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Teen brains
May. 23rd, 2015 11:17 pmLet me preface this by saying that I’m not thinking about this because I need to better understand D; he’s easy to interact with and has pretty good judgment. Rather, I’m working on a proposal for the fall on the topic of teen susceptibility to certain kinds of risky behavior (using tobacco and e-cigarettes), and it would be helpful to know what the current state of knowledge is. (I confess that I know very little about the brain – psychology is a big field, and I’m at the other side of it.)
Anyhow, so, teenagers seem prone to all-or-nothing, black-and-white thinking. They’re rather more likely than adults to make big pronouncements with unwarranted certainty. Why is this?
Jane Loevinger described this phenomenon as a lower degree of “cognitive complexity” and said that it can last until the mid-20s. Meanwhile, we now know that teenagers have a more active limbic system (causing stronger emotions) starting with puberty, but the prefrontal cortex, which regulates good judgment, isn’t fully mature until around age 25. Does that mean that we need a fully developed prefrontal cortex before we engage in and value more nuanced thinking? And meanwhile, does this active limbic system somehow make us feel more certain about things? Or is it more a situational matter – teens have to exercise more judgment than younger children do, and it no longer feels right to just parrot what the adults tell them, but they’re under more pressure because their lives are now more complex, with so many possible directions, and (just like happens to adults under pressure), they then want to have more closure on matters of interest, more of a sense of certainty and knowing for sure how things are?
Also, I don’t know if adolescents are more into all-or-nothing thinking than younger kids are. Maybe they’re the same, or even less inclined that way, but it’s just so much more obvious for teens because they’re thinking about and talking about more issues. Or maybe there’s something about being a teen (that limbic system again) that makes things more dramatic than they were for younger kids.
Anyhow, so, teenagers seem prone to all-or-nothing, black-and-white thinking. They’re rather more likely than adults to make big pronouncements with unwarranted certainty. Why is this?
Jane Loevinger described this phenomenon as a lower degree of “cognitive complexity” and said that it can last until the mid-20s. Meanwhile, we now know that teenagers have a more active limbic system (causing stronger emotions) starting with puberty, but the prefrontal cortex, which regulates good judgment, isn’t fully mature until around age 25. Does that mean that we need a fully developed prefrontal cortex before we engage in and value more nuanced thinking? And meanwhile, does this active limbic system somehow make us feel more certain about things? Or is it more a situational matter – teens have to exercise more judgment than younger children do, and it no longer feels right to just parrot what the adults tell them, but they’re under more pressure because their lives are now more complex, with so many possible directions, and (just like happens to adults under pressure), they then want to have more closure on matters of interest, more of a sense of certainty and knowing for sure how things are?
Also, I don’t know if adolescents are more into all-or-nothing thinking than younger kids are. Maybe they’re the same, or even less inclined that way, but it’s just so much more obvious for teens because they’re thinking about and talking about more issues. Or maybe there’s something about being a teen (that limbic system again) that makes things more dramatic than they were for younger kids.