rrelatives 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 technological experimentation — the relationship between theory, visualization, observation and transcription in the construction of scientific facts — is a classic theme in studies on scientific research (Latour and Woolgar  1988, Hacking  1989, Daston and Galison 2007), including studies on functional imaging research (eg. Beaulieu 2002, Dumit 2004). The latter, however, have focused mainly on the scan-image and the interrogation of various experimental tools that aim to produce a cerebral activation of which the scan is the visible trace.
This paper will first address the use of photography as a tool to capture and represent facial expressions of the emotions, and then it will address the scan-image of the emotional adolescent brain. More specifically, following a cultural history and social science approach and using gender studies as a privileged analytical tool, I intend to investigate the process whereby the cognitive neurosciences, using photographic portraits of actors miming emotions, have produced valid stimuli that allow the fMRI visualization of a cerebral differentiation that distinguishes between adolescents and adults on the one hand, and on the other, between young girls and young boys, in the management of emotional information. In effect, the emotional adolescent brain is constructed according to two interlocking hierarchies : if age difference is taken to be the foundational hierarchy, sex difference is both a driving and a moderating factor within that hierarchy. I begin with the history of Ekman and Friesen’s set of Pictures of Facial Affect, setting aside the object of the proof, i.e. the universality of the basic expressions, and looking at the support and tool of the proof, i.e. photography. The purpose of the exercise is to review experiments in the neurosciences of the emotions concerning adolescents. By concentrating on one dimension of the research that was hardly problematized by the researchers, I hope to demonstrate and interrogate the trajectory of the image, whether photographic or sca