Adolescents take a lot of risks compared to any other age groups in human development stages (Steinberg, 2008). This risk-taking ranges from dangerous driving, binge drinking, drug use to risky sexual engagements. According to Glover et al., 2006 adolescents continue to engage in risky behaviors despite the educational effort and counseling practices always advanced to them. Following this persistence, a number of questions have been asked, particularly, as to whether the adolescent brain is the reason for their positive perception of risks. People often think that teens often take part in risky behavior since they are not pretty good at evaluating risks.
However, most of the early studies in this area reveal that adolescents are exactly as good as adults at assessing risks across an extensive range of risky behavior. This implies that adolescents know that certain behaviors are unsafe, but they still ignore and get involved in them. Why? This paper answers this question concerning the significance of the brain in determining the teens’ behaviors. It considers the two sides of the sides of the argumentations to make a stand on the subject matter (Buskirk-Cohen, 2014).
Individual variations in impulsivity underlie a great deal of the risk-taking observable during adolescence, and some of the deadly forms of this behavior are stems from the impulsivity traits that manifest in early stages of development. However, early interventions seem able to limit the severity and effects of these mannerisms by augmenting control over behavior and tenacity towards valued goals, such as academic success. One kind of impulsivity, sensation seeking, heightens dramatically during the adolescence stage and surges risks to healthy development. Nevertheless, a review of the substantiation for the hypothesis that degree of brain development during adolescence limits the ability to regulate impulsivity posits that any such limitations are understated at best. Instead, it is reasoned that nonexistence of familiarity with novel adult behavior subjects adolescents to greater risks than structural discrepancies in brain maturation.
The brain controls how adolescents relate with each other in everyday life events. Those with similar brain development standards are likely to behave in a similar manner or in a way to be identified among the populations. This urge eventually leads to peer relationships which influence the behaviors standards among the teens. Recently, there has been an upsurge in the usage of magnetic resonance (MRI) together with the functional of magnetic resonance (fMRI) equipment to determine and monitor the changes in human brain puberty (Blakemore, 2012) which are believed to be of great significance in explaining the reason for engagement risky behaviors among the adolescents.
The adolescence period is always marked with increased peer pressure and interest in peer relationships. According to Mounts (2004), the susceptibility of peer influence mounts during early teen years and becomes optimal at around the age of 16. At this age, the brain response to rewards from peer relationships peaks as well as leading to increased curiosity to test everything around regardless of the risks involved. While others get involved just to fit in a given peer group, others may do it for various reasons. These may include personal recognition as on graduates from childhood to mid-adulthood where they protect, control or decide on their own. In the process, they find themselves in the wrong lane making a decision that, to them may be appealing but is actually considered dangerous. The reason for this kind of behavior, as scientists have found out through present brain-scanning technology, is that the adolescents’ brain is not fully cooked. Their brains still undergo the process of rewiring and remodeling as they mature towards adulthood (Buskirk-Cohen, 2014).
Petersen and Posner (2012). explore the study on changes in the human brain’s dopamine system, which often drive the adolescents to novelty and thrill-seeking. These are the key elements that make socializing with their peers awesomely attractive. It is irritating to the parents, who put emphasis on the risks while their adolescents seek rewards. However, evolutionarily speaking, this is precisely what sexually developing humans should undergo if they are to fruitfully find mates and come up with workable social connections to support child-raising.
Further, it is evident that adolescents always become more distressed than adults when separated from peers. A part of the brain called the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (PFC) is always plays an important role in helping people handle negative feelings such as those developed when excluded from peers. It reduces distress and its subsequent impacts. It is, however, surprising that teens rarely use this region compared to adults when socially excluded (Sebastian et al., 2010). This is because at puberty the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex still undergoes rapid development and maturity making the adolescent lose control over distress which may make them resort risky engagements such as suicides and irresponsible drug abuse.
