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The Development of Adolescent Social Cognition

July 2009
Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1167(1):51-6

DOI:10.1111/j.1749-6632.2009.04509.x

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PubMed

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CC BY 2.5

Authors:

Stephanie Burnett Heyes

University of Birmingham

Sarah-Jayne Blakemore

University College London

Adolescence has long been considered a turbulent time; beginning with large changes in hormonal levels and consequent bodily changes, as well as changes in behavior. Recently, neuroscience studies have contributed to this picture of turbulence. We now know that the brain undergoes profound transformation during the teenage years. This paper focuses on how the social brain--the network of brain regions involved in understanding other people and self-awareness--develops during adolescence.

Main effect of social versus basic emotion in adult (left) and adolescent (right) groups: anterior rostral medial prefrontal cortex (arMPFC) is significantly active in both. Graph (bottom) shows the negative correlation between age and activity in arMPFC to social versus basic emotion at the coordinate for which there was a significant group by emotion interaction (see Burnett et al., 2009).

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VALUES, EMPATHY, AND FAIRNESS ACROSS SOCIAL BARRIERS

The Development of Adolescent

Social Cognition

Stephanie Burnett and Sarah-Jayne Blakemore

University College London, Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, London, United Kingdom

Adolescence has long been considered a turbulent time; beginning with large changes in

hormonal levels and consequent bodily changes, as well as changes in behavior. Recently,

neuroscience studies have contributed to this picture of turbulence. We now know that

the brain undergoes profound transformation during the teenage years. This paper

focuses on how the social brain—the network of brain regions involved in understanding

other people and self-awareness—develops during adolescence.

Key words: adolescence; social brain; development

Introduction

Adolescence is deﬁned in humans as the

period of psychological and social transition

between childhood and adulthood. The begin-

ning of adolescence, around the onset of pu-

berty, is characterized by dramatic changes in

hormone levels and, as a result, in physical ap-

pearance. This period of life is also character-

ized by the continued development of social

abilities and behavior as well as neuroanatom-

ical maturation within regions of the brain in-

volved in social cognition.1Recent advances in

cognitive neuroscience are allowing us to begin

to probe the links between unfolding adoles-

cent social cognition and its physical basis in

the brain.

Milestones in Social Ability

from Birth to Adulthood

Human social preferences are apparent at a

very early age. At only a few weeks after birth,

infants direct more smiles toward their care-

giver and other humans than at inanimate ob-

jects, indicating that they differentiate between

Address for correspondence: Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, UCL Institute

of Cognitive Neuroscience, 17 Queen Square, London WC1N 3AR, UK.

Voice: 0044 20 7679 1131. s.blakemore@ucl.ac.uk

social and nonsocial beings. From around 1

year, infants deliberately engage and redirect

the attention of their caregiver by pointing or

vocalizing. By about 2.5 years, children im-

plement complex social tactics, such as teas-

ing, lying, and saving face (bravado).2Over the

next few years, individuals learn to use these

social tactics ﬂexibly in different social situa-

tions. For example, children aged 5 or 6 can

use deception to protect other people’s feelings

(telling “white” lies) in contrast to younger chil-

dren who mainly use deception for self-serving

reasons (e.g., to avoid punishment). A grow-

ing understanding of the self-conscious emo-

tions (such as embarrassment, guilt, and pride)

at around the same age indicates that chil-

dren are beginning to explicitly take other peo-

ple’s feelings into account in their emotional

reactions to situations.3By middle childhood,

concepts of fairness and justice show through

in an emerging tendency to share resources

equally.4

The understanding of how social abilities de-

velop during late childhood and adolescence is

much less complete. Although social psychol-

ogy research on adolescence has been fruitful

since the 1970s,5research into adolescent so-

cial cognitive development, that is, the compo-

nent mental processes that underlie complex

social behaviors, is comparatively younger.6–9

However, accumulating evidence points to the

Values, Empathy, and Fairness across Social Barriers: Ann. N.Y. Acad. Sci. 1167: 51–56 (2009).

