This article was downloaded by: [Uppsala universitetsbibliotek]On: 10 October 2014, At: 19:37Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registeredoffice: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

Emotional and Behavioural DifficultiesPublication details, including instructions for authors andsubscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rebd20

Are all teenagers emotionally illiterate?Charting a neuroscientific storying ofnormative deficitMonica A. Payne aa Department of Human Development & Counselling , University ofWaikato , New ZealandPublished online: 29 Mar 2012.

To cite this article: Monica A. Payne (2012) Are all teenagers emotionally illiterate? Charting aneuroscientific storying of normative deficit, Emotional and Behavioural Difficulties, 17:2, 143-155,DOI: 10.1080/13632752.2012.672864

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13632752.2012.672864

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the“Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis,our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as tothe accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinionsand views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors,and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Contentshould not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sourcesof information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims,proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever orhowsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arisingout of the use of the Content.

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Anysubstantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing,systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms &Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

Emotional and Behavioural DifficultiesVol. 17, No. 2, June 2012, 143–155

Are all teenagers emotionally illiterate? Charting a neuroscientificstorying of normative deficit

Monica A. Payne*

Department of Human Development & Counselling, University of Waikato, New Zealand

Defining ‘emotional illiteracy’ is a task located within the broader context of expert (andsubsequently public) assumptions regarding the normally expectable competencies ofthe age group concerned. In the late 1990s a series of neuroscientific studies report-ing adolescents’ limited ability to recognize emotional states from facial expressionsseemed to present radically new developmental benchmarks. Although these studieswere subsequently subjected to considerable methodological and interpretive criticism,some incautious assertions regarding teenagers’ general inability to respond appropri-ately, especially in emotionally charged situations, continued to flourish. This papercharts the creation and maintenance of these ideas over the past decade to illustrate how,when primary sources are not carefully checked, powerful messages for which there isdubious empirical evidence can become incorporated into expert advice. It also sug-gests the importance of linking neuroscientific claims to other strands of contemporaryWestern efforts to define and contrast normative and disordered emotional behaviour inadolescence.

Keywords: adolescents; amygdala; emotional difficulty; emotional literacy; facerecognition; teen brain

Introduction

The contemporary academic and professional literature on social, emotional andbehavioural difficulties (SEBD) in children and adolescents includes considerable dis-cussion of problems faced in producing generic definitions of specific disorders (Cloughet al. 2005; Hunter-Carsch et al. 2006), whether familiar, like attention deficit hyperactivitydisorder (ADHD) (e.g. Cooper 2006; Visser and Jehan 2009), or relatively new, like ‘oppo-sitional defiant disorder’ and ‘social phobia’ (e.g. Finn 2001; Lane 2007). Certain sectionsof the literature currently pay much attention to the influence on diagnostic understandingsof wider cultural discourses of social control and compliance; for example, behaviouraldifficulties within educational settings may be discussed more in terms of the natureand enforcement of school rules than unmet emotional needs within individual students(e.g. Cooper and Cefai 2009; Thomas 2005). Such an approach appears to foster lit-tle enthusiasm for bringing the brain into explanations of troublesome behaviour; thus,Blakemore and Frith (2005, 110) noted it was ‘not generally accepted’ that socioemotionaldisorders are caused by subtle brain abnormalities, while Bond (2006, 56) assumed therewould be ‘no disagreement’ that ‘a badly wired brain’ should be rejected as a cause ofhostility in childhood and adolescence. Nonetheless, there is also a considerable body of

*Email: m.payne@waikato.ac.nz

ISSN 1363-2752 print/ISSN 1741-2692 online© 2012 SEBDAhttp://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13632752.2012.672864http://www.tandfonline.com

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Upp

sala

uni

vers

itets

bibl

iote

k] a

t 19:

37 1

0 O

ctob

er 2

014

144 M.A. Payne

research, much of it using facial expression recognition procedures, which explores theinvolvement of abnormalities such as amygdalar dysfunction in disorders such as autism,depression and psychopathy (e.g. Adolphs, Sears, and Piven 2001; Blair 2008; Blair et al.2004; Calder, Lawrence, and Young 2001; Herba and Phillips 2004; Pine et al. 2004).From a social constructionist perspective, furthermore, the task of defining emotionaldifficulty/disorder is also considered necessarily approached as a discursive enterprise,undertaken within the broader context of expert (and subsequently public) opinion and talkabout the normally expectable competencies of the age group concerned.

Defining ‘normal’

Although Bond (2006) was presumably rejecting idiosyncratic wiring deficit as an expla-nation for individual diagnoses of SEBD, the neuroscientific literature had since thelate 1990s been making a case that a developmentally normal period of brain rewiringproduces heightened emotional vulnerability and unpredictability in adolescence, thusoffering a new construction of ‘normal’ for judging ‘abnormal’ or ‘problem’ behaviourin this age group. Studies using non-invasive scanning technologies, particularly magneticresonance imaging (MRI), first revealed a previously unsuspected further period of synap-tic growth and pruning beginning in late childhood (Giedd et al. 1999). Subsequently,longitudinal mapping of development of the prefrontal cortex (PFC) – responsible forthe so-called ‘executive functions’ of identifying, planning and prioritizing goals, soundjudgement, and impulse control – indicated maturation incomplete until at least themid-twenties, suggesting that adolescents must rely more completely than adults do onless sophisticated, or more ‘primitive’, areas of the brain (particularly the amygdala)for processing emotions and interpreting social situations (for reviews see Choudhury,Charman, and Blakemore 2008; Weinberger, Elvevåg, and Giedd 2005; Yurgelun-Todd2007).

