Do Adolescents Care About Others?

New research suggests that teens and adolescents “hardly ever use the portion of their brains associated with thinking about other people’s emotions and thoughts,” according to Scott LaFee in today’s "San Diego Union-Tribune."

Neuroscientist Sarah-Jayne Blakemore of University College London has done brain-imaging research to indicate the extent to which adolescent brains are still developing. (http://www.icn.ucl.ac.uk/sblakemore/book.htm).

In addition to empathy, parts of the brain responsible for prudence and caution also are still growing and not fully functional, Blakemore says. As Lafee puts it, “When confronted with making decisions about people and emotions, a posterior portion of the brain, used in perceiving and imagining actions, took charge.”

This brought to mind something that Peter J. Boyer wrote about in the September 4, 2006 "New Yorker":

“When the [story about the alleged rape by members of the Duke lacrosse team] broke, last spring, [Duke Instructor] Elizabeth Chin’s anthropology class was studying Margaret Mead’s ‘The Coming of Age in Samoa,’ occasioning lively inquiry into the mores governing Duke’s undergraduate life.

“For Chin, a visiting professor from Occidental College, the sessions were surprising, and instructive. Several of the young women in her class were members of Duke’s elite sororities--the Core Four, as they are called. ‘The sorority women in particular were trying to convince me that the sexually free and exploratory world that Mead describes is pretty much the same thing as the hookup culture,’ Chin recalls. She wasn’t buying it.

“’The whole hookup thing is, you get really drunk so that, at some level, you can’t be responsible,’ she says. ‘And then you hook up and then there’s no obligation. It’s bad manners, in fact, to sort of get connected to the person. But I don’t think any of them like it that much…. It’s dehumanizing. And it’s very alienating. It’s sort of like they have to deaden themselves before they can do it.’”