Understanding why teenagers dramatically react to threats could help eliminate dangerous and impulsive behavior.
"The responses [to threats] we are seeing in the laboratory are on the order of milliseconds," Doctor BJ Casey, director of the Sackler Institute for Developmental Psychobiology at Weill Cornell, said in a statement. "Even teaching teens strategies to take a deep breath before acting could have potential implications for their safety."
The findings could also help explain why teens are more susceptible to suicide and accidents than other age demographics.
"The broader context for our findings, beyond how they may impact policies on the treatment of juveniles who typically commit crimes in the heat of the moment, is to understand why teens put themselves in harm's way," Casey said.
Casey said there is a "200 percent increase in mortality during adolescence that is not due to an increased risk for disease, but rather to preventable causes of accidental injury, homicide and suicide," the news release reported.
The team looked at 83 study subjects that were between the ages of six and 29. The participants underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while viewing photos of either neutral or threatening facial expressions. The subjects were also asked to press a button when they perceived and expression to be neutral, but not when it was threatening.
The researchers observed that teenagers had the most difficulty keeping themselves from pressing the button when presented with a threatening face. They also noticed that teens had more activity in the ventral prefrontal cortex brain region (which "[regulates] responses in emotional situations) when they were able to control themselves.
The researchers concluded the teens' "proclivity for danger" was unique to their age group.
"It's fascinating because, although the brains of young children are even less mature, children don't exhibit the same attraction to risky or criminal behaviors as do adolescents," lead author Doctor Kristina Caudle, a former postdoctoral fellow at Weill Cornell who now works at the Veterans Health Administration's National Center for PTSD, said. "Our research suggests that biological changes of the ventral prefrontal cortex during adolescence influence emotional processes, such that they react rather than retreat from dangerous activities."