Beyond charting structural development, some researchers began examining brainfunctioning during performance of specific perceptual/cognitive tasks. Early on, one seriesof functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies in particular, conducted byDeborah Yurgelun-Todd and colleagues in Boston, was to gain widespread media atten-tion and supply a key contribution to this new storying of adolescence. The experimentsinvestigated the processing of affect by scanning brain activity while participants viewedphotographs of adult faces (specially created for facial recognition tasks) and had to iden-tify the emotion being expressed (specifically in these studies, fear). Findings hinted atimportant differences between teenagers and adults in response accuracy, linked to thediffering patterns of PFC and amygdala involvement noted earlier. The conclusion thatadolescents were actually much less competent at recognizing the emotional state of oth-ers than previously thought became quickly established, leading to the idea that theyshould be considered at particular risk of reacting unpredictably and confrontationallyin social situations. In the SEBD literature the competencies implicated here are com-monly subsumed under the term ‘emotional literacy’: Faupel (2006, 167), for example,defines an emotionally literate person as someone who can recognize and understandtheir own and others’ emotions, and express and handle their emotions in ways that pro-mote development and maintenance of ‘wholesome relationships’. Emerging accounts ofthese experiments seemed to be suggesting, therefore, that it might be appropriate foradults to work with the expectation that all adolescents are (less or more) emotionallyilliterate.

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Upp

sala

uni

vers

itets

bibl

iote

k] a

t 19:

37 1

0 O

ctob

er 2

014

Emotional and Behavioural Difficulties 145

Objectives of this investigation

My initial reading of descriptions of the Boston studies prompted memories of undergrad-uate encounters with Sir Frederick Bartlett’s early work on the oral transmission of folktales. Bartlett had noted how

When a story is passed on from one person to another, each man repeating, as he imag-ines, what he heard from the last narrator, it undergoes many successive changes before itat length arrives at that relatively fixed form in which it may become current throughout awhole community. (Bartlett 1920, 30)

I became interested in examining more closely how the Boston studies had survived toacquire status as ‘fact’ within a range of expert writing about adolescence, often includingthese authors’ introduction of their own new ‘assumptions’ and ‘consequences’. Some ofthis writing belongs to the genre Cooper and Cefai (2009, 98) labelled ‘journalistic trivia’,but I believe (as did Cooper and Cefai) that attention to such accounts is important becausethey contribute significantly to the ‘process of cultural reproduction’. With regard to thepresent investigation, certainly, such texts played a reliable role in the spread of the story.

Initially, the biggest barrier to progressing this project was the almost insurmount-able difficulty in tracking down the primary academic sources involved. The frequentlydetailed reporting of different participant samples and findings in secondary accounts(even allowing for possible journalistic errors) clearly signalled reference to a series ofexperiments, but sources were never identified. Academic articles too failed to provide thenormal leads. Assuming that this might imply that several studies were available only asunpublished reports, conference papers, press releases, media interviews or other hard-to-access material, I finally contacted two of the key researchers, Abigail Baird and DeborahYurgelun-Todd, for help, but several attempts unfortunately failed to elicit any response.However, despite this problem – and perhaps because of it – the project seemed worth pur-suing. Ultimately, it has been able to illustrate how, in the likely absence of much (if any)checking of primary sources, powerful developmental messages can become entrenchedwithin ‘expert’ advice.

The analysis begins with an overview of one study readily accessible in a peer-reviewedjournal (Baird et al. 1999), followed by examples from secondary sources offering uncriti-cal reporting of this and other Boston studies, first with and then without explicit referenceto either researchers or institutions. I have used verbatim extracts to minimize potentialconcerns about biased editing or summarizing on my part, and all material comes fromsources of information and advice to professionals or parents available for use at time ofwriting (mid-2010). Critiques, including the Boston researchers’ own reflections, are thenreported. In the discussion I draw on these critiques and consider how these studies relateto emotional expression recognition research more generally.

Documenting a new neuroscientific story of adolescent emotional illiteracy

The main available primary source: Baird et al. (1999)

Baird, Yurgelun-Todd and colleagues say that they set out to test with adolescents thehypothesis suggested by previous research with adults that ‘amygdala function is criti-cal for the development of affect/emotional recognition’ (Baird et al. 1999, 6). Using 12‘healthy’ participants (no history of head injury, seizures, psychiatric disorder or substanceabuse) aged 12–17 years (mean age 13.9), fMRI data and conventional magnetic resonance

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Upp

sala

uni

vers

itets

bibl

iote

k] a

t 19:

37 1

0 O

ctob

er 2

014

146 M.A. Payne

images were collected to measure amygdala activation during presentation of black-and-white photographic images showing facial expressions of fear (which in previous researchhad provoked a robust response in adults). The scan sequence required participants to visu-ally fixate a central white point on the screen, passively view randomly generated nonsensegrey pixel figures, and view and label the emotional expression of photographs. The studyconcluded that fMRI could be used with adolescents to measure amygdala activation, andthat as predicted (1) a significant increase in activation was noted when viewing the facescompared to viewing the fixation point, (2) viewing the nonsense stimuli did not producethis effect, and (3) higher activation was noted for faces than for nonsense stimuli. However,the finding attracting all the attention was that only 74% of participants’ responses correctlyidentified ‘fear’ in the photographs, which was interpreted as an unexpectedly high (andworrying) level of inaccuracy:

While some subjects correctly categorized the faces as being fearful, other faces were incor-rectly categorized as angry, confused, surprised, or even happy. In short, although only onetype of facial expression was presented, the adolescents frequently interpreted the faces asdisplaying more than one category of affect. (Baird et al. 1999, 198)

The authors therefore suggested ‘one role of the amygdala during development may beto recognize facial expression and, through experience, learn to assign a label to facialexpression’ (198). However, it was acknowledged that only response to fearful faces wasexamined and further research should include neutral faces as well as additional cate-gories of emotional expression, and that the sample was small and a broader range ofages with larger samples was required in order to make definitive statements concerningdevelopmental change.

