Social relationships are particularly important during adolescence. In recent years, histological and MRI studies have shown that the brain is subject to considerable structural development during adolescence. Brain regions that are implicated in social cognition, including parts of prefrontal, parietal and superior temporal cortex, undergo the most pronounced and prolonged change. However, the development of social cognition during adolescence and its neural underpinnings remains poorly understood. Here, we begin by outlining how the brain changes between childhood and adulthood. We then describe findings that have emerged from behavioural and neuroimaging studies of the recognition of facial expression during adolescence. Finally, we present new data that demonstrate development of emotional perspective taking during adolescence. In this study, 112 participants, aged 8–36 years, performed a computerised task that involved taking an emotional perspective either from the participant’s own point of view or from that of another person. The results showed that average difference in reaction time (RT) to answer questions in the first person perspective (1PP) and third person perspective (3PP) significantly decreased with age. The RT difference of adults tended to cluster close to the zero line (3PP1PP), while a greater proportion of pre-adolescents had higher difference values in both the positive (3PP>1PP) and negative direction (1PP> 3PP) of the scale. The data suggest that the efficiency, and possibly strategy, of perspective taking develop in parallel with brain maturation and psychosocial development during adolescence.

Recent DNA exonerations have helped shed light on the problem of false confessions and the empirical fact that innocent people sometimes confess to crimes they did not commit. Drawing on past and current police practices, laws concerning the admissibility of confession evidence in court, relevant core principles of psychology, and forensic studies involving an array of empirical methodologies, this White Paper summarizes much of what we know about police-induced confessions. AS part of this review, we identify dispositional suspect characteristics (e.g., adolescence; intellectual disability; mental illness, and certain personality traits), interrogation tactics (e.g., excessive interrogation time; presentations of false evidence; minimization), and the phenomenology of innocence (e.g., the tendency to waive Miranda rights) that can influence the reliability of confessions, as well as their effects on judges, juries, and other decision makers. This article concludes with a strong recommendation for the mandatory videotaping of interrogations and considers other possibilities for the reform of interrogation practices and the protection of vulnerable suspect populations. 3 Police-Induced Confessions: Risk Factors and Recommendations In recent years, a disturbing number of high-profile cases, such as the Central Park jogger case, have surfaced involving innocent people who had confessed and were convicted at trial, only later to be exonerated (Drizin & Leo, 2004; Gudjonsson, 1992,