doi: 10.1111/j.1749-6632.2009.04509.x c

2009 New York Academy of Sciences.

Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences

continuing development of the ability to read

emotion in faces and of proﬁciency in taking

on other emotional perspectives (stepping into

someone else’s shoes).1

Another important social ability, the abil-

ity to sometimes decide to ignore what others

think you should do (resisting peer inﬂuence),

unfolds during the adolescent years. Steinberg

and Monahan conducted a large study in which

3600 male and female children, adolescents,

and adults completed a questionnaire asking

how likely they would be to do a variety of good,

bad, or neutral actions based on whether other

people were doing the same. It was found that

self-reported resistance to peer inﬂuence (RPI)

increased steadily between the middle and late

teens (ages 14 to 18).10 Another study was con-

ducted by Gardner and Steinberg to look at

the effects of developing RPI on risk-taking be-

havior. A laboratory study was conducted in

which adolescents (aged 13–16), youths (aged

18–22), and adults (24+) played a car-driving

video game either alone or with two friends

present.11 It was found that in the presence of

friends the adolescents (and to a lesser extent

the youths) took many more risks while driving,

for example, failing to stop at a yellow trafﬁc

light. Levels of risk taking did not increase for

adult participants if their friends were watch-

ing, and when adolescents were playing alone

they showed the same level of risk taking as

did adults. Recently, it has been shown that

this laboratory game has parallels in real life.

The Association of British Insurers reported in

2008 that teenagers are three times more likely

to have a fatal crash when driving with peers

compared to when driving alone.12

The onset of adolescence also marks a

change in patterns of social behavior. Teenagers

begin to enjoy the company of their friends

more and to spend more time with them (and

consequently less time with their families). Dur-

ing the time spent together, teenagers begin

to share their worries, secrets, and ambitions

more than they did as children. A more fully

integrated social identity emerges, with partici-

pation in relationships at different levels—from

intimate friendships and romantic attachments,

to semiﬂexible cliques of less than 10 members,

to large crowds of individuals who share distinct

fashions and interests but are not necessarily all

individually acquainted.13 At the end of ado-

lescence, an individual is expected to emerge

as a socially capable adult.

Brain Development during

Adolescence

Until relatively recently, it was widely held

that the brain was anatomically mature early in

life. A small number of studies published in the

late 1960s and 1970s, using post-mortem brain

samples,14,15 suggested that the brain contin-

ues to develop during adolescence. However,

it was generally assumed that changes in so-

cial behavior during the teens were a result of

hormones, social experience, and the chang-

ing social environment. These factors are un-

doubtedly important. However, neuroanatom-

ical development, which occurs throughout the

teenaged years, may also play a role.

Results from large magnetic resonance imag-

ing (MRI) studies looking at brain development

across the lifespan indicate that brain regions

involved in social cognition undergo protracted

development throughout adolescence.16–19 In

the frontal and parietal lobes, gray matter in-

creases in volume during childhood, reaching

its peak at around puberty onset. This is fol-

lowed by gray matter thinning during the re-

mainder of adolescence. This is in contrast to

basic sensory regions of the brain in which peak

gray matter volume is attained during child-

hood (for reviews, see refs. 1 and 20). It has

been suggested that the regional increases in

gray matter volume up to and around puberty

are a result of synaptic proliferation (synapto-

genesis) and that subsequent gray matter thin-

ning reﬂects the elimination or “pruning” of

synapses, as has been observed in post-mortem

brain samples.15,21,22 These changes would be

expected to result in more ﬁnely tuned neu-

ral circuits, which will respond optimally to the

Burnett & Blakemore: Adolescent Social Cognition

task in hand. Among the brain regions that

undergo these changes in gray matter volume

during the adolescent years is the prefrontal

cortex, a region involved in higher cognitive

abilities, including social cognition and the

planned control of behavior. This suggests that

the high-level abilities subsumed by these late-

maturing regions may continue to develop dur-

ing the adolescent years.

Another major neuroanatomical change that

has been observed using MRI is a linear in-

crease in white matter volume, which occurs

across the brain throughout childhood and ado-

lescence (and, indeed, into the 20s). This in-

crease in white matter volume is thought to

reﬂect ongoing maturation of neuronal axons,

for example, myelination and/or increasing ax-

onal caliber.14,23,20 These processes might be

expected to result in faster and more efﬁcient

neuronal signaling.

