Cognitive psychology

Communication

Neuroscience

Brain development

Statistics

Developmental psychology

Acoustics

Physics

Psychology

Mathematics

Adolescent development

Flexibility (engineering)

Period (music)

Affect (linguistics)

Neuroimaging

Nature reviews. Neuroscience

Crone and Dahl review functional imaging studies of cognitive, affective and social processing in adolescents. They suggest that, together with the development of cognitive control networks, changes in social and affective processing in adolescence may both confer adaptive advantages and induce vulnerability to risky behaviours. Research has demonstrated that extensive structural and functional brain development continues throughout adolescence. A popular notion emerging from this work states that a relative immaturity in frontal cortical neural systems could explain adolescents' high rates of risk-taking, substance use and other dangerous behaviours. However, developmental neuroimaging studies do not support a simple model of frontal cortical immaturity. Rather, growing evidence points to the importance of changes in social and affective processing, which begin around the onset of puberty, as crucial to understanding these adolescent vulnerabilities. These changes in social–affective processing also may confer some adaptive advantages, such as greater flexibility in adjusting one's intrinsic motivations and goal priorities amidst changing social contexts in adolescence.

Understanding adolescence as a period of social–affective engagement and goal flexibility