Special issue on the teenage brain: Sensitivity to social evaluation
By Leah H. Somerville. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 2013
817 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Relative to childhood, peer relationships take on a heightened importance during adolescence. Might adolescents be highly attuned to information that concerns when and how they are being evaluated and what their peers think of them? This review evaluates how continuing brain development—which influences brain function—partially explains and reflects adolescents’ attunement to social evaluation. Though preliminary, evidence is mounting to suggest that while processing information relevant to social evaluation and the internal states of other people, adolescents respond with heightened emotional intensity and corresponding nonlinear recruitment of socioaffective brain circuitry. This review highlights research findings that relate trajectories of brain development to social behavior and discusses promising avenues of future research that will inform how brain development might lead adolescents to be sensitized to social evaluation.
Subfields: Clinical Psychology, Social Psychology
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/afe692f4898c4e7749bec91f61a0da885b0aaa3d
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Clinical Psychology
In Social Psychology
Citations in the corpus
- Beyond simple models of self-control to circuit-based accounts of adolescent behavior. (2015, background): “Social contexts impact behavior throughout the life span, but perhaps never as much as during adolescence (Blakemore & Mills 2014, Somerville 2013, Steinberg et al. 2008).”
- Peer Influence on Prosocial Behavior in Adolescence (2016, neutral): “Because social acceptance and approval are highly salient in adolescence, a time period of social reorientation in which peers’ opinions become more important, social reward is likely an important guide for social behavior (Berger, 2008; Somerville, 2013; Steinberg & Morris, 2001; Wentzel, 2014).”
- PoKi: A Large Dataset of Poems by Children (2020, neutral): “Regarding arousal, adolescents are thought to experience more intense emotions (Carstensen et al., 2000; Gunnar et al., 2009; Somerville, 2013), perhaps implying heightened tension and stress.”
- Frequency-specific maturation of cortical organization and social-cognitive links from childhood to adolescence (2025, unknown): “Social development shows a similar pattern: adolescence, a period of heightened peer sensitivity, coincides with major network reorganization (Crone & Dahl, 2012; Somerville, 2013).”