According to a recent report from the Institute of Medicine, risk taking is a natural part of teenagers' lives. They need to take some risks in order to grow, trying new activities, generating new ideas, experimenting with new roles. However, they can also get into trouble with their risk taking, when it involves behaviors such as sex, drinking, smoking, and violence, and drug use. Fortunately, more recent data shows that some of these risk behaviors are trending down. However, given the severe physical and emotional consequences associated with these activities, theories regarding their causes are of significant interest to parents everywhere.
Some researchers suggest that teenagers tend to be especially high in sensation seeking.
Others suggest that they use these behaviors to appear more mature or because they have heightened egocentrism. Many authors attribute these behaviors to a combination of individual, social, and environmental factors. One of these factors that has received much research attention in recent years is adolescent decision-making. A recent study by the researchers at the Mclean Hospital Brain Imaging Center has shed a potentially different light upon the decision-making processes of teen. They found that when young adolescents process emotion, the level of brain activity in the amygdala is higher than the activity in the frontal lobe.