Secondary accounts with explicit reference to the Boston studies

Since accounts of the work of the Boston team began to proliferate around 1998, at leastsome of the studies I was unable to locate obviously pre-dated the above. For example, theAmerican Association for the Advancement of Science reported:

Teenagers seem to ride an emotional roller coaster and often have difficulty dealing withtheir emotions. To map the brain regions responsible for these emotions, neuropsychologistDeborah Yurgelun-Todd, of Harvard-affiliated McLean Hospital in Belmont, used functionalmagnetic resonance imaging, which measures changes in blood flow as a proxy for neuronactivity. She flashed 40 faces showing expressions of fear to 16 adolescents aged 11 to 17.Young brains reacted to fear with heightened activity in the amygdala, an almond-shapedstructure near the center of the brain that triggers the primitive ‘fight or flight’ instinct. But theolder the teenager, the larger the portion of their frontal lobe – charged with reasoning – thatis also activated when processing fear. In previous work, adults showed greater frontal lobeand less amygdala activity compared to adolescents. . . . ‘You have to learn to be afraid, andit’s probably a pretty extensive process’, says Yurgelun-Todd. ‘But if you don’t have the rightbrain tissue in place, you may not be ready yet to make use of the experiences’. (AmericanAssociation for the Advancement of Science 1998, paras. 1–3)

For a different audience, Psychology Today offered a briefer, looser, account of(apparently) another earlier study:

Wonder why teens become so emotional so easily? Blame it on their (underdeveloped)brains. In a recent study at McLean Hospital in Massachusetts, neuropsychologist DeborahYurgelun-Todd, PhD, showed adults and adolescents photos of faces contorted by fear. Theadults swiftly and accurately identified the pictured emotion, but the teens had more trouble.

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Upp

sala

uni

vers

itets

bibl

iote

k] a

t 19:

37 1

0 O

ctob

er 2

014

Emotional and Behavioural Difficulties 147

‘Almost all of them got it wrong’, says Yurgelun-Todd. ‘They identified fear as worry or angeror something else. That may explain in part why adolescents’ responses are so incongruous’.(Centofanti 1998, 16)

Science writer Shannon Brownlee appeared to be referring to the same study in herlengthy (but regrettably unreferenced) August 1999 article for US News & World Report:

In an adult, for instance, an overheard insult might arouse a murderous rage, until the pre-frontal cortex figures out that the comment was meant for somebody else and tells thelimbic system to pipe down. . . . Something very different happens in teenagers, according toDeborah Yurgelun-Todd, a neuropsychologist at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Mass. In recentexperiments, Yurgelun-Todd and graduate student Abigail Baird showed adults and teenagersphotographs of people’s faces contorted in fear. When the researcher asked her subjects toidentify the emotion being expressed all of the adults got it right. Many of the teens, however,were unable to correctly identify the expression. . . . These results suggest to Yurgelun-Toddthat kids may not be as good as we think they are at interpreting facial expressions, in partbecause the prefrontal cortex is not yet lending the limbic system a hand. Teenagers are notadept readers of social signals, such as facial expressions, even if they seem to do nothing butsocialize. ‘You have to actually learn how to read emotions’, says Yurgelun-Todd. ‘We maythink anger is pretty obvious to our kids, but they may not’. (Brownlee 1999, 47–8)

In a brief report boxed within Brownlee’s article, Roberta Hotinksi (1999, 50) offered aslightly modified interpretation:

Neuropsychologists studying brain development showed standardized pictures of fearful facesto 15 adults and 15 teenagers. All the adults correctly identified the emotion, but 11 of theteens guessed wrong at least once, picking emotions such as anger or discomfort instead.The researchers, at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Mass., say teenagers relied more on theprimitive emotion center of the brain and less on the region tied to judgment than adults did.Teens literally think differently than adults, so their baffling behavior may reflect cluelessness,not stubbornness.

For the Brain Connection website, Gargi Talukder explained:

Deborah Yurgelun-Todd and colleagues at the McLean Hospital Brain Imaging Center inBoston, Massachusetts have used functional magnetic resonance imaging to compare the activ-ity of teenage brains to those of adults. The researchers found that when processing emotions,adults have greater activity in their frontal lobes than do teenagers. Adults also have loweractivity in their amygdala than teenagers. . . . The results from the McLean study suggest thatwhile adults can to [sic] use rational decision making processes when facing emotional deci-sions, adolescent brains are simply not yet equipped to think through things in the same way.(Talukder 2000, paras. 2, 5)

She concluded that this and other studies do not mean that ‘a teenager will always makeirrational decisions’ (para. 8). Indeed! Nevertheless, in his book humorously (or objection-ably, depending on your point of view) titled Yes, your teen is crazy!, psychologist MichaelBradley less reservedly informed parents:

Using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), Dr. Yurgelun-Todd first showed how adults use twodifferent brain parts to make sophisticated judgments such as interpreting social signals. In herresearch, she showed a group of adults pictures of faces contorted in fear and then asked themto interpret the emotion the faces conveyed. As the adults responded, she found that both theprefrontal cortex and the brain’s limbic system worked to process the task. The limbic systemis a kind of primal emotion center that deals with emotions like rage and fear. Once the limbicsystem is aroused, the prefrontal cortex can process or moderate the reactions or impulses

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Upp

sala

uni

vers

itets

bibl

iote

k] a

t 19:

