Teenage Risk-Taking: Rise in Deaths Prompts New Research Effort

    October 24, 1987
Source : Psychology Updates: ARTICLES ON PSYCHOLOGY FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES by Daniel Goleman

I will offer u an article about teenagers.
What do u think about teenagers?
Unstability of mind? A late of childhood? A period of finding who they truly r?
Fosho' they are in all of these definition.
And i guess all of the teenagers in the whole world ever had an experience and exploration caused by their curiousness, then had been found their life in a risk.



According to Daniel Goleman's book 'Psychology Updates'. teenagers are notoriously reckless.
"The three biggest killers of young ppl are essentially psychological," said Lewis Lipsitt, a developmental psychologist at Brown University. "They r dying of their own reckless behavior."
The ability to evaluate risk seems to be skewed in many teenagers. For instance, when they were asked to anticipate risks become more or less dangerous over time, they saw addiction from drug use and pregnancy from unprotected intercourse as becoming less rather than more likely, according to Charles Irwin, a pediatrician at the University of California at San Fransisco.

   Psychological Growth

Risk-taking is part of the natural exploration and assertion of independence that every healthy teenager goes through to one extent or another.
The pursuit of new activities and taking of intiative are crucial for the psychological growth that young ppl undergo through adolescence. That natural tendency makes risk-taking all the more likely.
Beatrix A. Hamburg as a child psychiatrist at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City said that Part of adolescence is trying on new roles and seeking new experiences. But by age ten or so, they enter a risky period when they do lots of exploring at a time when their cognitive development has not reached the point where they can make judgments that will keep 'em out of trouble.
One of the major deficits in the thinking of teenagers, particularly in early adolescence, is in evaluating the probabilities of a risk.
Dr. Hamburg began the study of smoking teenagers, among ten to fourteen yrs old teenagers. It shows that 15% of 'em sometimes smoked and about 80% if they'r in their age group.

As children progress from childhood to adolescence, their new social role is ambiguous, leaving even the most stable feeling like outsiders, unusually susceptible to social influence and insecure about their own judgments and values.
As Dr. Hamburg said, not all risk-taking really adventurous, sometimes it is risk-avoidant to take a drink, smoke a joint or have sex rather than be ridiculed, shunnes or deprecated by peers.
Educational programs about the health risks of smoking, for instance, were not as effective among adolescents as approaches that incorporated the teenager's social world. In some of the more succesful programs, student leaders were used in a role-playing exercise on how to refuse a cigarette.
Any approach to risk-taking must take into account the social realities of young ppl, Dr. Fischhoff said.


   'Bad Girls,' 'Macho Boys'
Some of the new research focuses on identifying exactly which risks teenagers are likely to take. For example, Dr. Adler has developed profiles of "bad girls" and "macho boys", those who most likely to take risks, and the risks they are likely to take.
She found that girls aged eleven to fourteen in San Fransisco innercity schools had already started smoking and experimenting w drugs and were exposed to other risks. Other risks that these "bad girls" took included drinking, fighting, hitchhiking, arguing w strangers, seeking entertainment in high-crime areas and crying a knife.
For boys in the same age group, a cluster of activities set the most riskprone youths apart from their peers, but no single marker emerged. The activities included drinking, smoking cigarettes and marijuana, riding on motorcycles and getting knocked unsconscious.
Sensation-seeking is a personality trait that includes the desire for thrills and adventure, the enjoyment of physically risky activities and the need for sensory and social stimulation such as loud music or parties.
According to Dr. Zuckerman, there is a direct relationship between how ppl score on a personality test for sensation-seeking and how fast they say they drive on an open highway. Ppl who have the lowest sensation-seeking scores drive, on average at 55miles an hour. As the scores rise, so does the average driving speed; in the highest range it is over 75miles an hour.

Sincerely,

sick-psycho