs. I look forward to starting our own work on this and it was interesting to see this work in this context.
(vi) in terms of interventions to promote health, he strongly comes down in favour of restriction of access type policies. Raise the driving age. Make alcohol and cigarettes harder to get, make mental health services more accesible etc., It would be very interesting to see (or do) another review verifying these claims from the developmental neuroscience perspective.
just seen on the news that another murder has taken place involving a young guy that appears to have been a spur-of-the moment thing.
http://www.rte.ie/news/2007/0526/stab.html
there has been a lot written going back centuries about adolescence being a period of "sturm-und-drang". one thing the article did not bring out in detail is gender differences in the effects of adolescence. It is certainly the young guys who are getting in to more trouble related to impulsive behaviour such as the young people in the news article.
I presume this is also related to sex differences in suicide
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