Functional Imaging of the

Adolescent Social Brain

In the past decade, cognitive neuroscientists

have used functional MRI (fMRI) to investi-

gate brain activity during social cognition tasks

in adolescent participants. These studies have

revealed consistent differences in brain activity

between adolescents and adults.

In one of these fMRI studies, 18 adolescent

volunteers and 10 adults were scanned as they

read sentences describing situations in which

social or “basic” emotions would be felt.24 So-

cial emotions, such as embarrassment or guilt,

are emotions that require the consideration of

other people’s beliefs, feelings, or desires (their

“mental states”). For example, embarrassment

is felt when you believe that someone judges

your actions as foolish, and guilt is experienced

when you become aware that someone is suffer-

ing because of your actions. In contrast, basic

or “gut” emotions, such as pure disgust or pure

fear, are all about you—and your immediate vis-

ceral reactions. Basic emotions do not require

you to think about other people’s mental states.

In this study, components of the so-called “men-

talizing system,” comprising anterior rostral

medial prefrontal cortex (arMPFC), the pos-

terior superior temporal sulcus at the temporo-

parietal junction (pSTS/TPJ), and the ante-

rior temporal lobe (ATL), showed greater ac-

tivity in social relative to basic emotions in both

age groups (see Fig. 1, top).25,26 However, when

activity was compared between age groups, it

was found that adolescents activated arMPFC,

a brain region involved in mental state rep-

resentation,25 more strongly than did adults

for social relative basic emotions (see Fig. 1,

bottom). In contrast, adults activated left ATL

more strongly than did adolescents in this con-

trast. ATL is a brain region thought to store

social-emotional semantic information.27

Another important aspect of social cogni-

tion is the ability to understand yourself .28 This

allows you to work out how other people see

you and perhaps adjust your behavior depend-

ing on the social situation you are in. In a

recent fMRI study of self-knowledge, 12 chil-

dren (aged 10) and 12 adults underwent brain

scanning while they judged whether a series of

statements, such as “I like to read just for fun,”

applied to them.29 In another experiment, 19

teenagers and 11 adults were scanned in fMRI

as they tried to work out what they would do

in different situations (e.g., “If you were bored

on a Friday night, would you ﬁnd out what was

on at the cinema?”).30 In both experiments,

the older children and adolescents activated

arMPFC more strongly than the adults, a sim-

ilar result to that in the social emotion study.

Together, these studies collectively suggest that

adolescents use brain regions for social cogni-

tion differently than do adults, in a variety of

situations that require social understanding.

There are a number of plausible explana-

tions for these developmental differences in

functional activity within social brain regions.

One possible explanation has to do with neu-

roanatomical development. It could be the case

that adolescents activate these developing so-

cial brain regions more strongly than adults

because the less efﬁcient neural circuits need

Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences

Figure 1. Main effect of social versus basic emotion in adult (

left

) and adolescent (

right

) groups: anterior

rostral medial prefrontal cortex (arMPFC) is signiﬁcantly active in both. Graph (

bottom

) shows the negative

correlation between age and activity in arMPFC to social versus basic emotion at the coordinate for which

there was a signiﬁcant group by emotion interaction (see Burnett

et al

., 2009).

more oxygen and energy to power them. This

might mean that adolescents can do just as well

as adults in certain tasks requiring social un-

derstanding, but that parts of their brain re-

quire more energy to do so. Another possibil-

ity is that adolescents are actually using differ-

ent cognitive strategies to approach social tasks.

Perhaps teenagers are still “working out” social

situations as a result of accumulating experi-

ence or developing social skills. This may mean

that they require more effortful, online, so-

cial cognitive processing. With age, processing

may become less effortful, more automatic, and

perhaps more reliant on stored social knowl-

edge. An unexplored implication of this could

be that the period of life when arMPFC and

other social brain regions are still developing—

the teens and early 20s—might be a period of

Burnett & Blakemore: Adolescent Social Cognition

particular open mindedness to new ideas and

different types of people.

