https://faculty.weber.edu/eamsel/Research%20Groups/Dual%20PRocess%20Research/New%20Papers/Steinberg%20(2008).pdf

A Social Neuroscience Perspective on Adolescent Risk-Taking.

Predictors of adolescent sexual behavior and intention: a theory-guided systematic review.

Contemporary perspectives on age differences in risk taking, informed by advances in developmental neuroscience, have emphasized the need to examine the ways in which emotional and cognitive factors interact to influence decision making. In the present study, a diverse sample of 901 individuals between the ages of 10 and 30 were administered a modified version of the Iowa Gambling Task, which is designed to measure affective decision making. Results indicate that approach behaviors (operationalized as the tendency to play increasingly from the advantageous decks over the course of the task) display an inverted U-shape relation to age, peaking in mid- to late adolescence. In contrast, avoidance behaviors (operationalized as the tendency to refrain from playing from the disadvantageous decks) increase linearly with age, with adults avoiding disadvantageous decks at higher rates than both preadolescents and adolescents. The finding that adolescents, compared to adults, are relatively more approach oriented in response to positive feedback and less avoidant in response to negative feedback is consistent with recent studies of brain development, as well as epidemiological data on various types of risky behavior, and may have important practical implications for the prevention of adolescent risk taking.

Age differences in affective decision making as indexed by performance on the Iowa Gambling Task.

Connectedness as a Predictor of Sexual and Reproductive Health Outcomes for Youth

The purpose of this study was to quantitatively synthesize the growing literature on the relationship between safer sexual communication (SSC) among sexual partners and condom use, and to systematically examine a number of conceptual and methodological moderators of this relationship. Data from 53 articles published in 27 journals met criteria for the study. Fifty-five independent effect sizes coded from samples totaling N=18,529 were meta-analyzed. Results indicate that the mean sample-size weighted effect size of the SSC-condom use relation was r=.22, and a number of conceptual variables were found to moderate this relationship. Specifically, communication about condom use (r=.25) and sexual history (r=.23) had significantly (p .05). Further, methodological moderators tended to be unrelated to effect size. Implications for the future study of safer sexual communication as well as the importance of emphasizing communication skills in HIV preventive interventions are discussed.

Joyce Mbwara

Papers

Social cognitive correlates of sexual experience and condom use among 13- through 15-year-old adolescents