How attitudes diverge in the teenage years
The transition from childhood to adolescence is often a difficult one for parents and youngsters alike. They move from dependence on the family to engaging with the wider world.
Their affiliation shifts from being family-focused to being peer-focused. Indeed, parents are often troubled and at times angered by the emphasis that young people place on their friends at the expense of family.
This is amusingly portrayed by Harry Enfield in his depiction of Kevin, a graceless, angry and clumsy teenager. However, it is also clear that boys and girls differ during these years, with girls preening and relentlessly focused on their appearance while teenage boys are gauche and often sulky.
While both are sensitive to the opinions that others have of them, this is much more pronounced in girls. Awareness of and attention to the opinion of others is ordinarily a good thing since it allows us to focus on social cues and to navigate various social encounters with sensitivity.
In excess it can be maladaptive, as it makes peer rejection painful and can lead to social avoidance and loneliness.
Gangs
What is obvious to the person on the street is that girls tend to go about in pairs while boys congregate in gangs. Take any street on a Saturday afternoon and groups of boy standing at a bus stop or in front of a sweet shop, often spitting, sometimes horse-playing, are common sights, while their female counterparts will be in dress shops talking about fashion and style.
It is tempting to think that these are culturally determined and that in another era things were different. Of course the expression of such phenomena may be culturally determined, but the core of their behaviour, the fact of adolescent boys hunting in packs and girls tending to go about in pairs, has always been observed; boys have always been 'rough' while girls have been giggly.
A new study based on brain scans of adolescents throws further light on these habits. Researchers Dr Daniel Pine, Dr Amanda Guyer and colleagues from the National Institute of Mental Health, carried out the study on 34 nine- to 17-year-olds, who were free from mental-health problems, with the aim of shedding light on the changes in relationships that occur in adolescence.
They were shown faces of people they could choose to meet and given brain scans as they studied these pictures. The results indicated that the parts of the brain which evaluate people, such as whether they are likeable or trustworthy, and the feelings the pictures evoked, lit up when shown to the female subjects. Among boys there was a decrease in activity in these areas.
Reactions
So girls were interested in the faces and the implied personal relationships while boys were not. Moreover, their skills at assessing their own emotional reactions to the pictures were also superior, abilities that are of obvious assistance in responding to social situations.
What does this study mean? Clearly it shows that adolescent girls have more highly developed social behaviour and have more affinity for one-to-one relationships than have boys of similar age. But there are implications that go beyond understanding the biological basis of social development, and extend into the area of mental health.
Among children the prevalence of depression is similar in both sexes but once adolescence is reached differences emerge, with depression occurring in a ratio of two to one in females as compared to males.
One possible explanation may rest with the priority that relationships have in the lives of women and that seems to be hardwired into their psychobiology, as evidenced in this study.
When these relationships are fractured, women are thus at greater risk of experiencing an adverse reaction.
So this research is one more step in the direction of understanding the differences between young men and young women in their social development and in their differential propensity to mental-health problems. What seems to be adolescent immaturity is, in fact, programmed into the nervous system.
- Patricia Casey
