Response to Helfinstein & Casey

In response, we welcome the opportunity to express agreement with a few of their key points, to respectfully disagree on one point, and (hopefully) to clarify some issues that we regard as potential misunderstandings.First of all, we agree that the paradoxes of adolescent behavior represent a complex and fascinating set of issues that will require better integration of several conceptual and empirical approaches.We certainly did not mean to imply that the goal of our paper was an effort to explain all (or even most) of adolescent risk taking with a simple model, but rather to address one developmental component contributing to this complex picture, focusing on a hypothesis that may provide insight into one (affective) dimension of developmental changes in association with pubertal maturation.More specifically, the goal of our paper was not to suggest that [in their words]: "adolescence [is] one big roller coaster ride of thrills in the face of potential danger. .."; moreover, we do not regard the central premise of our paper as being that "teens find threatening situations exciting."More generally, we feel strongly that there is value in moving beyond general statements about "the teen brain" (and what we regard as on over-reliance on results from cross-sectional studies that often span several of the 'teen' years) and instead focus on studies designed to understand specific developmental processes.Accordingly, our study