Internally, adolescents go through big hormonal changes and fine tuning of the neural networks that can both produce and manage emotions. Externally, adolescents experience big shifts in the structure and significance of social relationships (such as with parents, peers, romantic partners, new experiences, increasing social demands). When these internal and external changes come together it can result in affective experiences and behaviors that can be overwhelming and confusing and sometimes difficult to manage.

Why is the emotional life of an adolescent complex both inside and out?

Internally, adolescents go through big hormonal changes and fine tuning of the neural networks that can both produce and manage emotions. Externally, adolescents experience big shifts in the structure and significance of social relationships (such as with parents, peers, romantic partners, new experiences, increasing social demands). When these internal and external changes come together it can result in affective experiences and behaviors that can be overwhelming and confusing and sometimes difficult to manage.

What has been discovered through the use of methodological advances?

There have been recent methodological advances in neuroscience that have led to improvement in our understanding of neurobiological mechanisms of the emotional lives of adolescents. Three of these discoveries that will be highlighted in this summary are as follows:

• Adolescence is characterized by a high level of emotionality and an increase in psychopathological levels of dysfunctional affect.

• A principal task of adolescence that relates to social-cognitive development is learning to manage one’s emotional reactions.

• Adolescents’ affective behavior is, in addition to the influence of brain maturation, intertwined with a number of other psychological factors that modify emotional experience.

Why would emotionality be heightened during adolescence?

Adolescents show high levels of emotionality compared with adults and the emotionality differs from emotionality in early childhood. Emotions tend to be more frequent, intense and volatile. From a functional perspective it could be said that human emotions have been preserved throughout evolutionary history to promote adaptive responses to salient events. Stimuli with emotional salience tend to attract our attention. The affective characteristics of these stimuli then serve to direct our attention to critical information, generate a behavioral response, facilitate learning and help create adaptive response patterns.

What is the long term impact of heightened emotionality?

Increased risk for psychopathology

During adolescence there is an increased risk for psychopathology that involves dysregulated affect. The onset of psychiatric disorders during adolescence is high, particularly with regards to mood, anxiety and substance use disorders. When the type, strength or coordination across neurophysiological systems is not optimal for a particular context, emotional reactions can become maladaptive.

Adolescence is a period of both vulnerability and opportunity

The “storm and stress” of adolescence is not universally experienced, but evidence supports adolescence as a time of hypersensitivity for different kinds of emotional experiences. Adolescents are also more susceptible to mortality and morbidity due to behaviors that are directly related to emotional experiences (think of accidents, excessive alcohol and drug use, sexual promiscuity). However, this dynamic of emotionality and risk taking may also have beneficial outcomes, because adolescents are also more prone to emotional forces that facilitate prosocial behavior (such as academic and artistic behavior).

Long term maladaptive patterns

The brain may be in a state of localized hyper-plasticity as circuits mature during adolescence. Throughout the teenage years many of the brain circuits that are involved in social information processing continue to develop. Adolescence thus represents a sensitive period for the long term organization of social behavior. Increased interaction with peers and the emergence of sexual behaviors that are brought on by changes in social emotions establishes certain behavioral patterns and the adoption of group social norms and group culture tends to be more profound during adolescence.

Why does heightened emotionality take place during adolescence?

Specific behaviors and non-sexual social behaviors are critically dependent on the presence of gonadal hormones during adolescence. The ‘organizational effects’ of gonadal hormones on brain function was thought to occur primarily during perinatal andlate gestation periods of development, but now it is known that a second organizational wave occurs during puberty. In addition to the organizational effects of pubertal hormones, a number of acute or excitatory effects of hormones on brain function have been observed, many of which relate to heightened emotionality.

How can cognitive control over behavior and emotional reactions be refined?

Cognitive control during adolescence is gained through a gradually emerging modulatory control neural system. During early adolescence there is a peak of emotionality, which is followed by an emerging ability to exert greater self-directed control over behaviors and emotions. Especially dual systems and imbalance conceptual models of adolescent neurodevelopment show this very well and characterize neocortical systems as developing increasing inhibitory control over striatal and limbic regions as adolescence continues.

What do the terms ‘mentalizing’ and ‘perspective-taking’ mean and what role do they play in adolescence?

Mentalizing refers to the ability to understand the mental and emotional state of other individuals. Perspective-taking refers to the ability to understand the perspective of other individuals. If we understand others’ mental states, we can figure out their goals and behaviors and adjust our own behavior accordingly. Some basic aspects of mentalizing are functional from an early age, but more nuanced capabilities that are linked to changes in the prefrontal cortex continue to develop throughout adolescence.

What is self-appraisal and what role does it play in adolescence?

Self-appraisal refers to the evaluation of one’s own strengths and weaknesses, one’s own self-efficacy. It is part of one of the important tasks of adolescent development, namely exploring and establishing one’s sense of individual identity. Adolescents deepen and expand the values, interests and capabilities that define themselves an as individual and they consider how that self-definition compares to others around them.

