Sercombe Howard
School of Applied Social Sciences, University of Strathclyde, 6th Floor, Lord Hope Building, 141 St James Road, Glasgow G4 0LT, United Kingdom.
Brain Cogn. 2014 Aug;89:61-9. doi: 10.1016/j.bandc.2014.01.001. Epub 2014 Jan 24.
Over the last decade, the propensity for young people to take risks has been a particular focus of neuroscientific inquiries into human development. Taking population-level data about teenagers' involvement in drinking, smoking, dangerous driving and unprotected sex as indicative, a consensus has developed about the association between risk-taking and the temporal misalignment in the development of reward-seeking and executive regions of the brain. There are epistemological difficulties in this theory. Risk, the brain, and adolescence are different kinds of objects, and bringing them into the same frame for analysis is not unproblematic. In particular, risk is inextricably contextual and value-driven. The assessment of adolescent behaviour and decision-making as 'sub-optimal', and the implication that the developmental schedule of the teenage brain is dysfunctional, is also reassessed in terms of evolutionary development of the individual, the family and the human community. The paper proposes a view of adolescent development as adaptive, and a focus on young people's capacities in the profile of the needs of the community as a whole.
在过去十年中，年轻人冒险的倾向一直是神经科学对人类发展进行探究的一个特别关注点。以关于青少年饮酒、吸烟、危险驾驶和无保护性行为的数据作为人口层面的指标，人们已就冒险行为与大脑中寻求奖励区域和执行区域发育的时间失调之间的关联达成了共识。该理论存在认识论上的困难。风险、大脑和青春期是不同类型的对象，将它们置于同一分析框架并非毫无问题。特别是，风险与背景和价值驱动紧密相连。将青少年的行为和决策评估为“次优”，以及暗示青少年大脑的发育时间表存在功能失调，也从个体、家庭和人类群体的进化发展角度进行了重新评估。本文提出了一种将青少年发展视为适应性的观点，并强调在整个社区需求背景下关注年轻人的能力。
