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Fourteen year old Sebastian smokes a cigarette in his grandmother`s yard during a family meeting in downtown Santiago, September 06, 2005. Most Chileans have their first cigarette at age 15, says the government's National Narcotics Control Council. Overall, 26 percent of teenage girls and 55 percent of Chilean women aged 19-25 smoke. PHOTO - REUTERS |
DUBLIN - Teenage angst and clashes with authority may be caused by changes in youngsters' brains during puberty, but luckily for harassed parents the problems pass. The ability of boys and girls to decode social cues and recognise emotions, particularly anger and sadness, dips between the ages of 12 and 14, researchers at University College London and the Institute of Child Health have discovered.
"It would appear that this is a function of the development of their brain at that time," Professor David Skuse, of the group's behavioural science unit, told a conference. "It is a real biologically based phenomenon from which, fortunately, they recover," he added.
So rather than rebellious teenagers being deliberately obstinate or difficult, their brains may be unable to detect subtle signs from parents, teachers and other adults or to decode them correctly. The same brain circuits involved in recognising facial expression are also associated with processing tone of voice,
according to Skuse. But the problem seems to disappear by the age of 16 or 17.
Skuse, who presented the findings at the British Association for the Advancement of Science conference in the Irish capital, found the dip during puberty while studying 6,000 children as part of his research into autism, a condition that affects far more boys than girls. All of the children, aged 6-16, were asked to do certain tasks such as remembering faces, establishing eye contact and distinguishing emotions by looking at photographs of faces which depicted happiness, sadness, anger, fear, surprise and disgust. "All those are abilities related to our capacity to interact appropriately with other people socially and are abilities that are supposedly deficient in people who are autistic," Skuse explained.
He and his colleagues found that at the age of six girls were better than boys in interpreting emotions and social cues. But by puberty, when the body is going through hormonal changes, there was a drop in the ability of both sexes to perform the tasks. "It
looks as though when the brain reorganises itself during puberty, rewires itself as a consequence of the hormonal changes presumably taking place at that time...we actually get worse at recognising facial expressions and remembering faces we have seen before than we were 5 years previously," said Skuse.
Reuters
