Nouslife: Feelings Matter Less To Teenagers, Neuroscientist Says

10 September 2006

Feelings Matter Less To Teenagers, Neuroscientist Says

Dt's a bit of brain research that confirms the idea of developmental aspects to moral reasoning. It's bound to have implications for teachig, particularly the teaching of religion. But I guess that youth workers need to clock it too.

Dr. Sarah-Jayne Blakemore of the UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience,... said: "Thinking strategies change with age. As you get older you use more or less the same brain network to make decisions about your actions as you did when you were a teenager, but the crucial difference is that the distribution of that brain activity shifts from the back of the brain (when you are a teenager) to the front (when you are an adult). The fact that teenagers underuse the medial pre-frontal cortex when making decisions about what to do, implies that they are less likely to think about how they themselves and how other people will feel as a result of their intended action. We think that a teenager's judgement of what they would do in a given situation is driven by the simple question: 'What would I do?'. Adults, on the other hand, ask: 'What would I do, given how I would feel and given how the people around me would feel as a result of my 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."

I will have to consider further how it affects thing, I'm still thinking about it and trying to match it and map it to the observed behaviour of teenagers I know, including my own. And I'm trying to recall my own teenaged years in an attempt to feel around the idea from the inside, so to speak. First response is that 'they are less likely to think about how they themselves and how other people will feel as a result of their intended action' might relate to that alleged tendency of the young to be very black and white about morality and the tendency of aging supposedly to make one more woolly because more in touch with the way others may feel about it.
This would fit with ...

"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."