37 1

0 O

ctob

er 2

014

148 M.A. Payne

of the limbic system. Using this two-step process, the adults all recognized fear in the facesshown to them in the pictures. When Dr. Yurgelun-Todd tried this with teens, however, manywere unable to process the pictures correctly. She found that the pictures aroused the teens’limbic systems, but their prefrontal cortexes were not working. In other words, the teens weremoved by the pictures, but were unable to figure out what they meant. (Bradley 2001, 7)

In 2002 the US Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) created a website in connectionwith its documentary Inside the teen brain. Many second-hand accounts subsequently usedeither paraphrased or verbatim material from the interview with Deborah Yurgelun-Toddposted on this site. Its introductory paragraph explained that the interview would focus ona study in which adolescents and adults had their brains monitored while being shown aseries of pictures of faces and asked to identify the emotion being expressed (an example‘fear’ photograph is shown).1 It is stated that scans indicated less PFC activity during thetask in adolescents’ than in adults’ brains, and apparently greater reliance on the amyg-dala; while adults correctly identified the photographs as expressing fear 100% of the time,‘only about half’ the teenagers did. Alternative answers included shock, anger, confusionand sadness. Girls were reported as ‘somewhat more accurate’ than boys. However, askedwhether different results might have been obtained if 10 more adults and 10 more teenshad been studied, Yurgelun-Todd said ‘This is a small pilot study, so clearly if we addeda considerably larger sample, we may have very different results. So I want to be cau-tious and not over-interpret these findings’ (Interview: Deborah Yurgelun-Todd 2002, 4).Nevertheless she went on to observe (4, editing in original):

We saw that adults can actually look at fearful faces and perceive them as fearful faces, andthey label them as such, whereas teenagers . . . don’t label them the same way. So it meansthat they’re reading external visual cues [differently], or they’re looking at affect differently.

Subsequently, a website for teachers offered the following ‘background essay’ to accom-pany use of the PBS materials with young adolescent students:

In a recent study, scientists compared the brains of 18 children between the ages of 10 and18 to those of 16 adults, using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Both groupswere shown photographs of adult faces. . . .

The adults in the study correctly identified a frightened expression, for example, as fear.Yet the teens in the study often described the same expression using words like surprised orangry. What’s more, the teens and adults used different parts of the brain to process theiranalysis of the expressions. . . . The scientists who conducted the research believe their studymay partially explain why the teenage years are so emotionally turbulent for so many kids.The teens in the study not only seemed to misread the expression on the adult faces in thephotographs, but they reacted strongly from an area deep inside the brain. While the frontalcortex helped the adults distinguish subtlety of expression, this area wasn’t fully operating inthe teenagers. (Teachers’ Domain 2002, paras. 2–4)

Also speaking to teachers, Alistair Smith (2004, 71–2) explained:

Deborah Yurgelun Todd . . . is of the view that schools ought to pay more attention to theschooling of emotions, ‘as important as teaching maths, science or reading is teaching socialbehaviors’. . . . Adolescents in Yurgelun Todd’s study were very poor at reading the emotionson the faces of individuals whose photographs they were shown. In many instances completelywrong interpretations were made: anger confused with joy, sadness with fear. Their brains hadnot yet been wired by experience of a range of social interactions.

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Upp

sala

uni

vers

itets

bibl

iote

k] a

t 19:

37 1

0 O

ctob

er 2

014

Emotional and Behavioural Difficulties 149

Interim appearance of both critique and further published studies notwithstanding, thislate-1990s’ message was still around a decade later; for example:

Teens seem to process input differently than do adults. In one experiment, young teenagerstrying to read the emotions on people’s faces used parts of the brain designed to quicklyrecognize fear and alarm; adults used the more rational prefrontal cortex. Deborah Yurgelun-Todd, the researcher at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Mass., who led this work, believes youngteens are prone to read emotion into their interactions and miss content. Therefore, parents mayhave better luck communicating with middle-schoolers if they avoid raising their voice (easiersaid than done) and instead explain how they’re feeling. (Shute 2008, para. 7)

Secondary accounts with no explicit reference to the Boston studies

By the early/mid-2000s, accounts were appearing that contained no explicit reference tothe research team involved, arguably creating an even stronger impression these are factsthat can be taken for granted. Many were directed at educators; for example:

While brain researchers are cautious about interpreting their results, here is some of what weknow so far. . . . Adolescents rely heavily on the part of the brain associated with emotionaland gut reactions. Research found that those under 14 tend to misread facial and emotionalsignals, seeing anger and hostility where there is none. Hence it’s easy to see that a teen mightrant, ‘My teacher hates me!’ (Carls n.d., para. 3)

It is believed that a developing amygdala contributes two behavioural effects: the tendency foradolescents to react explosively to situations rather than with more controlled responses, andthe propensity for youth to misread neutral or inquisitive facial expressions of others as a signof anger. (Winters 2004, 2)

Helping US middle-school teachers to get the picture, Raleigh Philp stated in interview:

The neocortex – the part of the human brain responsible for language, planning, empathy, andexecutive functions – hasn’t fully developed inside the average thirteen-year-old’s head. Thatteenager still relies on a more reactive, gut-instinct part of the brain, the amygdala, whichhandles emotions and memories associated with emotion. Teenagers also aren’t very good atreading emotion on others’ faces. (Standen 2007, paras. 2–3)

Amongst other things, he explained, this means teachers may expect their actions and inten-tions to be interpreted differently by students, and should be prepared to ‘have a lot morepatience with kids’ (para. 6). ‘Educational consultant’ Victoria Tennant similarly advised:

Teens have trouble modulating their emotional responses and controlling impulses. Teens oftenmisread emotional cues, causing them to be over-sensitive and exaggerated in their reactionsto another’s communication . . . Teen brains are wired to seek out risky experiences that createbig emotional reactions. (Tennant 2007, para. 2)

Such accounts were also offered to the general public. For example, ‘adolescent spe-cialist and parent coach’ Glenn Goldberg informed adult readers of the Teenagers Todaywebsite:

