Adolescence: Developmental, Clinical, and School Psychology – Article overview (UNIVERSITY OF AMSTERDAM)
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Male antisocial behaviour is heavily concentrated in adolescence. There may be two types of male antisocial behaviour:Life-course persistent antisocial behaviour (LCP)This refers to antisocial behaviour that has its origins in neurodevelopmental processes and family adversity. Here, antisocial behaviour begins in childhood, builds persistently and continues into midlife.Adolescence limited antisocial behaviour (AL)This refers to antisocial behaviour that occurs due to age-graded social processes that begin with a maturity gap in adolescence and end when social adulthood is attained. Here, antisocial begins in adolescence and ends when social adulthood is attained.Life-course persistent antisocial behaviour is rare, persistent, pervasive and pathological whereas adolescence-limited antisocial behaviour is normative. For LCP, there first is a neurodevelopmental vulnerability (e.g. cognitive deficit; hyperactivity; difficult temperament) and this is exacerbated by environmental risk factors (e.g. inadequate parenting; maltreatment; poverty). The environmental risk factors includes other contexts with age (e.g. peer relations) and opportunities to learn prosocial skills are missed. The accumulation of risk and missed opportunities lead to a disordered personality and antisocial behaviour. LCP boys had elevated levels of risk in domains of parenting (1), neurocognitive development (2), temperament (3) and behaviour (4). These risk factors were not present for AL boys. LCP men often have poor work histories (1), interpersonal conflicts (2), low-status and unskilled jobs (3) and a lack of high school qualification (4). LCP men had more suicide attempts (1), worse mental health (2) and worse physical health (3) in their 30s while AL men experienced less severe problems (e.g. alcohol abuse). Chronic offenders refer to people who commit repeated offences and have several characteristics:They tend to have a young onset age (i.e. this predicts...
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Rank-order stability refers to the maintenance of the relative standing of individuals on a trait dimension within a population over time. Mean-level change refers to change in the average trait levels of a population over time. Individual difference in change refers to individual deviations from population mean-level patterns of change.
The cumulative continuity principle of personality development refers to personality and temperament being moderately stable in preschool years and becoming increasingly stable until middle adulthood. The maturity principle of personality development refers to the fact that, on average, young adults increase in their absolute levels of agreeableness (1), emotional stability (2), conscientiousness (3) and social dominance (4). These aspects are related to being mature and thus maturing is associated with increases in these factors.
The disruption hypothesis states that adolescents tend to experience temporal dips in personality maturity as a result of biological, social, and psychological transitions from childhood to adolescence. Adolescents may also not fit the maturity principle because they temporarily conform to deviant peer norms and experience difficulties in adjusting to increasingly mature expectations.
There seems to be an U-shaped change in the mean levels of most Big Five traits. There may be temporary mean-level decreases in conscientiousness (1), openness (2), extraversion (3) and emotional stability (4) in early adolescence and increases in late adolescence with the emotional stability aspect specifically holding true for girls.
Peers may play an important role in explaining individual differences in adolescents’ personality trait change (i.e. transactional model). Co-development refers to the tendency of group members to show interrelated development on a trait because of their social connectedness. There are several possible trajectories of co-development:
Personality trait change and personality trait co-development may result from social learning processes (1), conformity to social norms for behaviour and other personality expressions (2) or shared environmental experiences (3).
Adolescents tend to become more stable in their ranking on personality trait dimensions and tend to achieve greater psychological maturity, either linearly or through the U-shape. Adolescents differ regarding their personality trait trajectories but the individual differences in change are not related to personality trajectories of their friends and siblings.
The 1-year rank order stability of Big Five traits increased substantially in early and middle adolescence. Rank-order stability levels do not increase further in late adolescence. This is mostly due to stability of environmental influences. This may be stability of social relationships (1), identity maturation (2) and decreasing brain development of areas associated with personality.
Throughout adolescence and early adulthood, boys and girls showed increasing agreeableness and girls showed increasing conscientiousness. There is a temporal decline in boys’ conscientiousness and girls’
.....read moreDuring adolescence, people are uniquely attuned to the complexities of interpersonal relationships. There are significant changes and reorganization in subcortical regions associated with emotion processing and reward. Escalation of risk taking in adolescence may be the result of the dopaminergic system and related regions in the striatum. This may also explain increased desire to spend time with and earn the approval of peers.
In-person communication is necessarily qualitative and involves subjective interpretation. Online environments and interaction allow for quantifiable feedback (e.g. likes). Quantifiable social endorsement (e.g. likes; comments) may act as a powerful motivator.
