Adult Teen Pictures

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adult teen pictures

One of the reason I like books is that they can be read without an image; the characters look like how I want them to look. Often, readers play a game about the books they read, a game of what actors they would want to see in what role. How many times are those actors actual teens, or the adult-teen? Even in that game, do we make the teens older, more mature, less children?

Looking for a place to talk about young adult books? Pull up a chair, have a cup of tea, and let's chat. I am a New Jersey librarian. My opinions do not reflect those of my employer, SLJ, YALSA, or anyone else. On Twitter I'm @LizB; my email is lizzy.burns@gmail.com.

In a recent study mapping differences between the brains of adults andteens, Todd put teenage and adult volunteers through a MRI and monitored howtheir brains responded to a series of pictures. The volunteers were asked todiscern the emotion a series of faces like this one. The results were surprising. All the adults identified theemotion as fear, but many of the teenagers saw something different, such asshock or anger. When she examined their brain scans, Todd found that theteenagers were using a different part of their brain when reading the images.

Yes. Our data suggested that the younger teenagers were significantly differentin how they responded compared to adults. And we did see an age-dependent orage-related change between the ages of 11 and 17, with the most dramaticdifference being in the earlier teen years.

One aspect of our work has been to look at the frontal part of the brain, whichhas been known to underlie thought and anticipation and planning andgoal-directed behavior, and try to understand the relationship of this part ofthe brain to the more inferior or lower part of the brain which has beenassociated with emotion and gut responses. It's quite well known that, inadults, there's a relationship between these two parts of the brain, and wewanted to understand what that relationship would be in adolescent subjects.

In an adult, this anterior or prefrontal part of the brain carries out a lot ofexecutive functions, or what we call more thinking functions: planning,goal-directed behavior, judgment, insight. And we think that that particularpart of the brain influences this more emotional or gut part of the brain.Therefore this relationship is key to understanding behavior.

This is a really nice picture highlighting the fact that in an adolescent brainor a younger brain, the relative activation of the prefrontal region or thisanterior front part of the brain is less it is in the adults. But in contrastto that, the more emotional region or that gut response region has moreactivation compared to the adult. So the relationship between these two regionsis very different. And we think that that's been a very important finding interms of understanding adolescent behavior.

... The adolescent will have a more of an emotional response. The part of thebrain that has more of that gut reaction will respond to a greater extent thanthe adult brain will. And we think that that is due to the fact that thisfrontal region is not interacting with the emotional region in the same way.

One of the things that we noticed in doing this experiment was, not only didthe adolescents show this emotional response or this increased response, butthey did this at the same time that they did not correctly identify theemotion. And that was very interesting to us, because it's clear that the brainwas responding, but the way it was responding didn't have to do with theaccuracy of the affect or the emotional expression. The adolescents typicallysaid that they saw shock or confusion or sadness. But they did not correctlyidentify fear 100 percent of the time. This is in contrast to the adults, whodid find that.

One of the implications of this work is that the brain is respondingdifferently to the outside world in teenagers compared to adults. And inparticular, with emotional information, the teenager's brain may be respondingwith more of a gut reaction than an executive or more thinking kind ofresponse. And if that's the case, then one of the things that you expect isthat you'll have more of an impulsive behavioral response, instead of anecessarily thoughtful or measured kind of response.

Yes, I do think this research goes to helping understand differences betweenadults and teenagers in terms of communications. And I think that it does fortwo reasons. One, we saw that adults can actually look at fearful faces andperceive them as fearful faces, and they label them as such, whereas teenagers... don't label them the same way. So it means that they're reading externalvisual cues [differently], or they're looking at affect differently.

The second aspect of the findings are that the frontal region, or thisexecutive region, is activating differentially in the teenagers compared toadults. And I think that has important implications in terms of modulatingtheir own responses, or trying to inhibit their own gut responses.

One thing that happens in the brain when we're going to get involved in anyactivity or initiate any activity is, we either have to decide what theconsequences of that behavior are, or we're just going to behave impulsively.And to appreciate what the consequences of a behavior are, you have to reallythink through what the potential outcomes of a behavior are. I think thefrontal lobe, that part of the executive region that we studied, is not alwaysfunctioning fully in teenagers; or least our data suggests that perhaps it'snot.

That would suggest that therefore teenagers aren't thinking through what theconsequences of their behaviors are, which would lead us to believe that they'dbe more impulsive, because they're not going to be so worried about whether ornot what they're doing has a negative consequence. ...

Our findings suggest that what is coming into the brain, how it's beingorganized, and then ultimately the response -- all three of those may bedifferent in our adolescents. So that attitude may be part of that, or may berelated to that. But it's not simply a matter of teenagers feeling like theydon't want to do something, or that they're just going to give you a hard time....

One of the interesting things about the findings are that they suggest that theteenagers are not able to correctly read all the feelings in the adult face. Sothat would suggest to us that when they're relating to their parents or totheir friends' parents or to their teachers, they may be misperceiving ormisunderstanding some of the feelings that we have as adults; that is, they seeanger when there isn't anger, or sadness when there isn't sadness. And ifthat's the case, then clearly their own behavior is not going to match that ofthe adult. So you'll see miscommunication, both in terms of what they think theadult is feeling, but also what the response should then be to that.

Yes. Actually it's very interesting that in our study we found quite a bit ofdifference between males and females. And this really didn't surprise us. Wefound that females were somewhat more accurate than males, and also a littlebit more subdued, relative to males. ... In general, the males in our studiesshowed more reaction from that gut region of the brain, and less frontal orexecutive reaction. The relationship between the gut response and thatexecutive region was very striking for the males, and somewhat striking for thefemales, but was not as extreme for the teenage females compared to the teenagemales. ....

One of the interesting outcomes of this study suggests that perhaps decision-making in teenagers is not what we thought. That is, they may not be as matureas we had originally thought. Just because they're physically mature, they maynot appreciate the consequences or weigh information the same way as adults do.So we may be mistaken if we think that [although] somebody looks physicallymature, their brain may in fact not be mature, and not weigh in the same way....

Certainly the data from this study would suggest that one of the things thatteenagers seem to do is to respond more strongly with gut response than they dowith evaluating the consequences of what they're doing. This would result in amore impulsive, more gut-oriented response in terms of behavior, so that theywould be different than adults. They would be more spontaneous, and lessinhibited. ...

That's a really interesting point, because enrichment or special kinds ofeducation during this period of time are very valuable; the brain is ready andresponsive in a way that it's not later in life. And one of the questions iswhether or not we can teach teenagers or adolescents to be more discriminatingin interpersonal communication.

For example, many adults say that one of the things that they felt most limitedby is the ability to have a really good relationship, a really intimaterelationship with another person. And the basis of that really comes out ofbeing able to read cues and being able to relate to others. So I think that theteenage years are important years for learning those skills. We assume thatteenagers are getting those skills at home, or we think that they're gettingthem in groups that they participate in, such as Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, clubsthat they belong to. But for perhaps many of our teens, they're not gettingthese skills, and maybe we've just assumed they're getting them. ...

Oh yes. I think that I also came to this research with the assumption that theteenager was going to look a lot like an adult. In fact, I assumed that theyear-old brain would respond quite similarly to the adult brain in terms of thekinds of tasks that we were asking them to do when they were in the magnet. SoI was quite surprised when we initially got these responses and found thatthere seemed to be a different pattern. And I was very reassured when otherinvestigators such as Dr. Giedd had indicated that their findings alsosuggested ongoing structural changes in the brain. Of course, it makes sensethat the behavior would be different through adolescence, in retrospect. But Iwas surprised. ... 041b061a72