Teenagers seem to have less wiring in the part of their brain that organizes and moderatesbehavior. Their brains are wired in a way that floods them with emotional responses to exter-nal events. . . . Another biological difference in a teenager’s brain makes them more likely

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Upp

sala

uni

vers

itets

bibl

iote

k] a

t 19:

37 1

0 O

ctob

er 2

014

150 M.A. Payne

to misread facial expressions. This could explain and potentially cause problems in interper-sonal relationships, especially between parents and teens. If you don’t explicitly tell them whatyou’re feeling and wanting, they will most likely guess wrong. (Goldberg 2003, paras. 11–12)

In 2008 North American epidemiologist and motivational speaker Linda Chamberlainand New Zealand clinical psychologist and media personality Nigel Latta, respectively,advised:

Teens are more likely to react first and think later, and are often inaccurate in interpreting otherpeople’s emotions. In one study where teens and adults were asked to interpret the same facialexpressions, one-half of teens misinterpreted the expression that adults identified as ‘fear’.Acting on their gut emotions, teens are more likely to misinterpret the emotions of others asanger. (Chamberlain 2008, para. 12)

When teenagers and adults were shown pictures of people with a fearful expression on theirface, teenagers showed far more activity in their amygdala and far less in their pre-frontal cor-tex than adults did. What’s more, teenagers are far more likely to make a mistake in decidingwhat the emotion is they’re looking at, with kids under 14 more likely to say the face is show-ing sadness, anger or confusion than correctly identifying fear. Again, if you stop and thinkabout what this means, it helps make sense of how teenagers sometimes behave. Their basicability to correctly figure out what other people are feeling is still developing, and they’reprone to make assumptions that are incorrect. They also tend to react from these emotionalcentres rather than bump the decision upstairs to the smart people in the pre-frontal cortex.From such little mistakes, cataclysmic arguments are born. (Latta 2008, 50)2

Secondary accounts including critique

In their 2004 review of research on development of facial expression recognition Herba andPhillips offered a fairly extensive critique of the Baird et al. (1999) study, suggesting theneed for more attention to the ‘limitations’ the authors themselves had admitted. Yurgelun-Todd has subsequently discussed research inconsistencies in more academic contexts thanthe PBS website (e.g. Yurgelun-Todd 2007; Yurgelun-Todd and Killgore 2006). In MaryBeckman’s report for Science magazine, Baird acknowledged that reactions to photographsmay not actually reveal anything about impulse control, and explained how the use ofalternative research designs could yield different findings:

Baird . . . says that subsequent experiments showed that in teenagers the prefrontal cortexbuzzes when they view expressions of people they know. Also, the children [sic] identified thecorrect emotion more than 95% of the time, an improvement of 20% over the previous work.The key difference between the results, says Baird, is that adolescents pay attention to thingsthat matter to them but have difficult interpreting images that are unfamiliar or seem remotein time. (Beckman 2004, 599)

Bruce Bower’s retrospective analysis for Science News is worth considering at length forthe very detailed – and accurate – information it provided:

A 1999 investigation led by Baird and Deborah Yurgelun-Todd of Harvard Medical Schoolin Boston raised the possibility that certain characteristics of teens’ brains make it difficultfor them to recognize when other people are scared. They tested 12 teenagers, ages 12 to 17.A functional magnetic imaging (fMRI) scanner measured changes throughout participants’brains in blood flow, which studies have indicated reflects dips and rises in neural activity.As the teens briefly viewed and identified fear in pictures of people who had intentionally triedto look scared, the researchers observed marked increases in activity of an almond-shaped

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Upp

sala

uni

vers

itets

bibl

iote

k] a

t 19:

37 1

0 O

ctob

er 2

014

Emotional and Behavioural Difficulties 151

inner-brain structure called the amygdala. . . . The teen volunteers – all with active amyg-dalas – incorrectly identified one in four fear expressions, usually labelling them as angry, sad,or confused. In an ensuing fMRI study directed by Yurgelun-Todd, 16 participants ages 12 to17 also erred frequently when labelling the emotion on fearful faces. Those less than 14 yearsold answered incorrectly about half the time and yet showed the most amygdala activity, whileolder teens made fewer errors and displayed less activity in the amygdala and more in thefrontal lobes than the younger participants did. . . . The results in these small experimentsremain preliminary. Even if the findings hold up, it’s not clear whether young teens’ diffi-culties in discerning fearful expressions stem from incomplete brain development or reflectunique duties assumed by the frontal lobes during adolescence. What’s more, teenagers andadults have yet to be similarly tested with faces displaying emotions other than fear. Baird’songoing research suggests that the teen frontal brain indeed responds to spontaneous emotionalexpressions on the faces of friends and family members. ‘Kids say the posed expressions weshow them look kind of weird’, Baird says. (Bower 2004, paras. 21–7)

In her 2007 assessment of what could be assumed thus far about fMRI studies ofamygdala activation in adolescents, behavioural neuroscientist Linda Spear concluded:

Although intriguing, the amygdala data are highly inconsistent at present. While it has beenproposed that the development of emotional control during adolescence may be related toprogressively greater PFC modulation over emotional processing within the amygdala (seeKillgore et al., 2001), only limited support for this appealing hypothesis has been obtained todate. (Spear 2007, 19)

Discussion

The central issue for this discussion is, therefore, why so many adults have been willing toadvise or accept that on the basis of a very small number of teenagers demonstrating somedifficulty interpreting posed and arguably unrealistic images of unknown adults while lyingin a brain scanner it is appropriate to assume that all teenagers most of the time will ineveryday life be unable to correctly judge the emotional state not only of strangers but alsoof parents, teachers and friends.

