Adolescence Flashcards
When is a critical period for the onset of psychiatric conditions?
Adolescence
What social upheaval occurs in adolescence?
Changing relationships from family as the primary interactions, to peers and intimate friends.
What are the clinical implications of adolescence?
Period of high risk and opportunity for intervention
Adolescents are more sensitive to
Acceptance and rejection by their peers.
How does peer importance change at adolescence?
Increases
How is risk taking behaviour changed in adolescence?
Increased
How does white matter change?
Increased myelination
How does grey matter change?
Synaptic proliferation followed by pruning
When do higher order association cortices mature?
After lower order cortices
Disjoin between which brain areas
Executive functioning and emotional areas
Relative maturity of … in comparison to a still immature ….
Limbic structures
Prefrontal signalling
What does the limbic/executive disjoin mean?
Biased emotional and incentive-based behaviour
Adolescents respond to threat cue more or less than adults
More
Adolescents respond to safety cue more or less than adults
Same
How is face processing changed in adolescence (4)?
Increased recognition of emotional expressions
Improved recognition of facial identities
Increased functional responsiveness of cortical face networks
Increased processing of facial attractiveness
What may relate to the emergence of psychopathology?
Differences in emotional processing
Amygdala in anxious vs depressed adolescents?
Anxiety reported in teenagers, relative increased activity in right amygdala. While depressed teens showed a blunted amygdala response.
How may sex hormones influence adolescents?
May sensitize neural circuits to hormone activation, which in turn allows for the development and maturation of social and sexual behaviors
Hormones may influence
Brain development
Lower testosterone effects on adolescent boys?
lower levels of testosterone and testosterone levels that decreased more slowly during the day had greater levels of anxiety, depression and attention problems irrespective of pubertal development.
Lower testosterone effects on adolescent boys?
Lower levels of testosterone and testosterone levels that decreased more slowly during the day had greater levels of anxiety, depression and attention problems irrespective of pubertal development.
Higher levels of testosterone associated with?
Increases in volume in the amygdala.
Acute increases in gonadal hormones correlated with
Greater affiliations with risk-taking peers and higher social dominance
Theory of psychopathology in adolescence
Higher emotional response to life events, problem behaviours emerge
Brain development during childhood and adolescence is characterised by
Increasing control over executive processes
