This general model of adolescent brain development has been extended betyond the study of risk-taking in several ways. First, as Blakemore and colleagues (this issue) discuss, adolescence is also a time of important changes in the processing of social and emotional information, much of which is subserved by the same regions and systems that undergird the motivational and self-regulatory changes described by writers who have focused on risk taking. Whether and how these various sets of changes may be linked is an important question (Albert & Steinberg, in press). For instance, there is evidence that adolescents are highly responsive to the social rewards afforded by positive peer evaluation and that such rewards activate the same brain regions as non-social rewards (Guyer et al., 2009).
