The Teenage Brain: Public Perceptions of Neurocognitive Development during Adolescence

Abstract

Over the past decade, important insights have been obtained into the neurocognitive development during adolescence. To better understand how these neuroscientific insights impact the real world, we investigated how neuroscience has shaped public perceptions of the "teenage brain" and if these perceptions influence adolescent behavior. When asking to generate free associations with the word "teenage brain," adolescents ( n = 363, M_age = 14.47 years) and parents ( n = 164, M_age = 47.16 years) more often mention undesirable behaviors (e.g., "irresponsible") than desirable behaviors (e.g., "creative"). Despite these dominantly negative associations, priming adolescents with positively versus negatively framed statements about adolescent brain development did not influence their subsequent risk-taking, impulsivity, and performance on response-to-failure tasks. However, we did find a more nuanced effect, related to how much adolescents agreed with the negative versus positive priming statements: Adolescents' negative beliefs about adolescent brain development reinforced negative behaviors by increased risk-taking behaviors, and adolescents' positive beliefs reinforced positive behaviors by using positive strategies to cope with academic setbacks. The current findings underline the impact of views that build up over time and that these are not easily influenced by a one-time instance of information but rather reinforce the impact of new information. To prevent negative perceptions of the teenage brain from becoming self-fulfilling prophecies, it is important that communication about adolescent neurocognitive development is framed in a more balanced way. Neuroscientists need to be more aware of how their research impacts the real world, before we are fully ready for "real-world neuroscience."

Figure 1

Display of the sequence of the risk-taking task (BART). Adolescents had to inflate a balloon (30 times) by selecting the number of desired pumps on a slider (min = 0, max = 128) and could earn more points when the balloon was further inflated, but no points were earned if the balloon burst. On the basis of the selected number of desired pumps, it was shown whether or not the adolescent had earned points and the balloon had burst.

Figure 2

Percentages of adolescents and parents’ associations with the teenage brain. Undesirable behavior is mostly mentioned by both adolescents and parents. A = adolescents’ association with the word “teenage brain”; AP = adolescents’ thoughts of adults’ association with the teenage brain; P = parents or caregivers’ association with the word “teenage brain”; PA = parents or caregivers’ thought of the association of their child with the teenage brain.

Figure 3

Adolescents’ choice (one of three options) of the developmental period they thought that the described behaviors in the priming statements are most common. The different types of behavior as described in the priming statements are (1) more common during childhood compared with adolescence, (2) equally common during childhood and adolescence, or (3) more common during adolescence compared with childhood.