Higher risk taking in both young and old.

This is an important issue and need lots of feedback from experts. I will give my view after some analysis.

Dear Geneviève,

You ask the following: " Does anxiety lead to higher or lower risk-taking in adolescence?

As you say, there are different kinds of risk-taking. When an unemployee decides to set up his/her own business (e.g., a laundy) s/he is taking lower risks than when s/he decides to own a mall or supermarket.

As a psychologist, I think that almost by defintion, anxious people like living, say, in their confort zone and hence they are not, say, much inclined to take risks. To take risks, namely higher risks, would amount for them to coming out their confort zone and becoming more anxious or even depressed. It can be the case that anxiety pushes both adolescents to take more risks than those that are, say, part and parcel of their daily lifes. However, there is accumulated evidence that shows that anxiety is linked to risk aversion in adolescents. More to the point, anxiety is a debilitating factor in many situations. Exams anxiety is a typical example.

KInd regards.

Orlando

I am not familiar with the related literature, but as a researcher I would expect some adolescents to head for higher and some for lower risk-taking behaviors. The ways people deal with negative emotions are varying by persons, contexts, etc. If I may ask, is your question research-oriented?

Valuable contributions by respected colleagues on this discussion

Hello and thank you all for your anwsers.

I'm not sure how to answer each person individually. I am only a third-year psychology student (in France) and for one of the courses, we have to write a project. I chose "the influence of anxiety on risk-taking in adolescence. It's not a proper research paper : we must write about a "pseudo study" : abstract, state of the question, hypothesis, procedure, results and discussion.

I saw I could ask a question so thought "Why not?" But I wasn't really expecting and answer. And I'm certainly no specialist.

As Georgios pointed out, I tend to think that there are different reactions to risk-taking among anxious people, depending on the degree of anxiety maybe, and the kind of anxiety.

It also depends on what you call "risk taking". Taking drugs is risky but it might also help to aleviate anxiety.

And then there's the issue of peer influence : the presence of peers tends to increase risk-taking among adolecents. But what about adolescents suffering from social phobia ?

It is indeed a complex question. And an intesresting one. As psychology always is :-)

I completely agree with Orlando M Lourenço. swedish youth's drug use

seems to be linking to e.g. impulsivity:

Risk-taking may depend on the type of coping strategy the adolescent uses. However, children with congenital bleeding disorders , those who should be more careful with what they were doing were more inclined to put them selves at risk for damages.

Anxiety may be viewed positive or negative by individuals. We would think that anxiety would keep a person rather in low-risk taking state but maybe anxiety rises in a low-risk taking state due to constant returns in money, recognition, compliments, social integration etc. Anxiety is ultimately inevitable whether it leads us to low or high risk and as such anxiety is relatively keeping now at low-risk and now at high-risk as adolescents and there are other factors that contribute to anxiety leading us to high-risk or low-risk undertakings. That would really depend on the coping strategy of individuals as S. Béatrice Marianne Ewalds-Kvist mentioned. Some cope at low-risk heavily and the produced anxiety leads them to high-risk to solve the problem of the low-risk state while at high-risk the coping strategy will lead us to a level where anxiety again leads us to a low-risk state/choice etc. As Einstein's theory entitles, perhaps that may be a relative and very probable thing to determine.