Social and Nonsocial Intelligence

At this point, it is worthwhile considering

that real-life social behavior relies on many

component processes that are not speciﬁcally

social. These are the cool, forward-thinking

processes known as the “executive functions”

that allow you to exert control over your be-

havior and plan ahead. There is evidence that

some of these executive functions are still ma-

turing during the teenaged years,31 and this

may aid the development of adult social be-

havior. For example, social situations will run

more smoothly if you can regulate your imme-

diate emotional reactions (e.g., remaining calm

when somebody says something to make you

feel angry), focus on the task in hand (e.g., com-

forting a friend) by resisting temptations (e.g.,

to ask a nosy question), or keep track of several

contingent facts at once (e.g., “If he just said

this, when she said that yesterday, what she re-

ally meant was...”). These abilities, which are

useful in both social and nonsocial situations,

develop throughout the teens. At the same time,

parts of the prefrontal cortex that enable these

executive abilities continue to mature.

Conclusions and Implications

There are many factors responsible for the

complex changes in social behavior and self-

awareness that take place during the teenaged

years. Hormones, genes, and the psychoso-

cial impact of the physical changes of puberty

undoubtedly contribute, as do an individual’s

steadily accumulating experiences with differ-

ent people and social situations. And although

science has little to say on this issue, the day-to-

day decisions a teenager chooses to make must

surely alter the shape of social awareness and

behavior in the adult.

Recently, brain imaging experiments have

shown that these changes in social cognition

post puberty are also related to brain develop-

ment. In brain regions such as arMPFC, which

is involved in representing mental states, gray

and white matter continue to mature through-

out the teenaged years. These maturational

changes are thought to result in faster and more

efﬁcient brain circuits, which will respond more

appropriately to the tasks they perform. An-

other recent discovery is that activity during

social cognition tasks differs between adoles-

cence and adulthood. Speciﬁcally, adolescents

show greater activity within arMPFC than do

adults. Whether this means adolescents are ap-

proaching social situations using different cog-

nitive strategies, or whether it is a side effect of

anatomical brain development in the absence

of cognitive change, is not yet known.

Acknowledgments

Our research is funded by the Royal Soci-

ety and the Wellcome Trust. S.J.B. is a Royal

Society University Research Fellow. S.B. is

funded by the Wellcome Trust 4-year Ph.D.

program in neuroscience at University College

London.

Conﬂicts of Interest

The authors declare no conﬂicts of interest.

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May 2023
Q J EXP PSYCHOL

Awareness of the importance of assessing social cognition skills in conditions showing atypical social behaviours has increased over the years. However, the evaluation of the psychometric properties of the measures and the availability of normative values for the clinical context are still limited. This study aims to revise, provide normative values and evaluate the clinical validity of the Italian version of three social cognition measures: Advanced Theory of Mind (A-ToM) task, the Emotion Attribution Task (EAT) and the Social Situation Task (SST). Measures were administered to 580 adolescents and adult healthy controls (age range 14-50). We performed differential item functioning and Rasch analysis to revise each task, so normative data of the revised measures were calculated. Moreover, the revised measures were administered to 38 individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and 35 individuals with schizophrenia spectrum disorders (SSD): ASD and SSD were matched by age, gender and IQ with a control sample to evaluate clinical validity. ROC analysis showed that the SST is the best measure differentiating between healthy and clinical groups, compared to the A-ToM (AUCASD = 0.70; AUCSSD = 0.65) and EAT (AUCASD= 0.67; AUCSSD = 0.50), which showed poorer performance. For SSD diagnosis, two SST subscales (Violation and Gravity score) indicated the best accuracy (AUCs of 0.88 and 0.84, respectively); for the ASD diagnosis we propose a combined score between the SST subscale and A-ToM (AUC = 0.86). The results suggest that the proposed measures can be used to support the diagnostic process and clinical practice.

