Teens Under-Use Empathy Region of Brain

Teenagers under-use the region of the brain involved in considering their own and other people's emotions according to a study presented at the BA Festival of Science at University College London.

In the study, adult and teen-aged participants were asked to consider the actions they would take in various social situations while brain activity was scanned with an fMRI.

While the groups chose similar responses, the pre-frontal cortex, the area of the brain associated with empathy, understanding and guilt, was far more active in adult respondents. Teens meanwhile, showed higher activity in the superior temporal sulcus, a part of the brain associated with predicting future actions based on past actions.

"The fact that teenagers use a different area of the brain than adults when considering what to do suggests they may think less about the impact of their actions on other people and how they are likely to make other people feel," said Dr. Sarah-Jayne Blakemore of the UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience.

A second study presented showed that adolescents are also less capable of considering situations from someone else's perspective. When asked to gauge how another person would feel in various scenarios, adults were able to make far quicker assessments than teens.

Dr. Blakemore said: "It seems that adults might be better at putting themselves in other people's mental shoes and thinking about the emotional impact of actions -- but further analysis is required. The relative difficulty that teenagers have could be down to them using a different strategy when trying to understand someone else's perspective, perhaps because the relevant part of the brain is still developing. The other factor to consider is that adults have had much more social experience.

"Whatever the reasons, it is clear that teenagers are dealing with, not only massive hormonal shifts, but also substantial neural changes."