Elsevier

Biological Psychiatry

Volume 89, Issue 2, 15 January 2021, Pages 109-118
Biological Psychiatry

Review
Navigating the Social Environment in Adolescence: The Role of Social Brain Development

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsych.2020.09.012Get rights and content

Abstract

Successful navigation of the social environment is dependent on a number of social cognitive processes, including mentalizing and resistance to peer influence. These processes continue to develop during adolescence, a time of significant social change, and are underpinned by regions of the social brain that continue to mature structurally and functionally into adulthood. In this review, we describe how mentalizing, peer influence, and emotion regulation capacities develop to aid the navigation of the social environment during adolescence. Heightened susceptibility to peer influence and hypersensitivity to social rejection in adolescence increase the likelihood of both risky and prosocial behavior in the presence of peers. Developmental differences in mentalizing and emotion regulation, and the corticosubcortical circuits that underpin these processes, might put adolescents at risk for developing mental health problems. We suggest how interventions aimed at improving prosocial behavior and emotion regulation abilities hold promise in reducing the risk of poor mental health as adolescents navigate the changes in their social environment.

Section snippets

Social Brain Development in Adolescence

During development, the brain undergoes substantial structural change in terms of gray and white matter volume, surface area, and cortical thickness (8, 9, 10). Magnetic resonance imaging studies have shown that cortical gray matter volume increases during childhood, reaches a peak in late childhood, and declines during the second decade of life, eventually stabilizing in the mid-20s (9,11, 12, 13). At the same time, there is a linear increase in white matter volume across childhood and

Mentalizing/Perspective Taking

Mentalizing enables us to understand the minds and predict the behavior of other people (27). Developmental functional neuroimaging studies have compared the neural processing of mentalizing across age, usually by asking participants to think about other people’s mental states. The TPJ, superior temporal sulcas, and precuneus show increased activity when young adolescents (28, 29, 30) listen to sections of a story describing a character’s thoughts (requiring mental state attribution) compared

Peer Influence in Adolescence

Adolescents are particularly susceptible to peer influence, especially in risky contexts. Research has also begun to explore the positive influence peers can have on prosocial decisions, and even on prosocial risk taking, as described below.

Conclusions

Adolescence is a time of social transition during which a number of social cognitive processes, such as mentalizing, resistance to peer influence, and emotion regulation, continue to mature alongside the brain systems that support them. Adolescents are especially vulnerable to mental health problems and risk factors in the social environment, such as peer rejection, contribute to this vulnerability. Interventions aimed at improving prosocial behavior and emotion regulation abilities,

Acknowledgments and Disclosures

S-JB is funded by Wellcome, the Jacobs Foundation, and the University of Cambridge. SPA is funded by a Wellcome grant to S-JB (Grant No. WT107496/Z/15/Z). JLA is funded by a Medical Research Council studentship.

The authors report no biomedical financial interests or potential conflicts of interest.

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    JLA and SPA contributed equally to this work as joint first authors.

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