Teen Risk-Taking

Robert Fettgather teaches psychology at Mission College in Santa Clara California. He is interested in adolescent development, including positive risk-taking behavior. 

How should a teenager realize and claim their adulthood? Some adolescents may assert their man or womanhood by engaging in pro-social activities while others engage in high-risk behaviors. A first driver’s license is a case in point. Some adolescents express that it represents their own coming of age with an adult responsibility. For others, that also means risky behavior behind the wheel. 

Teens who routinely engage in risky behavior may be attempting to invent their own rites of passage. Of course, much depends on the peer group with which they identify and what constitutes a risk. For one teenager, the rite may involve preparing to audition for the school play. For another adolescent, it may involve joining a street gang that may provide a sense of belonging and protection in unsafe communities.

Remembering key elements of their own rites of passage, some adults recall alcohol/coffee/smoking as well as important relationships in ways the could inform their own parenting. Researchers believe that parents of teens must somehow allow for both limits and choices within those limits.

Adolescents have two, apparently contradictory, tasks in their relationships with their parents- to establish autonomy from them and to maintain a sense of relatedness with them. That is, teens could strive to separate/individuate while retaining a parental connection. Relatedness to parents has benefits. For example, teens who are close to their parents are less likely to use drugs. 

Besides the teen-parent relationship, peers become far more significant in adolescence than they have been at any earlier period. Peers who value prosocial risk taking are another positive influence on teen development.

Eyewitness Testimony

Robert Fettgather holds a BA in psychology from San Jose State University as well as Masters and Doctoral degrees. He works as an associate faculty at Mission College in Santa Clara, educating students in different areas of psychology and human development. He is interested in the role of memory as it impacts the lifespan

If you have watched some dramas based on our legal system, you no doubt know how fictional attorneys esteem the eye witness in the court room. While eyewitness testimony is quite persuasive to a courtroom of jurors, it may not be particularly reliable.

Elizabeth Loftus has spent over thirty years studying the reliability of eyewitness memories. She has demonstrated that what people see and hear about an event after the fact can actually affect the accuracy of their recollections for that event. Following a traumatic childhood experience with a false memory, Loftus began to study rich false memories characterized by “the subjective feeling that one is experiencing a genuine recollection, replete with sensory details, and even expressed with confidence and emotion, even though the event never happened."

The very nature of memory may make it an unreliable source of information in court. Specifically, memory is reconstructive. We tend to remember only some aspects of any given event. To make our accounts of the event make sense, we re-construct it, filling in with detail that is generated by our minds to make sense of the event. Recollecting the event, most of us fail to recognize the imperfect nature of the remembrance.

The retrieval of memories is a much more constructive process than most people assume. Several other factors affect the accuracy of information retrieval. One such factor is the misinformation effect in which false information presented after an event influences the memory of that event. When insinuations or suggestions from others engender inaccurate memories, this is referred to as the false memory syndrome. All of this and much more can complicate legal proceedings.