Avoidance in Adolescence: The Balloon Risk Avoidance Task (BRAT)

Abstract

A large body of work documents the utility of behavioral risk tasks for making inferences about adolescent risk-taking proclivities and related emotional and motivational correlates. Much less attention has been paid to risk-avoidance during adolescence. We provide validity data for a behavioral measure designed to assess avoidance, the Balloon Risk-Avoidance Task (BRAT). We examined avoidance in 127 youth, ages 10-17 (51% female, 68% Caucasian). Correlation analyses indicated significant positive associations between anxiety, fear, and BRAT avoidance behavior. Providing discriminant validity, avoidance on the BRAT was unrelated to depressive symptoms, depressed mood, or trait surgency (approach motivation). The BRAT was negatively associated with risk-taking behavior on the Balloon Analog Risk Task (BART). IQ and age were not associated with avoidance on the BRAT. We found that females showed significantly more avoidance behavior than males, but sex did not moderate the association between anxiety and avoidance. Cluster-based analyses revealed a subset of youth in mid-to-late adolescence showing significantly greater levels of avoidance behavior on the BRAT. These adolescents had higher levels of reported anxiety symptoms compared to individuals in mid-to-late who show lower levels of avoidance. Findings are discussed in terms of the clinical implications and the potential role that avoidance serves as both protective and risk factors in youth.

The effect of pubertal status on self-regulation of behavior – a systematic review

“…In tasks involving risk-taking, if the results are to be used as an index of self-regulation, the task must have a strategic component that requires the capacity to choose the best course of action -and the performance in the task must assess whether or not the test-taker succeed in doing so. To illustrate this point, consider the Balloon Analogue Risk-Taking task (BART; Lejuez et al, 2007), and its recent cousin, the Balloon Risk-Avoidance Task (BRAT; Crowley et al, 2021). Both these tasks can involve strategic decisionmaking under uncertainty, where participants gain points by progressively inflating or deflating virtual balloons through button presses, but lose all points if the balloon burst, which occurs at unexpected levels of balloon total size.…”

“…The ideal performance must reflect a balance between inflating the balloon as much as possible (in the BART) or deflating it as little as possible (in the BRAT) while avoiding explosions, so that "risk-takers" or "impulsive" individuals should end up with less points than people who are more cautious/less impulsive. However, many studies on adolescents (e.g., Crowley et al, 2021;Collado et al, 2014;Loman et al, 2014) do not take into account the number of balloons that burst or the participants' final earnings. Instead, they used scores like the total number of balloon pumps independently of whether that balloon burst, which does not reflect how participants fare when trying to balance earning more points with the possibility of bursting the balloons.…”