Risky decisions increase with age and reach peaks in adolescence and early adulthood before declining again during adulthood. Although risky decisions are commonly made by adolescents, it may have long-term negative impacts on life later. The Iowa Gambling Task (IGT), proposed about three decades ago, is the most common task used to investigate risky decision-making. It was developed based on the somatic marker hypothesis, which assumed that individuals’ behaviors are implicitly influenced by reward and punishment experiences, and these experiences would send emotional information to drive individuals’ decision-making behaviors toward beneficial long-term directions. However, only the emotional decision-making process was addressed in IGT, which may not sufficiently account for adolescents’ risky decision processes. Recently, cognitive neuroscience research suggested that risky decision-making involves two systems in the brain. Risky decision-making increases between childhood and adolescence as a result of changes around the time of puberty of the brain’s socio-emotional system that leads to increased reward-seeking, especially when peers are present. The socio-emotional system has been shown to rely on the ventral tegmentum area, subcortical structures (ventral striatum and amygdala) and cortical structures (the insular and medial/orbital frontal cortex). This system is operated automatically based on similarity and contiguity, and behavior is influenced by emotional impulse. Risky decision-making decreases between adolescence and adulthood because of changes in the brain’s cognitive-control system – changes which improve individuals’ ability for self-control, which occur gradually and over the course of adolescence and young adulthood. The cognitive-control system is assumed to rely on the dorsal and ventral area of the lateral prefrontal cortex and posterior parietal cortex. The differing timetables of these two brain systems make mid-adolescence a time of heightened vulnerability to make risky decisions. Consequently, researchers tended to argue that biased behavioral decision making was due to an imbalance between emotion and cognition processes. The Columbia Card Task (CCT) was proposed to measure individuals’ emotion and cognition processes in decision making. However, the construct validity of this measurement was unclear, and it was not only complex and time- consuming in the implementation of the original task design but also considered the changes of scores instead of including the effects of social factors (i.e., peers and social reward) on decision making processes. The main purpose of this study was referring and revising (simplifying) the original design of CCT and adding other tasks that incorporated social reference of peers’ decisions and social rewards of recognition into a revised CCT task to evaluate the construct validity of this social risky decision-making task. There were 269 eighth graders who consented to participate in this study, and multilevel confirmatory factor analysis was conducted to take into account nesting structure. The results showed: (1) The original design of CCT with minor revisions (reducing decision options from three to two) was effective in eliciting emotion and cognition processes. (2) Simplified CCT tasks incorporating social factors were also effective in eliciting the effects of social reference and social reward. (3) The social risky decision-making task held good construct validity. Future studies are encouraged to utilize this measurement to understand the effects of adolescents’ risky decision-making on cognition and behavior. For guidance and counseling practices, it is encouraged to understand the extent of risky decision-making for adolescents through present tasks to identify adolescents who are vulnerable to make risky decisions as early as possible and to regularly show care and help through guidance and counseling. Moreover, clarifying which adolescents are more likely to make risky decisions because of the presence of peers or social rewards helps to understand the potential impacts of risky decisions under different decision conditions. This study is beneficial for guidance and counseling practitioners to provide more precise interventions.
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