Hazard anticipation of young novice drivers - SWOV

with lesions in the OFC and/or VMPC have difficulties with empathy, control
over emotions and the weighing of risks (see Wallis, 2007 for a review).
Loss averse means that people are generally more sensitive to the
possibility of losing something than gaining something (Tversky &
Kahneman, 1981). Barbalat et al. (2010) suggested that adolescents may be
less loss averse than adults as they are less affected by anticipated
punishment than adults. The neural substrate for this phenomena are hypo
activations in regions involved in negative emotions such as the amygdala or
the insular cortex of the brains of adolescents during tasks when losses are
anticipated (Bjork et al., 2004). Not only when losses are anticipated, but also
when gains are anticipated adolescents show lower activation in various
subcortical regions than adults, most importantly in the nucleus accumbens
(Bjork et al., 2004). The lower activation or no activation in adolescents of
various subcortical regions in mainly the ventral striatum when anticipating
gain or loss compared to adults is in support of the hypothesis of Spear
(2000) that adolescents require more intense stimuli to experience positive or
negative feelings than adults. This for example implies that they have to
drive faster than adults do in order to experience the same amount of
pleasure from driving fast. The third aspect mentioned by Barbalat et al.
(2010), intertemporal choice, means that direct reward is preferred above
long term reward. Thus, a girl may not wear a helmet when riding on a
moped because a helmet will ruin her hairdo. This is considered to be more
important than the fact that the helmet protects your head in case of a crash.
When in an fMRI study both adolescents and adults were asked if they
considered it a good idea to swim with sharks, both groups responded that
this was not a good idea. Adolescents however needed more time to reach
this conclusion than adults and while thinking about an answer, adolescents
showed relatively greater activation in the right DLPFC than adults (Baird,
Fugelsang, & Bennett, 2005). The relatively greater activation of the DLPFC
during the task indicates that adolescents in away are more rational than
adults when thinking about swimming with sharks. Adults 'feel' negative
emotions (activation of subcortical areas) and without much thinking (little
activation of the DLPFC required) immediately decide that swimming with
sharks is a bad idea. How this may function is elaborated in Chapter 3 when
the somatic marker theory (Damasio, 1994) is discussed. Adolescents on the
other hand probably first 'think' that swimming with sharks could be exiting,
but in the end come to the conclusion that the negative aspects (being eaten
by sharks) outweigh the positive aspects (activation of the DLPFC). In this
task, adolescents showed greater activation in the DLPFC whereas this
region of the brain is not yet fully matured.
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