ABSTRACT
In this chapter we will review two influential hypotheses about risk taking in adolescence. On the one hand, the literature on adolescent development provides us with a considerable number of experiments that predict a decrease in risk-taking behavior with age as a consequence of increased cognitive control. On the other hand, many studies report an increase in risk taking in adolescence. We will give a short review of this literature and the literature on the neurobiological underpinnings of adolescent risk taking. In addition, we will propose a new working model that can account for these seemingly contradictory reports. This model describes risk taking under neutral circumstances (such as in the laboratory) in terms of increasing cognitive control abilities, but under emotional circumstances (such as when large rewards are at stake, or in the presence of peers) as a competition between emotion-related and control-related neural networks.
