This week in Adolescent Development: Risk, externalizing behaviors, and violence

To talk about personal fable/optimistic bias, I like to show some data I collected from a large undergraduate class a few years ago. I asked them to compare their likelihood of a range of outcomes to the rest of the class (5 point scale ranging from more likely to less likely). If people were accurate, then the same percent of students should choose more likely as less likely (you can ignore the “equal” ratings). Instead, there is almost always optimistic bias. For instance, averaged across the negative events, 47% of students rate them as less likely to happen to themselves, and only 19% as more likely (biggest biases come from STDs, pregnancy, and alcohol poisoning; reverse, pessimistic bias comes from skin cancer). Averaged across positive events, 41% of students rate them as more likely to happen to themselves, 19% as less likely (biggest biases come from successful marriage and getting the job you want; reverse pessimistic bias from winning the lottery). It’s interesting for thinking about people’s ability to make these judgments, which we now know doesn’t disappear after adolescence.

We chatted about Moffitt’s adolescence limited and life course persistent antisocial behavior model, and the newer Loeber and Burke model of different developmental pathways to externalizing and internalizing outcomes. And recent work by Loeber and colleagues on how cognitive impulsivity and intelligence are associated with the age-crime curve.

We also discussed an article in which the authors predicted age 15 externalizing behavior from exposure to cocaine in utero.

And finally, we tried to think about how to intervene in the different types of externalizing behaviors.

“The post This week in Adolescent Development: Risk, externalizing behaviors & violence first appeared on Eva Lefkowitz’s blog on March 31, 2014.”