Picturing Teenage Feelings.
From Photographs of Facial Affect to fMRI Scans in the Construction of a Sexed Emotional Adolescent Brain.Christel Gumy
This article has been translated by Diane Belle James.
The young adolescent lives for several years with a sexually mature body and a brain activated by emotions, but with a relatively immature behavioral and emotional regulatory system. This “disconnect” predicts the risk of a panoply of behavioral and emotional problems. (Holzer, Halfon and Thoua 2011, p. 7)
Research that aims to elucidate the neural bases of adolescence from the structural as well as the functional perspective emerged during the 1990s and has become authoritative over the past decade. In the field of developmental neurosciences, it is now accepted that after the tenth year of life, the brain continues to mature in a heterogeneous temporality, the prefrontal cortex reaching an adult-like stage of development only toward the age of 25 (Giedd et al. 1999, Sowell et al. 1999). The use of fMRI techniques aims to link the structural characteristics of the adolescent brain to behaviors that evolutionary psychology has designated as being constitutive of this stage of life. In other words, the specific configuration of the adolescent brain leads to a lack of emotional control that permits so-called risk behaviors which allow young people to gain the independence necessary to live as an adult and at the same time place them and their companions in dangerous situations (Spear 2000). This is the context in which research using fMRI to measure adolescent brain response to emotional-type visual stimulation is carried out.
To my knowledge, the report on the first study using fMRI to test adolescent responses to photographs of facial expressions of emotion was published in February 1999 (Baird et al. 1999) by Deborah Yurgelun-Todd’s research team at the cognitive and clinical neuroimaging center of Harvard University’s McLean Hospital. Yurgelun-Todd is a psychologist who specializes in research on the neuronal correlatives of the risks of developing mental illness and drug addiction.
Inspired primarily by Joseph LeDoux’s work on the neurobiology of the emotions using animal subjects (1992, 1994) and by the comparative studies of healthy and injured adult brains coauthored by Ralph Adolphs, Daniel Tranel, Hanna Damasio and Antonio Damasio (1994, 1995, Damasio 1994), Yurgelun-Todd’s team measured the activation of the amygdala in young subjects tasked to recognize the facial expression of fear. According to the authors, the purpose of this preliminary research was above all to validate the use of this experimental procedure with adolescent subjects, based on a synthesis of the above-mentioned research studies. The use of the Pictures of Facial Affect (POFA) developed by Paul Ekman and Wallace Friesen (1976) as the sole source of stimuli represented a stable element whose scientific legitimacy needed no further problematization. Indeed, the neurosciences of the emotions adopted this type of experimental tool during the 1990s as a static reference for emotion used to produce brain activation that could be visualized by fMRI (McClain 2004, Leys 2010). In the opinion of the neuroscientists, the use of such procedures in the study of adolescence allowed them to demonstrate a significant difference between adolescents and adults in brain activation in response to emotional stimulation. Thus the characteristic brain response of young people to emotional information could lead to risk behaviors (Dahl 2008, Steinberg 2008).
Some authors — sociologists, historians, but also neuroscientists — have produced critical reflections on the adolescent brain. While most of these studies highlight the fact that theories of cerebral adolescence tend to naturalize social and cultural issues related to youth (eg. Bessant 2008, Males 2009, Choudhury 2010, Payne 2011), they hardly problematize the question of gender which, in my view, is central to all levels of the construction of the teenage brain. Moreover, the problematization of modern techno