Adolescent Brain Development - the Youth Advocacy Division

III. Academic Articles
Elizabeth Cauffman et. al., Age Differences in Affective Decision Making as Indexed by Performance on
the Iowa Gambling Test, DEV. PSYCHOL., 193 (2010).
• Study showing that adolescents perform more poorly than adults in decision-making tasks where
affective processing is involved and respond differently to rewards.
• “[D]ecision making, which frequently precedes engaging in risk-taking behavior, indeed
improves throughout adolescence and into young adulthood … this improvement may be due not
to cognitive maturation but to changes in affective processing. Whereas adolescents may attend
more to the potential rewards of a risky decision than to the potential costs, adults tend to
consider both, even weighing costs more than rewards.
This higher level of approach behavior during adolescence coupled with the lesser inclination
toward harm avoidance may help explain increased novelty-seeking in adolescence, which can
lead to various types of risk taking, including experimentation with drugs, unprotected sex, and
delinquent activity.” (206)
Laurence Steinberg, Adolescent Development and Juvenile Justice, 16 ANN. REV. OF CLINICAL
PSYCHOL. 47 (2008).
• Excellent overview of adolescent development research. Outlines the implications of adolescent
brain, cognitive, and psychosocial development on culpability, competence to stand trial, and
impact of sanctions on adolescents.
Laurence Steinberg, A Social Neuroscience Perspective on Adolescent Risk-taking, 28
DEVELOPMENTAL REV. 78 (2008).
• Summarizes brain development research and discusses why risk-taking behavior increases from
childhood to adolescence and decreases from adolescence to adulthood.
• “As a consequence of [neural transformations], relative to prepubertal individuals, adolescents
who have gone through puberty are more inclined to take risks in order to gain rewards, an
inclination that is exacerbated by the presence of peers. This increase in reward-seeking … has
its onset around the onset of puberty, and likely peaks sometime around age 15, after which it
begins to decline. Behavioral manifestations of these changes are evident in a wide range of
experimental and correlational studies using a diverse array of tasks and self-report instruments
… and are logically linked to well-documented structural and functional changes in the brain.”
(92)
Jeffrey Fagan, Juvenile Crime and Criminal Justice: Resolving Border Disputes, 18 FUTURE OF
CHILDREN 81 (2008). http://futureofchildren.org/futureofchildren/publications/docs/18_02_05.pdf (last
visited Apr. 30, 2010)
• “Without exception the research evidence shows that policies promoting transfer of adolescents
from juvenile to criminal court fail to deter crime among sanctioned juveniles and may even
worsen public safety risks. The weight of empirical evidence strongly suggests that increasing
the scope of transfer has no general deterrent effects on the incidence of serious juvenile crime or
specific deterrent effects on the re-offending rates of transferred youth. In fact, compared with
youth retained in juvenile court, youth prosecuted as adults had higher rates of rearrest for serious
felony crimes such as robbery and assault. They were also rearrested more quickly and were
more often returned to incarceration.” (105)
Barry Feld, A Slower Form of Death, 22 NOTRE DAME J.L. ETHICS & PUB. POL’Y 9 (2008).
• Argues that the diminished responsibility rationale in Roper should be extended by state
legislatures to recognize youthfulness as a categorical mitigating factor in sentencing.