Pubertal development of the understanding of social emotions: Implications for education

Abstract

Recent developmental cognitive neuroscience research has supported the notion that puberty and adolescence are periods of profound socio-emotional development. The current study was designed to investigate whether the onset of puberty marks an increase in the awareness of complex, or "mixed," emotions. Eighty-three female participants (aged 9-16 years) were divided into three groups according to a self-report measure of puberty stage (early-, mid- and post-puberty). Participants were presented with emotional scenarios, and used four linear scales to rate their emotional response to each scenario. Scenarios were designed to evoke social emotions (embarrassment or guilt) or basic emotions (anger or fear), where social emotions are defined as those which require the representation of others' mental states. We measured the relative complexity or "mixedness" of emotional responses, that is, the degree to which participants reported feeling more than one emotion for a given scenario. We found that mixed emotion reporting increased between early- and post-puberty for social emotion scenarios, and showed no relationship with age, whereas there was no change in mixed emotion reporting for basic emotion scenarios across age or puberty groups. This suggests that the awareness of mixed emotions develops during the course of puberty, and that this development is specific to social emotions. Results are discussed in the context of brain development across puberty and adolescence, with speculation regarding the potential implications for education.

Fig. 1

Several recent studies have shown that activity in DMPFC (pale yellow area) during social processing decreases between adolescence and adulthood. The purple dot shows a region activated more during social than basic emotion processing in adolescents than in adults (Burnett et al., 2009); green: activity greater during sarcasm comprehension in adolescents (Wang, Lee, Sigman, & Dapretto, 2006); blue: activity greater during mental state self-insight in adolescents (Blakemore et al. 2007); yellow: activity greater during self-other evaluation (Pfeifer et al., 2007); red: increase in activation with age during adolescence while watching social cartoons (Moriguchi et al., 2007).

Fig. 2

Example of a task scenario. Each was read aloud to participants, who were asked to imagine how they would feel if the scenario happened to them, and then to rate how strongly they would feel each of the four emotions, on a scale of 0 (not at all) to 10 (very strongly).

Fig. 3

Scoring of responses. Each response (32 per participant: 16 Social, 16 Basic) was given a mixedness score that took into account how many times a rating > 2 cm had been given. A maximally mixed emotional response (above, right) was one in which all four emotions were rated > 2 cm. We compared mean mixedness scores for Social and Basic emotion scenarios across Puberty Groups.

Fig. 4

Mean mixed emotion score for Social (left) and Basic (right) emotion scenarios in each Puberty Group. The maximum possible mixedness score was 4 (four emotions rated > 2 cm) and the minimum was 1 (one emotion rated > 2 cm). There was an interaction between Puberty Group and Emotion driven by higher mixedness scores for Social relative to Basic emotions in the Post-puberty group relative to the Early-puberty group.