14 DAY TRIAL // As any parent could tell you, teenagers and young adults are a lot more prone to experiencing stress and anxiety when exposed to situations that would not necessarily elicit the same feelings in an adult. A new research study has just discovered the reason why this difference of perception exists.
Experts now say that the brains of teens process the way specific situations are related to fear and danger using regions of the cortex that tend to mature early on in their development. However, this areas of the brain are not as efficient in understanding risks as specialized ones in the adult brain.
This explains why teens tend to experience more anxiety than adults do when faced with the same situation. The work also suggests that the way a person responds to a certain situation is not only a matter of experience, but also one of age.
For the purpose of the new study, investigators at the Oxford University subjected healthy teens and adults to a threat stimulus study. The team, led by Jennifer Lau, PhD, was seeking to tease out the differences in the way the two types of brain were processing the stimuli they were provided with.
In order to be able to see the patterns of neural activation in the participants' brains, the team used an observations technique called functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), which provides experts with data on how blood flows through various areas of the brain.
After being hooked to the machine, all test subjects were made to watch a series of images, which included expressions that were scary and neutral. Experts divided the images into threat stimulus and safety stimulus, and mixed them among other photographs.
Brain activity patterns suggested that teens were more likely to experience a higher degree of neural activation in the hippocampus and amygdala. While the former is involved with creating and storing new memories, the latter is involved in fear response, PsychCentral reports.
In adults, experts noticed higher levels of neural activation in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), an area of the brain that generally matures much later in life. Past studies found it heavily involved in categorizing objects into different groups.
This difference helps explain why adults feel less anxiety than teens when handling the same stimuli. They are capable of cataloging the threat more accurately, which in turn reduces their degree of uncertainty about what they are seeing.
Without uncertainty, anxiety cannot take hold, experts say. The study is detailed in a paper published online in the latest issue of the esteemed journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).