In addition to conveying something of the widespread penetration of this story intowriting on adolescence, inclusion of a large number of examples in this presentation wasalso designed to highlight the range of ‘creative meaning making’ that has evolved. Thereshould be cause for concern at the extent to which dissemination of expert advice basedon the Boston studies has resembled folk-tale transmission (Bartlett 1920) or, as we mightnow call it, an extended game of ‘Chinese whispers’. It is disappointing to find profession-als and the public still being offered such readily embellished, problematic descriptionsand explanations of normative teenage competencies even many years after publicationof readily accessible critiques. Second – and of equal concern – is the actual language ofthese accounts, with regard not only to characteristic overstatement but also to the underly-ing sense of disrespect implied. Thus, some incredibly context-specific ‘mistakes’ (if thatis indeed what they should be called) made by probably no more than a few dozen par-ticipants become translated into advice to expect adolescents to be ‘very poor’ at readingemotions and to ‘often’ misread social signals generally, and that unless adults explain toteenagers exactly how they feel or exactly what they want, it should be anticipated ‘theywill most likely guess wrong’. Expect them then to have difficulty dealing with their emo-tions in most other respects as well, spending years ‘riding an emotional roller coaster’, andunderstand that their ‘lack of ability to learn from experience’ means there is unfortunately

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Upp

sala

uni

vers

itets

bibl

iote

k] a

t 19:

37 1

0 O

ctob

er 2

014

152 M.A. Payne

little you can do as adults except be willing to accept their behaviour as ‘cluelessness, notstubbornness’.

Notwithstanding the fact ‘teen brain’ research has moved on from the late 1990s, andthat the erstwhile Boston team and others have acknowledged the shortcomings of the stud-ies examined here, a comprehensive story of normative teenage emotional illiteracy hasbeen created and is being actively maintained. Much as the earlier ‘hormonal storm andstress’ discourse of adolescence proved stubbornly immune to the persuasions of researchevidence and conceptual critique (e.g. Offer 1969; Offer and Schonert-Reichl 1992), itpersists to contribute to many experts’ apparently irrepressible preference for a story-ing of adolescence characterized by incompetence, unpredictability and lack of control(Epstein 2010). Such discourses promote the common practice of selling advice on par-enting teens as ‘survival guides’, while for the general public they provide replacementsfor the ‘superpredator’ and other scares of the 1990s (Elikann 1999) with tales of threatsposed by a generation defined by ‘earlier puberty’ and ‘later brains’. Here in New Zealand,for example, the Government’s chief science adviser has recently spoken of three aspectsof development – slow rate of PFC maturation, together with earlier sexual maturity andincreasingly complex social networks – as creating a ‘powder keg’ during adolescence(Gluckman 2010, 2), expected sooner rather than later to cause ‘an explosion of unsafesex, drugs and crime’ (‘Chief scientist warns’ 2010).

Third, it has been interesting to consider how the Boston studies’ story has been ableto flourish not only despite considerable critique but also despite the reporting of contra-dictory findings in other quite closely related fields. It would appear that better knowledgeexchange between these fields might have made it more difficult for some of the adviceuncovered by the present investigation to establish and maintain credibility. For example,by the late 1990s in other areas within the broader field of emotional expression recog-nition research (much of it not using MRI/fMRI technology) there was already growingdissatisfaction with methodologies that employed static facial images, even when usingphotographic sets that were a considerable improvement in terms of realism over Eckmanand Friesen’s original 1976 black-and-white set (the ‘kind of weird’ images the Bostonstudies had still been using). Some researchers were experimenting with computer graphicsthat morph neutral faces into progressively more intense versions of a particular emo-tion (Blair et al. 2004; De Sonneville et al. 2002), while others challenged the validityof ever using facial images in isolation. The research of Aviezer et al. (2008), for exam-ple, has indicated that posed facial expressions can be perceived as conveying differentemotions depending on presentation in conjunction with congruent or incongruent bodylanguage information. Howard Sercombe has further observed that fMRI studies are onlyworking with people’s responses to simulations, and the extent to which this tells ushow the brain reacts in ‘real life’ remains largely untested. Today’s adolescents, more-over, tend to have considerably more experience working with computerized simulationsthan members of their parents’ generation. Thus, when adult researchers simply presumethat teenage participants should interpret photographs in the same way they do, and ifthey don’t there is something wrong with their interpretation or something deficient in theway their brain works, many viable alternative interpretations are inappropriately rejected(Sercombe 2010).3

Perhaps even more confusing than the lack of engagement with methodological cri-tique is the lack of attention to the extent to which the Boston findings seem at oddswith those of many decades of research with children as well as adolescents. WhileYurgelun-Todd has been quoted as saying that learning to be afraid is probably ‘a prettyextensive process’ (American Association for the Advancement of Science 1998, para. 3),

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Upp

sala

uni

vers

itets

bibl

iote

k] a

t 19:

37 1

0 O

ctob

er 2

014

Emotional and Behavioural Difficulties 153

psychologists have long insisted, as Markham and Adams (1992, 21) put it, that ‘We mustbe able to interpret facial expressions of emotion correctly if we are to respond in anappropriate way to other people’. Moreover, this ability has been described as especiallysignificant for young children (with limited ability to communicate verbally about emo-tions), and there is a substantial body of data suggesting – albeit somewhat inconsistently,as accuracy rates seem significantly affected by research methodology – that recognition ofthe basic negative emotions of sadness, anger and fear is normally well established by mid-dle childhood (for reviews see Herba and Phillips 2004; Markham and Adams 1992). Smithand Walden (1998) have offered data suggesting that fear recognition is well developed inpre-school children living in disadvantaged neighbourhoods, and comparing 7–10-year-olds and young adults De Sonneville et al. (2002) reported mean recognition error rates for‘happiness’, ‘anger’ and ‘fear’ varying between 2 and 8% for children and 2 and 5% foradults (not much difference, in other words). A central flaw in explanations stemming fromthe Boston studies would therefore seem to be that limited reports of adults’ superiority ona very specific (and arguably itself flawed) emotional recognition task have been taken toimply significant deficit in adolescents’ behaviour. Perhaps the most extraordinary featureof this case, then, is the extent to which one series of experimental studies apparently eithercaused adults to overlook how socially adept even young children quickly become, or gavethem permission to believe that teenagers experience a sudden and catastrophic lack ofaccess to skills acquired over more than a decade.

