Mother’s criticism ‘shuts down’ teenage brain, say researchers

SCIENTISTS put some teenagers into an MRI machine and played a recording of their mum nagging them. The results were surprisingly unsurprising.

What makes teen’s brain shut down?

TEENAGERS. Everyone knows they don’t respond well to nagging from their mothers. New research may have revealed why.

According to neuroscientists, adolescents’ brains actually ‘shut down’ when they hear their own mothers criticising them, Wired reports.

The finding is revealed in a new paper, ‘Neural responses to maternal criticism in healthy youth’, by a team of researchers from the Universities of Pittsburgh, California-Berkeley and Harvard.

In a bid to find out just what makes teenagers tick, the scientists put the 32 youngsters — 22 girls and 10 boys, with an average age of 14 — through their brain scanner.

They then played them audio clips of their own mother criticising them. A sample, from Wired:

“One thing that bothers me about you is that you get upset over minor issues. I could tell you to take your shoes from downstairs. You’ll get mad that you have to pick them up and actually walk upstairs and put them in your room.”

Seems fair enough, right? Not for teenagers.

What the researchers found was that in response to maternal criticism, youths showed increased brain activity in ‘affective networks’, but decreased activity in ‘cognitive control networks’ and ‘social cognitive networks’.

Teenagers are ‘brain dead’. The science says so.

In other words, teenagers’ brains showed more activity in areas associated with negative emotions, but also reduced activity in regions responsible for emotional control and seeing other people’s point of view.

“These results suggest that youth may respond to maternal criticism with increased emotional reactivity but decreased cognitive control and social cognitive processing,” the authors write.

“A better understanding of children’s responses to parental criticism may provide insights into the ways that parental feedback can be modified to be more helpful to behaviour and development in youth.”

Wired’s Christian Jarrett, a former neuroscientist turned science writer, points out the limitations of the study, however — in particular, making assumptions about the meaning of brain activity based on previous research.

“The looseness of the study means the results could in theory be interpreted in a different way. For example, as the researchers surmised, perhaps the shutting down of the teen brain is a kind of protective effect to help stop conflict from spiralling,” he writes.

“This would fit with the finding that the teens who said their parents were more supportive tended to show the more striking inhibitory effect during criticism.”