According to Rivers and colleagues (2008) differences in effective gist processing make adolescents more susceptible to potentially deleterious effects of arousal on decision making. In conditions of heightened arousal, a reduction in behavioral inhibition may cause one to switch from a “reasoned” to a “reactive” or impulsive mode. They further argue that the adolescent tendency to perform more verbatim-analytical processing makes this more likely, while the values and biases of the simpler adult “gist” processing is more impervious to arousal state (Rivers et al., 2008). Others have also argued that adolescent behavior may be particularly sensitive to conditions of high emotional arousal (Dahl, 2001; Spear, 2010). A recent study by Figner and colleagues (2009) directly tested this hypothesis using a task that measured risk taking under different affective conditions. Adolescents and adults performed the Columbia Card Task, in which the level of tolerated risk was examined under conditions of greater/lesser arousal and while varying factors that could be used to make more informed decisions (such as the magnitude of gains/losses and their probability). Adolescents took more risks than adults only