Consideration of the developmental storying encouraged by the Boston studies nev-ertheless leads one to reflect on the possible consequences for defining emotionaldifficulty/disorder in adolescence if all individuals this age are to be discursively con-structed as so significantly incapacitated. The objective of this paper has been to providelinks to and between some ideas, and with broader allegations of the infantilizationof adolescents (Epstein 2010; Graham 2004), that may facilitate the progress of suchdiscussions.

Notes1. Aronson (2007, 122) identifies the work described by Yurgelun-Todd in her PBS interview as an

‘unpublished pilot study’.2. This account remains unchanged in the 2011 slightly revised reissue of this book.3. There is also an easier way to promote healthy scepticism. When speaking to groups of adults

on the teen brain, I conduct informal ‘experiments’ asking them to identify, after brief exposureon a PowerPoint slide, the emotion expressed in the ‘fear’ face accompanying Yurgelun-Todd’sPBS interview. Every time many do not identify it ‘correctly’.

ReferencesAdolphs, R., L. Sears, and J. Piven. 2001. Abnormal processing of social information from faces in

autism. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 13: 232–40.American Association for the Advancement of Science. 1998, June 11. Why young brains lack

caution. Science Now. http://sciencenow.sciencemag.orgAronson, J.D. 2007. Brain imaging, culpability and the juvenile death penalty. Psychology, Public

Policy, and Law 13: 115–42.Aviezer, H., R.R. Hassin, J. Ryan, C. Grady, J. Susskind, A. Anderson, M. Moscovitch, and S.

Bentin. 2008. Angry, disgusted, or afraid? Studies on the malleability of emotion perception.Psychological Science 19: 724–32.

Baird, A.A., S.A. Gruber, D.A. Fein, L.C. Maas, R.J. Steingard, P.F. Renshaw, B.M. Cohen, and D.A.Yurgelun-Todd. 1999. Functional magnetic resonance imaging of facial affect recognition in

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Upp

sala

uni

vers

itets

bibl

iote

k] a

t 19:

37 1

0 O

ctob

er 2

014

154 M.A. Payne

children and adolescents. Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry38: 195–9.

Bartlett, F.C. 1920. Some experiments on the reproduction of folk stories. Folk-Lore 31, no. 1: 30–47.Beckman, M. 2004, July 30. Crime, culpability, and the adolescent brain. Science 305: 596–9.Blair, R.J.R. 2008. The cognitive neuroscience of psychopathy and implications for judgments of

responsibility. Neuroethics 1: 149–57.Blair, R.J.R., D.G.V. Mitchell, K.S. Peschardt, E. Colledge, R.A. Leonard, J.H. Shine, L.K. Murray,

and D.I. Perrett. 2004. Reduced sensitivity to others’ fearful expressions in psychopathicindividuals. Personality and Individual Differences 37: 1111–22.

Blakemore, S.-J., and U. Frith. 2005. The learning brain: Lessons for education. Oxford: Blackwell.Bond, E.J. 2006. Ways of thinking about relationships: Communication, emotion and behaviour. In

The handbook of social, emotional and behavioural difficulties, ed. M. Hunter-Carsch, Y. Tiknaz,P. Cooper and R. Sage, 52–6. London: Continuum.

Bower, B. 2004. Teen brains on trial. Science News 165 (May 8): 299–301. http://www.jstor.orgBradley, M.J. 2001. Yes, your teen is crazy! Loving your kid without losing your mind. Gig Harbor,

WA: Harbor Press.Brownlee, S. 1999. Inside the teen brain. US News & World Report 127, no. 6: 44–54. http://www.

usnews.comCalder, A.J., A.D. Lawrence, and A.W. Young. 2001. Neuropsychology of fear and loathing. Nature

Reviews Neuroscience 2: 352–63.Carls, J. n.d. New research on brain development. Eye on Prevention 1. http://captus.samhsa.govCentofanti, M. 1998. Teen angst. Psychology Today 31, no. 6: 16.Chamberlain, L.B. 2008. The amazing adolescent brain: Translating science into strategies. http://

instituteforsafefamilies.orgChief scientist warns of youth ‘powder keg’. 2010. The New Zealand Herald, May 18. http://www.

nzherald.co.nzChoudhury, S., T. Charman, and S.-J. Blakemore. 2008. Development of the teenage brain. Mind,

Brain, and Education 2: 142–7.Clough, P., P. Garner, J.T. Pardeck, and F.K.O. Yuen. 2005. Themes and dimensions of EBD: A

conceptual overview. In Handbook of emotional and behavioural difficulties, ed. P. Clough,P. Garner, J.T. Pardeck, and F.K.O. Yuen, 3–19. London: Sage.

Cooper, P. 2006. Assessing the social and educational value of AD/HD. In The handbook of social,emotional and behavioural difficulties, ed. M. Hunter-Carsch, Y. Tiknaz, P. Cooper, and R. Sage,248–63. London: Continuum.

Cooper, P., and C. Cefai. 2009. Contemporary values and social context: Implications for theemotional wellbeing of children. Emotional and Behavioural Difficulties 14: 91–100.