How and why does social learning take place during adolescence?

Social and appetitive learning are critical for shaping subsequent behavior during adolescence. Learning occurs when outcomes are different from what was expected or when experience is repeated and predictions about outcomes are improved. The neural networks that underlie adolescents’ emotions are very important. The striatum and the prefrontal cortex are involved in appetitive learning. During adolescence, the functional connections between the striatum and the prefrontal cortex during an appetitive prediction error task have been shown to strengthen. This indicates that forming functional connections between the striatum and prefrontal cortex may be an important aspects of social learning in adolescence.

What is emotion regulation?

Emotion regulation is the ability to engage in processes that alter how one experiences or expresses emotions. This process begins in infancy but becomes more independent and sophisticated while growing up as metacognitive skills are refined. The strategies change from involving behavior (like looking away) to cognitive regulation (like thinking about the situation from another perspective). To be able to regulate emotions is critical in navigating and managing one’s interactions with others and it is an important task for adolescents.

What is cognitive reappraisal?

Cognitive reappraisal is an emotion regulation strategy that becomes more refined during adolescence. It involves altering emotions by changing one’s thoughts and requires cognitive effort to reframe the stimulus or experience. This strategy occurs early in the emotion generation process and is effective at reducing negative affect. Increased age relates to greater success with emotion regulation attempts, but not to emotional reactivity. The structural development of the prefrontal cortex is implicated in the use of emotion regulation strategies. Neuroimaging results indicate that emotional regulatory efficiency increases with age and with prefrontal cortex maturation.

What influence has the context on the emotional adolescent brain?

The neural circuits that support affective responding are highly sensitive to contextual influences, especially during adolescence. The adolescent brain is highly attuned to social inputs, to facilitate flexible responding in a constantly changing social context. Peer social interactions take on increasing salience during adolescence. Neurologically, protracted ventral prefrontal cortex development takes place to accommodate the need for children and adolescents to develop social flexibility.

What are the short term social-contextual influences on social-affective neural circuitry?

Social influences on the brain’s processing of affective stimuli and situation can operate within relatively short time frames or within discrete situations or exchanges with others. Three short term social-contextual influences will be discussed here, namely peer presence, peer feedback and parent-child interaction.

• The presence of peers increases risk-taking behavior and heightens the responsivity of the brain’s reward circuit in adolescents but not adults. With regards to prosocial behavior, adolescents engaged in greater prosocial behavior when their peers were present. During mentalizing and in response to social influence, the prefrontal cortex was activated and TPJ involvement increased associated with more advanced types of perspective-taking.

• Adolescents derive a sense of belonging and identity from their peers’ judgments and acceptance or rejection of them. Research indicates that the brain regions involved in reward-processing, mentalizing and self-processing respond to social evaluation differently as a function of development and are modulated by expectations about social feedback and its valence.

• Even though peer relationships become more important during adolescence, adolescents continue to care what their parents think about them. When listening to critical comments, adolescents showed increased brain activity in subcortical limbic regions, but decreased activity in regions of the brain that subserve cognitive control of emotion. Developing adolescents fail to recruit cognitive control networks to help them regulate their emotions when passively listening to critical comments from their mothers.

What are the long term social-contextual influences on social-affective neural circuitry?

Neural circuits that support affective behavior are also shaped by earlier social experience. Extreme stress and adverse experiences early in life influence the functioning of the adolescent brain within circuits that support affective behavior, but also variations in the socil context within the more typical range of experience and in the years more proximal to adolescence can influence adolescent brain function.

• Earlier experiences with peers have long term effects on subsequent neural correlates of affective behavior. For example, the experience of peer victimization during middle childhood sensitizes the adolescent brain to social exclusion later in adolescence.

• The quality of peer relationships has been found to influence neural response to appetitive stimuli. It has the potential to modulate the sensitivity of reward and threat circuits to future affective cues. For example, risk taking may serve to integrate individuals within new social networks in adolescence. For those with already established stable peer networks, the rewards associated with risk taking may be diminished.

• The adolescent brain is also responsive to social inputs from the family environment. Given continued plasticity in the neural circuitry that supports affective behavior during adolescence, relationships with the parents remain influential on how adolescents process and manage both positive and negative emotional experiences. For example, warm and supportive parenting earlier in adolescence may have neuroprotective effects on adolescent brain development.

What role do individual differences play in brain function and affective behavior?

Individuals vary in their ability to modulate their emotions. For some, comprised emotion regulation can lead to increased dysfunction. When emotions (for example fear, anxiety, sadness) are coming up in inappropriate social contexts, or when their arousal is unpredictable or extreme and are incongruent with the situational demands, they have become dysfunctional or psychopathological. Increased sensitivity to peer feedback is normative during adolescence, but the process appears to be particularly enhanced for youth with anxiety and depression. Research indicates that individual differences in neural responses to socially-relevant affective stimuli are increasingly thought to play a role in the emergence of anxiety and depression amongst adolescents.