TEENAGER BRAINS ARE WIRED FOR RISKY BEHAVIOR
A new study has found that using educational and prevention
programs alone to persuade teens to keep away from drinking,
smoking or taking drugs are unlikely to be effective, as
competing systems within the brain make adolescents more
susceptible to engaging in risky or dangerous behavior.
The study was conducted by Laurence Steinberg, distinguished
University Professor and Laura H. Carnell Professor of
Psychology at Temple University.
As part of this study, psychologists focussed on research on
adolescent brain development over the past 10 years to find why
the educational programs or interventions that have been
developed have not been especially effective.
Researchers found that heightened risk taking in adolescence is
the result of competition between two very different brain
systems, the socioemotional and cognitive-control networks, that
are undergoing maturation during adolescence, but along very
different timetables.
The socioemotional system, which processes social and emotional
information, becomes more assertive during puberty, allowing
adolescents to become more easily aroused and experience more
intense emotion, and to become more sensitive to social
influence, while the cognitive-control system gains strength
only gradually and over a longer period of time.