De Sonneville, L.M.J., C.A. Verschoor, C. Njiokiktjien, V. Op het Veld, N. Toorenaar, and M.Vranken. 2002. Facial identity and facial emotions: Speed, accuracy, and processing strategies inchildren and adults. Journal of Clinical and Experimental Neuropsychology 24: 200–13.

Eckman, P., and W.V. Friesen. 1976. Pictures of facial affect. Palo Alto, CA: Consulting PsychologistsPress.

Elikann, P.T. 1999. Superpredators: The demonization of our children by the law. Reading, MA:Perseus Books.

Epstein, R. 2010. Teen 2.0: Saving our children and families from the torment of adolescence. Fresno,CA: Quill Driver Books.

Faupel, A. 2006. Promoting emotional literacy: Its implications for school and classroom practice. InThe handbook of social, emotional and behavioural difficulties, ed. M. Hunter-Carsch, Y. Tiknaz,P. Cooper, and R. Sage, 167–75. London: Continuum.

Finn, J.L. 2001. Text and turbulence: Representing adolescence as pathology in the human services.Childhood 8: 167–91.

Giedd, J. N., J. Blumenthal, N.O. Jeffries, F.X. Castellanos, H. Liu, A. Zijdenbos, T. Paus, A.C. Evans,and J.L. Rapoport. 1999. Brain development during childhood and adolescence: A longitudinalMRI study. Nature Neuroscience 2: 861–3.

Gluckman, P.D. 2010. Report on ‘Improving the transition: Reducing social and psychologicalmorbidity during adolescence’. Auckland: Office of the Prime Minister’s Science AdvisoryCommittee.

Goldberg, G. 2003. The teenage brain: A lesson in understanding for parents of adolescents. http://teenagerstoday.com

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Upp

sala

uni

vers

itets

bibl

iote

k] a

t 19:

37 1

0 O

ctob

er 2

014

Emotional and Behavioural Difficulties 155

Graham, P. 2004. The end of adolescence. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Herba, C., and M. Phillips. 2004. Annotation: Development of facial expression recognition

from childhood to adolescence: Behavioural and neurological perspectives. Journal of ChildPsychology and Psychiatry 45: 1185–98.

Hotinski, R. 1999. You were angry? US News & World Report 127, no. 6: 50. http://www.usnews.com

Hunter-Carsch, M., Y. Tiknaz, P. Cooper, and R. Sage, R., eds. 2006. The handbook of social,emotional and behavioural difficulties. London: Continuum.

Interview: Deborah Yurgelun-Todd. 2002. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/teenbrain

Lane, C. 2007. Shyness: How normal behavior became a sickness. New Haven, CT: Yale UniversityPress.

Latta, N. 2008. Before your teenagers drive you crazy, read this! Auckland: HarperCollins.Markham, R., and K. Adams. 1992. The effect of type of task on children’s identification of facial

expressions. Journal of Nonverbal Behavior 16: 21–39.Offer, D. 1969. The psychological world of the teen-ager. New York: Basic Books.Offer, D., and K.A. Schonert-Reichl. 1992. Debunking the myths of adolescence: Findings from

recent research. Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry 31:1003–14.

Pine, D. S., S. Lissek, R.G. Klein, S. Mannuzza, J.L. Moulton, M. Guardino, and G. Woldehawariat.2004. Face-memory and emotion: Associations with major depression in children and adoles-cents. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry 45: 1199–208.

Sercombe, H. 2010. The ‘teen brain’ research: Critical perspectives. Youth & Policy 105: 71–80.Shute, N. 2008. How to deploy the amazing power of the teen brain. US News & World Report,

November 26. http://health.usnews.comSmith, A. 2004. The brain’s behind it: New knowledge about the brain and learning. rev. ed. Stafford:

Network Educational Press.Smith, M., and T. Walden. 1998. Developmental trends in emotion understanding among a diverse

sample of African-American preschool children. Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology19: 177–97.

Spear, L. 2007. The developing brain and adolescent-typical behavior patterns: An evolutionaryapproach. In Adolescent psychopathology and the developing brain: Integrating brain andprevention science, ed. D. Romer and E.F. Walker, 9–30. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Standen, A. 2007 (February 1). Inside the teenage brain: Understanding how adolescents think. http://www.edutopia.org

Talukder, G. 2000 (July). Decision-making is still a work in progress for teenagers. http://www.brainconnection.com

Teachers’ Domain. 2002. Resource: Dr. Jay Giedd: The adolescent brain. http://www.teachersdomain.org

Tennant, V. 2007. Understanding the mysteries of the teenage brain. http://casat.unr.eduThomas, G. 2005. What do we mean by ‘EBD’? In Handbook of emotional and behavioural

difficulties, ed. P. Clough, P. Garner, J.T. Pardeck, and F.K.O. Yuen, 59–82. London: Sage.Visser, J., and Z. Jehan. 2009. ADHD: A scientific fact or a factual opinion? A critique of the veracity

of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Emotional and Behavioural Difficulties 14: 127–40.Weinberger, D.R., B. Elvevåg, and J.N. Giedd. 2005. The adolescent brain: A work in progress.

Washington, DC: National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy.Winters, K.C. 2004. Adolescent brain development and drug abuse. http://www.tresearch.orgYurgelun-Todd, D. 2007. Emotional and cognitive changes during adolescence. Current Opinion in

Neurobiology 17: 251–7.Yurgelun-Todd, D.A., and W.D.S. Killgore. 2006. Fear-related activity in the prefrontal cortex

increases with age during adolescence: A preliminary fMRI study. Neuroscience Letters 406,no. 3: 194–9.

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Upp

sala

uni

vers

itets

bibl

iote

k] a

t 19:

37 1

0 O

ctob

er 2

014