New insights into teen risk-taking – their “hot” inhibitory control is poorer than children’s

By Emma Young Kids who are better at resisting unhelpful impulses and distractions go on later in life to perform better academically, professionally and socially. But how this kind of self-control develops with age has not been so clear. Teenagers’ show more self-control than children in many ways, but in other respects – think of their propensity for risk-taking – they actually seem to show less self-control than they did when they were younger. In a new paper, published in Developmental Science, Ania Aïte at Paris Descartes University, France, led research investigating whether this might be because there are two types of impulse control – “cool” control, in which emotions are not involved, and “hot” control, in which they are – and that they might show different developmental trajectories. If so, this could have implications for educational interventions aimed at reducing teens’ sometimes dangerous behaviour. The team studied 56 children (aged about 10), 48 adolescents (aged around 13), and 56 young adults (aged about 21). They all completed two different tests of their inhibitory control. In the emotionally neutral test, a classic version of the famous Stroop task, the participants had to indicate, as quickly but accurately as possible, the ink colour of a colour-denoting word (the word “red” written in blue, for example). It requires inhibitory control to ignore word meaning when there’s a mismatch between the word and...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Decision making Developmental Emotion Source Type: blogs