Conditioning induced placebo-like and nocebo-like effects of thermal discomfort in adults but not in youth

Article

Feb 2023

Introduction Conditioning can be used to modulate the perception of pain, in the form of placebo and nocebo effects. Previous studies show inconsistent results as to whether adolescents show similar, weaker, or non-significant conditioned placebo and nocebo effects compared to effects found in adults. There are suggestions that such differences (if any) may dependent on the cues used in the thermal conditioning paradigms. Therefore, in this current study, we utilized novel, neutral 3D-shaped visual cues to implicitly induce conditioned placebo-like and nocebo-like effects in adolescents and adults. Methods During the conditioning paradigm, distinct cues (Fribbles) were paired with low and high temperatures in 24 adults and 20 adolescents (mean age = 25.5 years). In the testing phase, these conditioned cues as well as a neutral (unconditioned) cue were presented with moderate temperatures. Results Thermal discomfort of moderate temperatures was lower when presented with the conditioned low heat cue (placebo-like effect) and higher when thermal stimuli were presented with the high heat cue (nocebo-like effect) compared to the neutral cue. The effects were driven by adults, as neither the placebo-like nor the nocebo-like effect was significant in adolescents. The difference between adolescents and adults was not explained by differences in temperature or discomfort levels, as adults and adolescents had comparable calibrated temperatures and levels of discomfort during heat stimuli. Conclusion Our findings suggest that thermal perception in adolescents is less influenced by conditioning to an engaging novel visual cue, compared to adults. Our work may have implications for better understanding the scope and limitations of conditioning as a key mechanism of placebo and nocebo effects in youth.

Developmental eye movement strategies for decoding facial expressions of emotion

Article

Full-text available

May 2023
J EXP CHILD PSYCHOL

In our daily lives, we routinely look at the faces of others to try to understand how they are feeling. Few studies have examined the perceptual strategies that are used to recognize facial expressions of emotion, and none have attempted to isolate visual information use with eye movements throughout development. Therefore, we recorded the eye movements of children from 5 years of age up to adulthood during recognition of the six “basic emotions” to investigate when perceptual strategies for emotion recognition become mature (i.e., most adult-like). Using iMap4, we identified the eye movement fixation patterns for recognition of the six emotions across age groups in natural viewing and gaze-contingent (i.e., expanding spotlight) conditions. While univariate analyses failed to reveal significant differences in fixation patterns, more sensitive multivariate distance analyses revealed a U-shaped developmental trajectory with the eye movement strategies of the 17- to 18-year-old group most similar to adults for all expressions. A developmental dip in strategy similarity was found for each emotional expression revealing which age group had the most distinct eye movement strategy from the adult group: the 13- to 14-year-olds for sadness recognition; the 11- to 12-year-olds for fear, anger, surprise, and disgust; and the 7- to 8-year-olds for happiness. Recognition performance for happy, angry, and sad expressions did not differ significantly across age groups, but the eye movement strategies for these expressions diverged for each group. Therefore, a unique strategy was not a prerequisite for optimal recognition performance for these expressions. Our data provide novel insights into the developmental trajectories underlying facial expression recognition, a critical ability for adaptive social relations.

The role of early life adversity and inflammation in stress-induced change in reward and risk processes among adolescents

Article

Mar 2023
BRAIN BEHAV IMMUN

Background: Early life adversity (ELA) has long been associated with increased risk for stress-related psychopathology, particularly depression. The neuroimmune network hypothesis posits that ELA increases sensitivity to psychosocial stress, moderating the association between increases in peripheral markers of inflammation and decreases in reward outcomes linked to anhedonia and risk-taking behaviors. The present study examined this hypothesis in a sample of adolescents by using acute psychosocial stress to probe the role of inflammatory signaling in behavioral measures of reward and risk processing. Method: 80 adolescents [13.86 years (SD=1.54); 45% female], oversampled for ELA, underwent the Trier Social Stress Test for Children while providing blood samples immediately before and 60-minutes after stress onset. Blood samples were assayed for plasma IL-6. One hour before stress onset, and then 60 minutes after, participants completed computer-administered behavioral tasks measuring reward (Pirate Task) and risk (Balloon Analog Risk Task). Results: ELA moderated the association between increases in IL-6 and decreases in risk tolerance in pursuit of rewards (p = .003) and reward response bias (p = .04). Stress-induced increases in IL-6 were associated with decreases in pumps for rewards among adolescents exposed to high, relative to little or no, ELA. Further, greater IL-6 increases were associated with increases in bias toward high relative to low value rewards among adolescents with low adversity exposure but not among those exposed to higher adversity. Conclusions: The present study provides the first evidence in a pediatric sample that ELA may alter the role of stress-induced inflammation in reward and risk processing, and may extend our understanding of why stress leads to depression in this high-risk population.

