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Teens’ Self-Consciousness Linked to Specific Brain Activity
The new study reveals that this self-consciousness is linked with specific physiological and brain responses that seem to emerge and peak in adolescence.
“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,” said lead researcher Leah Somerville, Ph.D., of Harvard University.
The findings, published in Psychological Science, suggest that teens’ sensitivity to social evaluation might be explained by shifts in physiological and brain function during adolescence, in addition to the numerous sociocultural changes that take place during the teen years.
Somerville and colleagues wanted to investigate whether just being looked at — a minimal social-evaluation situation — might register with greater importance, arousal, and intensity for adolescents than for either children or adults.
The researchers hypothesized that late-developing regions of the brain, such as the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC), could play a unique role in the way teens monitor these types of social evaluative contexts.
The researchers had 69 participants, ranging in age from 8 to almost 23 years old, come to the lab and complete measures that gauged emotional, physiological, and neural responses to social evaluation.
They told the participants that they would be testing a new video camera embedded in the head coil of a functional MRI scanner.
The participants watched a screen indicating whether the camera was “off,” “warming up,” or “on”, and were told that a same-sex peer of about the same age would be watching the video feed and would be able to see them when the camera was on. In reality, there was no camera in the MRI machine.
The consistency and strength of the resulting data took the researchers by surprise.
“We were concerned about whether simply being looked at was a strong enough ‘social evaluation’ to evoke emotional, physiological and neural responses,” Somerville said.
“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.”
Specifically, participants’ self-reported embarrassment, physiological arousal, and MPFC activation showed reactivity to social evaluation that seemed to converge and peak during adolescence.
Adolescent participants also showed increased functional connectivity between the MPFC and striatum, an area of the brain that mediates motivated behaviors and actions.
Somerville and colleagues speculate that the MPFC-striatum pathway may be a route by which social evaluative contexts influence behavior. The link may provide an initial clue as to why teens often engage in riskier behaviors when they’re with their peers.
Source: Association for Psychological Science
Abstract of human brain photo by shutterstock.
If Weight Gain Follows Smoking Cessation, Is it Worth it?
A new research study investigates the association between smoking, weight gain and cardiovascular risk among postmenopausal women with and without diabetes.
“Cigarette smoking is an important cause of cardiovascular disease, and smoking cessation reduces the risk. However, weight gain after smoking cessation may increase the risk of diabetes and weaken the benefit of quitting,” write Juhua Luo, Ph.D., of the Indiana University School of Public Health.
Researchers used data from the Women’s Health Initiative (WHI) to assess the association. In the WHI, 161,808 postmenopausal women 50 through 79 years of age were recruited from 40 sites between 1993 and 1998 and followed up every 6 to 12 months.
Women without known cancer or cardiovascular disease at baseline or CHD at year 3 were followed up until CHD diagnosis, date of death, loss to follow-up, or September 30, 2010, whichever occurred first.
Of 104,391 women followed up, 3,381 developed CHD, during an average of 8.8 years.
The researchers found that smoking cessation was associated with a lower risk of CHD among postmenopausal women with and without diabetes.
However, weight gain following smoking cessation weakened this association, especially for women with diabetes who gained 11 lbs. or more.
Researchers say more studies are necessary to study the association as the power to make statistical inference was limited due to the small number of cases.
Source: The JAMA Network Journals
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