The importance of positive youth development cannot be overstated. We strive to foster healthy mental/emotional, social, spiritual and physical development in our children. Alarmingly high Aboriginal youth suicide rates in some areas call for an increased understanding of how protective factors and risk-taking behaviours influence youth development. This may help us develop strategies to increa...

Trading between conflicting demands is a fundamental part in how animals interact with its environment and social surrounding. Knowledge of what factors shaping trade-off decisions is central in our understanding of animal adaptation and ecology. This thesis summarizes a series of behavioural experiments investigating how animals compromise behaviours depending on environmental background and c...

PURPOSE Social influence is prominent across the lifespan, but sensitivity to influence is especially high during adolescence and is often associated with increased risk taking. Such risk taking can have dire consequences. For example, in American adolescents, traffic-related crashes are leading causes of nonfatal injury and death. Neural measures may be especially useful in understanding the b...

Although immature cognitive control, subserved by late-developing prefrontal regions, has been proposed to underlie increased risk taking during adolescence, it remains unclear what patterns of PFC activation represent mature brain states: more or less activation? One challenge to drawing cogent conclusions from extant work stems from its reliance on single-time point neuroimaging and cross-sec...

According to the dual systems perspective, risk taking peaks during adolescence because activation of an early-maturing socioemotional-incentive processing system amplifies adolescents' affinity for exciting, pleasurable, and novel activities at a time when a still immature cognitive control system is not yet strong enough to consistently restrain potentially hazardous impulses. We review evide...

Evaluating the potential reward and risk associated with a choice of action plays an important role in everyday decision making. However, the details behind how reward and risk affect the decisions for actions remain unclear. The present study investigates the influence of reward and risk on a decision to make a speeded motor response. One hundred and ten college students performed a Speed-Rewa...

OBJECTIVE The aim of the present research was to examine associations between poor driving behaviour (DB), driving when fatigued (DF), risk taking (RT) and road traffic accidents (RTAs). DESIGN The study involved a cross-sectional online survey of clients of an insurance company. The survey measured DB (speeding, distraction, lapses of attention and aggression), RT and frequency of driving wh...

A coupled dynamical recognizer is proposed as a model for simulating turn-taking behaviour. An agent is modelled as a mobile robot with two wheels. A recurrent neural network is used to produce the motor outputs. By controlling this, agents compete to take turns on a two dimensional arena. There are two novel aspects to the present study. First, a dynamical recognizer is not only used for produ...

Objectives—To use research on adolescent risk taking behaviour as an impetus for a community to develop locally based injury prevention strategies. Design—Case study, based on a community action model and formative evaluation. This involved: a community profile on adolescent risk taking behaviour; interviews with service providers; dissemination of research findings to local policy makers; deve...

OBJECTIVES To use research on adolescent risk taking behaviour as an impetus for a community to develop locally based injury prevention strategies. DESIGN Case study, based on a community action model and formative evaluation. This involved: a community profile on adolescent risk taking behaviour; interviews with service providers; dissemination of research findings to local policy makers; de...