Negotiating the transition from dependence on parents to relative independence is not a unique demand for today's youth but has a long evolutionary history (transmission) and is shared across mammalian species (translation). However, behavioral changes observed during this period are often described as delinquent. This review examines changes in explorative and emotive behaviors during the transition into and out of adolescence and the underlying neurobiological bases in the context of adaptive and maladaptive functions. Introduction Adolescence is a transitional period from childhood to adulthood, with an onset that includes pubertal maturation and an offset that is marked by independence from the parent. The paradox observed for human adolescents is that while they are stronger, faster, and more resistant to disease, and have better reasoning and decision-making skills than children, mortality increases 200% for them during this time To understand this paradox, this review highlights central themes of the NIH Blueprint for neuroscience research on neurodevelopment (National Institutes of Health, 2006). This report underscores the importance of ''periods of rapid developmental transition, such as the transition into and out of puberty'' and of using ''translational developmental neuroscience'' to understand how behavior is transmitted from one generation to the next and translated across species. By examining the development of adolescent behavior through this lens, what may appear to be aberrant behavior at first glance may simply be adaptation of evolutionarily conserved mechanisms to the current environment. More and more, scientists are attempting to explain aberrant behavior in the context of gene and environment interactions, with the environment accounting for much of the variance One potential example of an altered environmental experience is the prolongation of adolescence with the postponement of adulthood What Causes or Controls Adolescent Behavior? Parents often attribute their adolescent's mood swings and provocative behavior to surging hormones. However, animal and human studies suggest that both puberty and age influence changes in explorative and emotive behaviors in adolescents. To address causal influences on behavior during adolescence, we begin by defining adolescence. Adolescence is the transition between pubertal onset and parental independence where puberty refers to changes in reproductive maturation Disentangling age and pubertal effects is more challenging, however Recent animal and human imaging studies support separate and interactive roles of puberty and age in controlling behavior and altering brain development. Sisk and colleagues showed that the presence or absence of testosterone during adolescence in male hamsters could program adult sexual behavior Disentangling age and pubertal driven changes is difficult in typically developing organisms given the strong associations between the two and the wide variability in timing of puberty To date, these studies suggest that mid-to late puberty is positively associated with elevated physiological reactivity to emotional cues How Does Behavior Change during Adolescence? Changes in explorative and emotive behaviors have been observed across species as the organism moves from parental dependence to independence during the transition into and out Prolongation of adolescence may result in increases in the duration and the degree (magnitude) of an imbalance between hormonally driven limbic processes relative to age-dependent (experience) driven cortical processes, In the illustration above, blue represents cortical control, pink represents subcortical reactivity, and red represents a further shift with earlier pubertal onset. Increasing the duration and degree of this imbalance may lead to greater difficulty as the individual moves from dependence on parents to relative independence. 750 Neuron 67, September 9, 2010 ª2010 Elsevier Inc. Neuron Review of adolescence. These behavioral findings are reviewed and then discussed in the context of changes in the underlying neurobiology with age. Human Behavioral Studies A cornerstone of behavioral development is the ability to resist temptation in favor of long-term goals. Lapses in this ability have been suggested to lie at the very core of adolescent behavior There is a wealth of behavioral evidence from experimental paradigms in controlled laboratory settings that show a steady improvement in the ability to suppress an inappropriate response in favor of an appropriate one from infancy to adulthood, termed cognitive control Motivation has been shown to modulate cognitive control in at least two ways. First, being rewarded for performance on a given task can improve performance more than when not rewarded Ernst and colleagues In contrast to enhancing performance, rewards can diminish performance when suppressing responses to stimuli that lead to high gain. For example, using a gambling task in which reward feedback was provided immediately during decision-making (''hot'' trials, which heightened task-elicited arousal) or withheld until after the decision (''cold'' deliberate decision-making trials), Figner et al. (2009) showed that adolescents made disproportionately more risky gambles compared to adults but only in the ''hot'' condition. Using a similar gambling task, More real-world experiments have begun to examine how peers, as possible secondary reinforcers, influence adolescent behavior more than adult behavior. Using a simulated driving task, Finally, there is evidence to suggest that motivational processes related to sensitivity to rewards and sensation-seeking behavior are distinct from impulsivity with very different developmental patterns (curvilinear versus a linear function, respectively). This distinction is further supported in a recent study by One of the first studies to examine incentive-related processes across the full spectrum of development from childhood to adulthood was completed by How does this enhancement of signaling in the ventral striatum in adolescents relate to real-world behavior? In a follow-up study, Although several laboratories Further support of the role for an elevation in dopamine-rich circuitry being related to risky behavior and sensitivity to reward comes from A scientific area that has received less attention is determining how cognitive control and motivational systems interact over the course of development. As mentioned earlier, Ernst and colleagues Rewards can enhance or diminish goal-directed behavior. The capacity to exert control over one's actions is especially challenged when required to suppress an action toward positive or appetitive cues. The observation that adolescents take more risks when appetitive cues are