Good and bad news on the adolescent brain

摘要

Winston Churchill once referred to Russia as "a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma". Adolescence could be described in the same way. Adolescents are at the peak of physical robustness, yet they are also at an elevated risk of death, injury and disease. Much of this increased mortality and morbidity has been blamed on risky decision-making processes performed by a still-maturing brain. Massive public-health campaigns and educational efforts have been aimed at reducing unhealthy risk taking, and have generally focused on exposing adolescents to information about the adverse health consequences of risky behaviours. Writing in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Moutsiana et al. present a study that raises questions about how effective all of this 'bad news' is in teaching adolescents to update their risk estimates. Previous research has shown that adults are more likely to incorporate good news than bad news into their beliefs. For example, news that a genetic mutation places them at lower risk of cancer than they thought is more likely to alter an adults belief about his or her cancer risk than is news of a mutation that puts them at higher risk. Moutsiana and colleagues have now examined this process of belief updating in response to good and bad news in individuals aged from 9 to 26 years, a period during which the brain is maturing. The participants were presented with 40 adverse events and asked for their estimates of personal risk - how likely (as a percentage) the event was to happen to them in the future.