Our teenage years are among the most awkward and self-conscious of our lives, and now scientists may have discovered why.
Researchers from Harvard used MRI scans to establish that feelings of embarrassment, awkwardness, and self-awareness are linked to a specific brain response that develops, and peaks, during adolescence.
This region directly connects to the part of the brain that influences actions and behaviours, and could also explain why teenagers are so strongly influenced by peer pressure.
The researchers made the discovery while studying the affect social evaluation has on brain activity and emotions.
Social evaluation is the process of evaluating people based on how they look, act and so on, and being aware of how others evaluate you.
Researchers claim that regions of the brain that develop later in life, such as the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC), could play a unique role in the way teens, in particular, monitor this type of social evaluation.
Specifically, the researchers wanted to discover whether something as simple as being watched, or looked at, played a role in social evaluation among young people.
They were also particularly interested to see how the MPFC area of the brain in adolescents connected to the striatum – an area of the brain involved with controlling behaviours and action.
The study involved 69 participants, ranging in age from eight to almost 22 years old.
Each participant was asked to complete tests that gauged emotional, physiological, and neural responses to social evaluation.
Researchers told the participants they would be testing a new video camera embedded in to the head coil of a functional MRI scanner, however the camera wasn’t real.
The participants watched a screen that told them whether the camera was on, off, or warming up.
They were also told that a same-sex peer of approximately the same age would be watching them via a video feed.
The MRI scans revealed that when adolescents thought they were being watched, there was an increase in activity between the MPFC and striatum.
Adolescents also reported a heightened state of embarrassment and physiological arousal when asked to self-evaluate how the experiment made them feel.
Leah Somerville, lead researcher and assistant professor of psychology at the university, said: ‘Our study identifies adolescence as a unique period of the lifespan in which self-conscious emotion, physiological reactivity, and activity in specific brain areas converge and peak in response to being evaluated by others.
‘We were concerned about whether simply being looked at was a strong enough ‘social evaluation’ to evoke emotional, physiological and neural responses.
‘Our findings suggest that being watched, and to some extent anticipating being watched, were sufficient to elicit self-conscious emotional responses at each level of measurement.’
The link may provide an initial clue as to why teenagers often engage in riskier behaviours when they’re with their peers.
