Data from the Balloon Analogue Risk Task, however, is mixed in terms of its value as predictive of drug use problems. Among young adults and adolescents, greater risk-taking in the BART is associated with increased use of alcohol and other drugs.224, 236, 237 Alternatively, other studies have found that young adult tobacco users take less risk in the BART than non-smoking controls,238 and that among a large sample of adults with alcohol use problems, greater risk-taking in the BART predicted less severe clinical symptomatology.239, 240 Dean et al.238 have suggested that this negative relationship may be due to the risk-taking being confounded with delay discounting since task performance requires persistence and patience; furthermore, unlike the other tasks described here, reduced risk-taking in the BART is, in the economic sense, a suboptimal strategy since diminished risk-taking ultimately results in smaller earnings.