The presence of peers is associated with increases in the nucleus accumbens which is a hub of reward circuitry. Peer influence is a means by which adolescents learn how to behave appropriately in their sociocultural environment. Peer pressure and social endorsement may influence risky behaviour.
Participants matched their peers more often than chance. The brain regions where more activity was with a lot or few likes depends on the content. When participants viewed neutral photos with many likes, they showed greater activity in the visual cortex. When participants viewed risky photos with many likes there was more activity in one cluster in the left frontal cortex. When participants viewed their own photo, there was more activity in several regions.
Participants had more activity in the bilateral occipital cortex, medial prefrontal cortex and the inferior frontal gyrus when seeing photos of risky photos compared to neutral pictures. There was more activity in the left nucleus accumbens when seeing one’s own photos or neutral photos with many likes but not risky photos.
Adolescents are more likely to like a photo when it had received more likes from peers. This also holds for when there is more risk-taking behaviour in the photo. This effect was especially strong for own photos. This may reflect the importance of self-presentation. People had more brain activity when there were more likes. This occurred in brain areas associated with social cognition and social memories (e.g. medial prefrontal cortex; hippocampus; inferior frontal gyrus). Adolescents perceive information online in a qualitatively different way when they believe that it is more valued by peers.
The nucleus accumbens is implicated in the experience of receiving positive feedback on one’s own images as well as viewing other people’s images that are well liked. This means that self-presentation can be rewarding and a motivation for using social networks.
Peers socialize one another to norms by using modelling and reinforcement. Social media uses both. Risk taking in adolescence may arise from heightened neural sensitivity to reward combined with immature capacity for cognitive control. A cognitive control network in the brain was less active when viewing risky photos.
Adolescents show increased attention and neural activation in response to peer acceptance. Feelings of relatedness with others and perceived acceptance during adolescence are associated with higher self-esteem (1), better adjustment in school (2) and greater self-worth (3). Peer rejection in adolescence is associated with school withdrawal (1), aggression (2) and mental health problems (3).
Social contexts are more salient to adolescents. This can lead to different decision-making abilities around peers (e.g. presence of peers increases risky decision making). Adolescents who feel rejected are more likely to engage in risky behaviour to fit in with the group.
Feedback from peers may reinforce behaviour. This may be due to overlapping neural circuitry for evaluating social and non-social rewards. The ventral striatum supports learning from varying amounts of positive social feedback from peers. The most reinforcing peers had a greater influence on social preferences. Choice behaviour (1), neural activity in the ventral striatum (2) and reaction times (3) may be hypersensitive to rewarding stimuli in adolescence. However, it is also possible that the functional connectivity changes and how neural activity guides expectations and behaviours rather than differences in reward-related learning signals.
Participants liked peers that gave them continuous positive social feedback more than those who rarely gave them positive social feedback. Participants liked peers who gave them frequent feedback more than those who rarely gave them positive feedback. There is no difference between the two in preference rating.
Higher learning rates to positive reinforcement reflect vigilance to reinforcement contingencies. This is indicated by a rapid change in behaviour when contingencies were reversed. Adolescents show lower positive learning rates compared to children and adults.
Adolescents showed greater activity in the supplementary motor cortex and in the putamen when receiving positive social reinforcement. Elevated activity within a motor circuit in adolescents when receiving positive social feedback is associated with speeding responses to cues of the least reinforcing peer.
Different amounts of positive social reinforcement enhanced learning in children and adults. However, all positive social reinforcement equally motivated adolescents (i.e. lower positive learning rate). They show elevated activity in response planning circuitry when they receive positive feedback, regardless of the expected outcome. This reiterates that adolescence is a period of unique sensitivity to peers. Adolescents may have an overall vigilance to peer approval. This demonstrates that peers can enhance adolescents’ risk-taking behaviour.
The lower positive learning rates for adolescents could occur if adolescents do not learn to discriminate between the cues that are associated with different amounts of positive social feedback. Alternatively, adolescents’ behaviour may not be captured by simple reinforcement learning.
Adolescents may also have a lower positive learning rate due to increased motivation toward that which is socially the least reinforcing. This may be as adolescents tend to engage in risky behaviour when they perceive themselves as less socially accepted.
There is elevated activity in the insula to social cues in adolescence. The insula
.....read moreSocial sensitivity refers to the heightened attention, salience and emotion relegated to processing information concerning social evaluations and social standing in adolescence. Social sensitivity could intensify socioemotional processes (e.g. more attuned to instances of perceived social evaluation).
There are three types of patterns of brain development:
Adolescent-emergent patterns imply developmentally mediated shifts that are constrained by maturational processes that solidify in early adulthood.