present versus absent during gambling tasks makes this point (e.g., Figner et al., 2009). Recently, Neuron Review trajectory of subjects' abilities to flexibly approach or avoid positive or neutral stimuli. Specifically, adolescents showed a unique pattern of errors relative to both children and adults, characterized by a reduction in the capacity to suppress an approach response toward a positive, appetitive social cue (see The decrement in performance during adolescence was paralleled by enhanced activity in the ventral striatum. Conversely, activation in the inferior frontal gyrus was associated with overall accuracy and showed a linear pattern of change with age for the no-go versus go trials (see Recently, developmental studies have begun to provide support for strengthening in the connections of dopamine-rich frontostriatal circuitry. Using diffusion tensor imaging and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), Casey and colleagues Collectively, the developmental imaging literature suggests that the prefrontal cortex, thought to support cognitive control Comparative Studies Adolescence is not special to humans. Rather, a variety of species must acquire the basic skills of transitioning from dependence to relative independence from parental care Review Risk taking also encourages individuals within a species to emigrate away from the home territory around the time of sexual maturation, thereby reducing inbreeding within the population and avoiding the lower viability of inbred offspring due to greater expression of recessive genes Seminal animal work has delineated dopamine-rich frontostriatal circuitry in motivated behavior. For example, using single-unit recordings in monkeys, Frontostriatal circuits undergo considerable elaboration during adolescence How Is Adolescent Behavior Adaptive? Because information about gender and social status are essential for reproduction and survival of a species, it seems plausible that specialized mechanisms have evolved to process socioemotional cues when needed Over the past decade, a number of imaging studies have begun to examine the sensitivity of adolescents to emotional cues and information Hare showed that adolescents have an initial exaggerated amygdala response to cues that signal threat (fearful faces) relative to children and adults (see More in-depth examination of the blood oxygen leveldependent signal in the amygdala with repeated presentation of the fearful face (i.e., repeated exposure to empty threat) across experimental trials showed attenuation over time. The extent to which activation of this region diminished with repeated trials was correlated with the anonymous self-report ratings of everyday anxiety ( These findings suggest that initial emotional reactivity to potential threat, as indexed by elevated amygdala activity, is typical of, or normal for adolescence, but that failure of this response to subside over time with no impending threat is atypical or maladaptive and may be indicative of risk for anxiety. Consistent with this suggestion is clinical imaging data showing elevated amygdala activity to fearful faces using similar paradigms with children and adolescents diagnosed with anxiety and depression (e.g., 754 Neuron 67, September 9, 2010 ª2010 Elsevier Inc. Neuron Review The observation of imbalanced activity in the amygdalaventromedial prefrontal network, as shown by elevated amygdala and less prefrontal activity in anxious individuals, is consistent with a variety of work in animals Recent translational studies using genetically altered mice and human genetic imaging suggest one pathway to the uncoupling within this circuitry Our model depicted in Conclusions Negotiating the transition from dependence on parents to relative independence is not a unique demand for today's youth, but has a long evolutionary history and is shared across mammalian species. This period of transition has been prolonged in Western civilization for humans, with the increasingly occurring postponement of parental independence in many individuals. In this review, we highlighted recent neurobiological studies of adolescence to address the questions of potential mechanisms of behavioral change, how behavior changes during the transitions from childhood to adolescence to adulthood, and how these behavioral changes are adaptive from a comparative and evolutionary framework. To theoretically ground the empirical findings, we provided a plausible neurobiological model for understanding adolescence. The intention is to move away from psychopathologizing adolescence in order to explain why some teens-but not others-are more vulnerable to poor outcomes and why there is a 200% increase in mortality during this developmental period. As such, we identified potential markers of risk for mental health problems that go beyond adaptive and typical exploratory and emotive behaviors of adolescence. The model builds on animal work Review This view of adolescence is consistent with previous ones In sum, we suggest that adolescence, as a transitional period from parental dependence to adult independence, requires explorative and emotive mechanisms. These mechanisms have evolved over generations, for successfully adapting to new information and environments. From this perspective, aberrant behavior is the result of a change in an evolutionally stable environment (experience-expectant) ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Puberty is advanced by sex hormones, yet it is not clear how it is best measured. The interrelation of multiple indices of puberty was examined, including the Pubertal Development Scale (PDS), a picture-based interview about puberty (PBIP), and a physical exam. These physical pubertal measures were then associated with basal hormones responsible for advancing puberty. Participants included 160 early adolescents (82 boys). Puberty indices were highly correlated with each other. The physical exam stages correlated well with boys ’ and girls’ testosterone and dehydroepiandrosterone and less so with girls ’ estradiol. The PDS and PBIP were similarly related to basal hormones. Self-report may be adequate when precise agreement is unnecessary. Multiple measures of puberty are viable options, each with respective strengths. Adolescence constitutes a transition between child-hood and adulthood whose onset includes pubertal maturation. Puberty has important implications for the development of regulatory competence and many aspects of physical, emotional, cognitive, and social development, including decision making and mental health (Steinberg et al., 2006). For these rea-sons, biobehavioral researchers increasingly seek to examine measures of puberty to clarify studies of emotion-related neural circuitry (Nelson, Leiben-

