They are creating a major shift in the social experiences of both children and adolescents.

"The presence of peers makes adolescents and youth,but not adults, more likely to take risks," Steinberg and Gardner concluded.

And this finding could have important implications for how we think about educating adolescents.

As careers and vocations become less available during times of recession, adolescents may be especially hard hit.

Contrary to some stereotypes, most adolescents believe they must be tolerant of differences among individuals though they do not always find this easy in the cliquish (拉幫結派的) environment of high school.

In a 2005 study, psychologist Laurence Steinberg of Temple University and his co-author, psychologist Margo Gardner, then at Temple, divided 6 people into three age groups: young adolescents, with a mean age of 14; older adolescents, with a mean age of 19

Older adolescents scored about 50 percent higher on an index of risky driving when their peers were in the room — and the driving of early adolescents was fully twice as reckless when other young teens were around.

piaget argued that once adolescents enter the world of work, their newly acquired ability to form hypotheses allows them to create representations that are too ideal.

Such difficult economic times may leave many adolescents confused about their roles in society.

The 28 existence of such ideals, without the tempering of the reality of a job or profession, rapidly leads adolescents to become 29 intolerant of the non-idealistic world and to press for reform in a characteristically adolescent way.

The results: Teens who played the Iowa Gambling Task under the eyes of fellow adolescents engaged in more exploratory behavior, learned faster from both positive and negative outcomes, and achieved better performance on the task than those who played in s

There is another explanation that Twenge and her colleagues wanted to address: the impact of the great recession of 2007-2009, which hit a great number of American families and might be affecting adolescents.

They found that adolescents who spent a very small amount of time on digital devices—a couple of hours a week—had the highest well-being.

Twenge and her colleagues also found that across the key years of 2013-16, well-being was indeed lowest in years where adolescents spent more time online, on social media, and reading news online, and when more youth in the United States had smartphones.