The socioaffective circuitry is critical for detection of salient information (1), assignment of hedonic, aversive or emotional value to that information (2), social cognition (3) and the use of that information to guide learning and behaviour (4). It includes the amygdala (1), striatum (2) and the medial prefrontal cortex (3).
The socioaffective circuitry may be especially important in adolescence as it develops. This may be because the prefrontal cortex continues to reach structural and functional maturity throughout adolescence. Next, the connections between subcortical and cortical structures continue to strengthen. The influx of hormones during puberty may sensitize functional properties of certain brain circuits and the still-maturing connections between subcortical and cortical brain regions may reduce the capacity to exert cognitive or emotional regulation, especially in emotionally salient contexts. This may lead to adolescent-specific engagement patterns. Sensitized socioaffective circuits which are not optimally regulated (i.e. due to an immature prefrontal cortex) could sharpen the detection of and response to salient cues during adolescence.
There are three general tasks to study the effect of social feedback:
Adolescents show heightened positive and negative emotional responses in these paradigms. There is a greater drop in mood and a greater increase in anxiety after receiving negative social feedback in adolescents compared to adults. All adolescents show a heightened pupil response to rejection social feedback and this is more so in older adolescents. This predicts less connectedness. However, adolescents also experience a boost in positive affect when experiencing social acceptance from a desirable peer.
Adolescents engaged similar regions of the brain as children and adults when processing social feedback. However, adolescents’ activity increased with age within the striatum and subgenual anterior cingulate cortex (i.e. regions that support emotional valuation) while
.....read moreIntervention studies facilitate our understanding about which interventions are most effective in improving educational outcomes.
Theories of motivation regard the energization and direction of behaviour. Social-cognitive theories of motivation include theories focusing on achievement motives and needs (1), perceived ability and self-concept (2), perceived value for and interest in an activity (3), goals (4), attributions about success and failure (5), emotions (6) and potential future identities (7). Motivation refers to processes that are affective, behavioural and/or cognitive and energize and direct behaviour.
Student motivation is essential for learning. Motivated students learn more (1), persist longer (2), produce higher quality work (3) and score higher on tests (4). This is especially the case if they are motivated by relatively intrinsic as compared with extrinsic motivation. Declines in student motivation are a common problem and threaten educational equity. Schools do not seem to be enhancing or maintaining motivation to learn in school at a systematic level.
There are three dimensions of naturalness:
A more natural intervention is more likely to generalize to other settings. There are several theories on motivation:
Male antisocial behaviour is heavily concentrated in adolescence. There may be two types of male antisocial behaviour:
Life-course persistent antisocial behaviour is rare, persistent, pervasive and pathological whereas adolescence-limited antisocial behaviour is normative. For LCP, there first is a neurodevelopmental vulnerability (e.g. cognitive deficit; hyperactivity; difficult temperament) and this is exacerbated by environmental risk factors (e.g. inadequate parenting; maltreatment; poverty). The environmental risk factors includes other contexts with age (e.g. peer relations) and opportunities to learn prosocial skills are missed. The accumulation of risk and missed opportunities lead to a disordered personality and antisocial behaviour.
LCP boys had elevated levels of risk in domains of parenting (1), neurocognitive development (2), temperament (3) and behaviour (4). These risk factors were not present for AL boys. LCP men often have poor work histories (1), interpersonal conflicts (2), low-status and unskilled jobs (3) and a lack of high school qualification (4). LCP men had more suicide attempts (1), worse mental health (2) and worse physical health (3) in their 30s while AL men experienced less severe problems (e.g. alcohol abuse).
Chronic offenders refer to people who commit repeated offences and have several characteristics:
The age-crime curve refers to the curve that offending follows over age. Onset of illegal behaviour is typically between ages 8 and 14 years and desistence from offending is typically between 20 and 29 years. The peak age of offending is between 15 to 19 years. During this age, almost 90% of males break laws.
It is possible that AL men are able to profit from opportunities for desistence of antisocial behaviour whereas this is not possible for LCP men due to their childhood which led to antisocial patterns and personalities. However, all men’s offending declines with age. Adult-onset antisocial behaviour seems unlikely to exist (i.e. they all have a history of problematic childhood or conduct problems).
The strongest predictors of persistent antisocial behaviour are individual characteristics (e.g. difficult temperament; neuropsychological deficits). Abnormalities on neuropsychological tests are associated with LCP but not AL. LCP behaviour is thus characterized by difficulties in the brain’s mental functions (i.e. verbal and executive functions).
A gap between biological and social maturation may explain the rise in the age-crime curve during adolescence. This maturity gap
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