Chapter 2 and Steinberg Article

I have to say that the Steinberg (2008) was incredibly interesting to me. During my undergrad years I majored in psychology, but I also minored in cognitive neuroscience at...Temple University. In addition, I studied the effects of emotional valence and arousal on memory at my previous grad school which definitely had me thinking that about how this affected adolescent risk taking behavior until I got to "Changes in brain connectivity and the development of resistance to peer influence." I knew that emotional information has the ability to differentiate what it is that we exactly remember from an event. For example, the weapon focus effect (Loftus et al., 1987).  It would make sense that adolescents would be more prone to risk taking behavior if certain details of a memory are encoded and consolidated more strongly than others. In addition, executive functioning of the prefrontal cortex is still developing in this age demographic.

My personal journey of adolescent risk taking only began by the time I turned 18. Up until that point, I had never been interested in any of it because I was too busy trying to be an overachiever in school to satisfy my mother's expectations. It was only when I chose to move out during my senior year of high school that I drank for the first time and smoked cigarettes. I don't even remember my school doing much of anything to prevent student's from these behaviors. The only memory that comes to mind for me now is how my classmates would make jokes about what the letters of D.A.R.E. actually meant. My only goal for myself at that point in my life was to get as far away as I could from my hometown and go to college.

As I began reading the chapter in the textbook for this week, I could not help but to reflect on my own childhood. I have contemplated many times why I act the particular way that I do in certain situations. I found the questions posed for reflection on p. 51 had me going back to childhood memories of how my parents expressed particular emotions while connecting it to how I express myself today. I definitely grew up in a household of authoritarian parents. In addition, I also grew up in a biracial family where I took on and tried to uphold the expectations of two different cultures (German and Korean).

References

Corey,G.,& Corey, M.S. (2008). I never knew I had a choice: Explorations in personal growth. (9th ed.). Belmont, California: Thompson Brooks/Cole.

Loftus, E.F., Loftus, G.R., Messo, J. (1987). Some facts about "weapon focus." Law and Human Behavior, 11(1), 55-62.

Steinberg, L. (2008). A social neuroscience perspective on adolescent risk-taking. Developmental Review, 78-106.