Adolescents often experience self-conscious or self-consciousness where they feel cared for and valued other people to make them panic. In fact, not necessarily other people notice and judge them. But it is a natural thing.
A new study suggests that self-awareness associated with physiological responses and performance of certain parts of the brain that appears and reaches its peak in adolescence. This study shows that adolescent sensitivity to social evaluation could be explained by a shift in physiological and brain function during adolescence, although the social and cultural changes also affect.
"Our study mengidentifikikasi teen is a unique period in which emotions, self-awareness, physiological reactivity, and activity in certain brain regions come together and reach a peak in response to the evaluation given by others," explains psychologist and head of a team of researchers from Harvard University, Leah Somerville.
Somerville and his team wanted to see if just by staring, social evaluation forms the smallest, would be worth more to teenagers, compared to children and adults. The researchers hypothesize that the developing brain regions, most recently, as Medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) may play a role in adolescents in the context of monitoring the social evaluation of faces.
As reported by Science Daily, Thursday (07/10/2013), researchers recruited 69 participants age 8 to 23 years old who came to the lab. Then they take measurements emotional, physiological, and neural responses to social evaluation.
Researchers told participants that they would test the new video cameras in the head coil in a functional MRI scanner. The participants watched on the screen if the camera is off, on, or on standby.
Participants were also told that the kind of fellow my age would watch the show and get to see them while the camera is on. When in fact there are no cameras in the MRI. Consistency and strength of the data generated surprise researchers. They do not know whether to stare teenager is a pretty strong social evaluation.
"Our findings demonstrate that seen by others alone makes teens berantisipasi due to the stares. We've got the measure of emotional response to self-awareness in their respective age groups," the researchers said.
The research team also said that most participants showed physiological arousal and shame MPFC activation in response to the social evaluation of all accumulated and reached a peak when adolescence.
Teen participants also showed increased functional connectivity between the MPFC and the striatum. Striatum is the brain regions that mediate motivation and behavior based on actions that ultimately do.
Somerville and his team speculate that MPFC-striatum pathway into the evaluation context where social influence adolescent behavior as a response. This relationship also can provide early clues why teenagers often do with the reasons for his actions while being gathered together.