Are attitudes, mental health literacy and clinical characteristics predischarge related to perceived stigma reported by adolescents discharged from inpatient psychiatry?

Article

Dec 2022

Psychiatric illness and stigma are serious global concerns. Adolescents with psychiatric illness represent a vulnerable group. The purpose for this study was to explore the associations of attitudes toward people with mental illness, mental health literacy and clinical characteristics captured while adolescent patients were hospitalized with the patients’ perceived stigma encountered post-discharge. Psychiatrist-reported less improvement in functioning was associated with perceived personal rejection, and patient-reported severity of symptoms was associated with perceived secrecy. Inpatients who do not display good improvement in functioning while in hospital may benefit from specialized intervention such as cognitive behavioural therapy during and after their hospital stay.

Why do many psychiatric disorders emerge during adolescence?

Article

Full-text available

Jan 2008
NAT REV NEUROSCI

How Infants Know Minds

Book

Dec 2008

Vasudevi Reddy

How Infants Know Minds

Book

Mar 2010

Vasudevi Reddy

Localizing Age-related Changes in Brain Structure between Childhood and Adolescence Using Statistical Mapping Techniques

Article

May 1998

Adolescents' Relationships with Peers

Chapter

Jul 2013

B. Bradford Brown

Ever since G. Stanley Hall's (1904) seminal work a century ago, peer relationships have been regarded as a central feature of American adolescence. From the early years through the present, researchers have remained decidedly ambivalent about the effects of peers on American adolescents (Berndt, 1999), but few deny the significance of peer relationships and interactions during this stage of life. Do peers comprise a supportive social context that fosters identity and helps to socialize youth into adult roles, or do they form an arena for frivolous and delinquent activity, with patterns of interaction that undermine autonomy and self-esteem? In this chapter I overview some of the major features of peer relations that have occupied researchers' attention over the past 10 or 15 years. Insights emerging from their studies underscore the complexity of adolescent peer relations and clarify the conditions under which peer interactions foster healthy or unhealthy development.

Handbook of Adolescent Psychology

Book

Jan 2004

The study of and interest in adolescence in the field of psychology and related fields continues to grow, necessitating an expanded revision of this seminal work. This multidisciplinary handbook, edited by the premier scholars in the field, Richard Lerner and Laurence Steinberg, and with contributions from the leading researchers, reflects the latest empirical work and growth in the field.

The myelogenetic cycles of regional maturation of the brain

Article

Nov 1966

S.27.01 Mapping brain maturation and cognitive development during adolescence

Article

Oct 2007
EUR NEUROPSYCHOPHARM

Tomas Paus

Synaptogenesis in human cerebral cortex

Article

Jan 1994

Peter R. Huttenlocher

focuses on late developmental events [those occurring during the second trimester of gestation and continuing into the postnatal period]—synaptogenesis and synapse elimination—in human cerebral cortex [in fetuses–70 yr olds], and stresses functional correlates where these can be determined (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)

Development of face recognition-A maturational compoent?

Article

Jul 1980

Assessed the development in approximately 160 6–16 yr old Ss of the ability to encode unfamiliar faces. Performance improved markedly between ages 6 and 10 and then remained at a fixed level or actually declined for several years, finally improving again by age 16. Evidence is provided that this distinctive developmental course reflects, in part, acquisition of processes specific to the encoding of faces rather than general pattern encoding or metamemorial skills. The possibility that maturational factors contribute to the developmental course of face recognition is raised, and 2 sources of data relevant to assessing this possibility are discussed. (41 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)