Engagement in risky events and self-regulation goes hand in hand. In case one of them fails, the other has to take the course. Those who tend to avoid risky engagement have the ability to regulate themselves. However, those who indulge in risky takes lack the self-regulation. Self-regulation as a psychological element is controlled by the brain, particularly, the lateral prefrontal cortex (PFC). This part of the brain develops gradually as an individual grows. At puberty, it shows medium or little track development and maturity suggesting that the teens are most likely to lack self-regulation and engage in risky activities.
At around age 11, the parietal lobes and the PFC regions of the brains commence a period of protracted pruning of neuronal axons leading to thinning of cortical gray matter components. At the same time, neuronal myelination increases during this time. The implication of these growth changes is yet to be discovered (In Buskirk-Cohen, 2015). Nevertheless, most researchers argue that the prolonged pruning of the PFC region signifies the development of frontal control over behavior. Therefore, its absence comes with impulsivity and poor decision-making in humans. Indeed, youths have long been pointed out as unduly prone to impulsivity and risk-taking as exemplified by unintentional injuries, drug use, and unprotected sexual activity.
Considering these stages in brain development and behavior, a number of authors including Glover et al. (2006) and Casey, Getz and Galvan (2006) propose two processes of brain development that influence the teenagers to impulsivity and uncalculated risk-taking. One process that arises early in adolescence stages is determined by the front striatal reward circuits of the ventral striatum. These circuits develop and mature comparatively early encouraging the adolescents to venture away from the childhood and family activities and engage in adult-like and novel activities. Not surprisingly, most of these engagements are fraught with a substantial amount of risks such as over-speeding and sex which may not only lead to contraction of sexually transmitted diseases but also unexpected pregnancy cases in girls.
The time that adolescents get involved in risky and novel activities, it is reasoned that the PFC region of the brain has not yet developed to give away for adequate evaluation risks and, therefore, control over risk-taking cannot be satisfactorily exerted to avoid undesired outcomes. In particular, the prefrontal cortex and its links to other brain areas are thought to be structurally derisory to offer optimal control over adolescent behaviors. This developmental gap in the maturation of PFC-based self-regulation relative to more progressive motivational circuitry results in an inevitable session of risk-taking for adolescents (Casey et al., 2008).
This paper, therefore, argues that the primary reason why adolescents are prone to impulsivity and risky engagements stem from two sources. One is the pre-existing kind of impulsivity mostly observed in the early years of development (at least age 3) that perseveres into adolescence (Buskirk-Cohen, 2014). Children will always carry feeling as they progress into adulthood traversing the puberty stage. Those who suffer greater influence of this sources are likely to erratic in their life engagements before adulthood. The second source risky behaviors in adolescents relate to the upsurge in sensation seeking due to activation of the ventral striatum of the brain. As already discussed, these physiological changes enhance experimentation with adult-like behaviors (Buskirk-Cohen, 2014). Nevertheless, instead of representing a structural shortfall in frontal control, the teen’s risk-taking tendencies are seen as resulting from normal maturation and the inevitable lack of experience due to engagement in novel behaviors. Taking a stand, it is true that the adolescents’ brain makes risk-taking an inevitable scenario. Since it is the engine controlling human behaviors, engagements, thinking and all functionalities, the implication of an inefficiency within it can never be underestimated. Adolescents take unimaginable risks because they lack control, an aspect only controlled by the brain functionality and maturity.
However, from the social neuroscience perspective, the risk-taking among the adolescents in is not reasoned against the brain. It is argued that the factors that lure adolescents to participate in risky activities are not cognitive, but are social and emotional. The psychological and scientific the fields’ evolving understanding of brain growth in adolescence implies that immaturity in these realms can have an elevated maturational and conceivably unalterable basis. Attempts to avoid or limit risk-taking in adolescent should, therefore, put emphasis on changing the context of occurrence of risky activities rather than largely putting effort through educational programs, as the current practice does, to change what teens know, their perception and line of thought.