Last week I was in Paris attending the 2019 International Convention of Psychological Science in Paris, for which I had organised the symposium ‘Risk Taking Across the Life Span: Integrating Biological, Cognitive and Social Perspectives’. The overarching aim of the symposium was to bring together researchers from different disciplines in order to exchange ideas and find a common road map for the study of individual differences in risk taking. Alongside talks from Iroise Dumontheil (Birkbeck, University of London) and Richard Karlsson Linnér (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam), I presented some work we conducted at CDS. As you can gauge from our title slides, the three of us share an interest in biological and developmental aspects of risk taking.

I also attended other symposia on risk taking, but found the lack of awareness of measurement issues disappointing. It seems that as a discipline, we have not made much progress in bridging the gap between lab measures and real-world outcomes, not just within the context of risk-taking research but within the context of psychological research in general. This needs to change.

Apart from our own symposium, the conference featured several keynote addresses, and I was excited to learn one of them was to be given by BJ Casey. BJ Casey is an eminent Professor of Psychology at Yale University, who has spent most of her academic career researching adolescent development by focusing on the adolescent brain. I found it interesting that the title of her talk promised to illuminate adolescence both from the perspective of a period of adaptive and arrested development, yet most of the work she presented adopted primarily one measure and focused predominantly on the maladaptive rather than the adaptive aspect of adolescent decision making. Still, some impressive work across several years involving many collaborations and many more doctoral students.