Behavioral scientists have distinguished an instrumental (or proactive) style of aggression from a style that is reactive (or hostile). Whereas instrumental aggression is cold-blooded, deliberate, and goal driven, reactive aggression is characterized by hot blood, impulsivity, and uncontrollable rage. Scholars have pointed to the distinction between murder (committed with malice aforethought) and manslaughter (enacted in the heat of passion in response to provocation) in criminal law as a reflection of the instrumental–reactive aggression dichotomy. Recently, B. J. Bush-man and C. A. Anderson (2001) argued that the instrumental–reactive aggression distinction has outlived its usefulness in psychology and pointed to inconsistencies and confusion in criminal law applications as support for their position. But how similar is the legal distinction between murder and manslaughter to the instrumen-tal–reactive aggression dichotomy in psychology? This article compares and con-trasts the psychological and legal models and demonstrates that the purposes for distinguishing between instrumental and reactive aggression in psychology and law are undeniably different in meaningful ways. As such, a perceived shift in law away from differentiating murder and manslaughter has no bearing on the usefulness of the instrumental–reactive aggression distinction in psychological science.

Abstract: Adolescent-focused marriage education is a relatively uncharted research area. Using a quasi-experimental design, this study examined the effectiveness of an adapted version of the curriculum entitled, Love U2: Increasing Your Relationship Smarts with an economically, geographically, and racially diverse sample of 340 high school students. Findings suggest that participants showed increases in 5 dimensions of their relationship knowledge, including their ability to identify unhealthy relationship patterns. Participants also had more realistic beliefs about relationships/marriages and reported lower levels of verbal aggression use at postprogram compared to controls. Moreover, these findings existed across race, household income, and family structure type, with all participating students benefiting in similar ways. Implications for future programming and research are discussed.

Disturbances in the detection of, response to, and interpretation of emotion are common inmany formsof psychopathology. The amygdala, striatum, and structureswithin the prefrontal cortex are highly involved inmediating these stages of emotion processing, and evidence indicates that these regions show structural and functional alterations in different types of psychopathology, including anxiety, depression, and autism spectrumdisorders.However,wedonot knowhowgenes and the environment interact to alter development of these brain regions in ways that give rise to emotion-related psychopathology. This review discusses the current understanding of brain regions that are involved in emotional functioning, how they develop, and how they are altered in three forms of psychopathology: anxiety, depression, and autism spectrum disorders. Following this, a framework is described that may facilitate the integration of investigations of genetic variation and brain function with symptom and diagnostic measures. The framework involves three components: (a) a greater emphasis on simultaneously analyzing multiple levels (genes, brain function, behavior, symptoms, and diagnoses); (b) further integration of developmental considerations, including timing of environmental events, adaptations (or maladaptations), and disorder-related trajectories that guide some children toward atypical experiences; and (c) greater cross-talk between animal and human investigations to take advantage of biological measures that cannot be acquired in humans. Abnormalities in the detection of, response to,

ABSTRACT-This article draws on research in neuroscience, cognitive science, developmental psychology, and education, as well as scholarship from contemplative traditions concerning the cultivation of positive development, to highlight a set of mental skills and socioemotional dispositions that are central to the aims of education in the 21st century. These include self-regulatory skills associated with emotion and attention, self-representations, and prosocial dispositions such as empathy and compassion. It should be possible to strengthen these positive qualities and dispositions through systematic contemplative practices, which induce plastic changes in brain function and structure, supporting prosocial behavior and academic success in young people. These putative beneficial consequences call for focused programmatic research to better characterize which forms and frequencies of practice are most effective for which types of children and adolescents. Results from such research may help refine training programs to maximize their effectiveness at different ages and to document the changes in neural function and structure that might be induced.

This study examined the bidirectional development of aggressive response evaluation and decision (RED) and antisocial behavior across five time points in adolescence. Participants (n5 522)were asked to imagine themselves behaving aggressively while viewing videotaped ambiguous provocations and answered a set of RED questions following each aggressive retaliation (administered at Grades 8 and 11 [13 and 16 years, respectively]). Self- and mother reports of antisocial behavior were collected at Grades 7, 9/10, and 12 (12, 14/15, and 17 years, respectively). Using structural equationmodeling, the study found apartialmediating effect at each hypothesized mediational path despite high stability of antisocial behavior across adolescence. Findings are consistent with an individual systems perspective by which adolescents ’ antisocial conduct influences how they evaluate aggressive interpersonal behaviors, which affects their future antisocial conduct. In recent years, dynamic models of child and adoles-cent development have received increasing scholarly

We investigated behavioral and neurobiological mechanisms by which risk-averse advice, provided by an expert, affected risky decisions across three developmental groups [early adolescents (12-14 years), late adolescents (15-17 years), adults (18þ years)]. Using cumulative prospect theory, we modeled choice behavior during a risky-choice task. Results indicate that advice had a significantly greater impact on risky choice in both adolescent groups than in adults. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we investigated the neural correlates of this behavioral effect. Developmental effects on correlations between brain activity and valuation parameters were obtained in regions that can be classified into (i) cognitive control regions, such as dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) and ventrolateral PFC; (ii) social cognition regions, such as posterior temporoparietal junction; and (iii) reward-related regions, such as ventromedial PFC (vmPFC) and ventral striatum. Within these regions, differential effects of advice on neural correlates of valuation were observed across development. Specifically, advice increased the correlation strength between brain activity and parameters reflective of safe choice options in adolescent DLPFC and decreased correlation strength between activity and parameters reflective of risky choice options in adult vmPFC. Taken together, results indicate that, across development, distinct brain systems involved in cognitive control and valuation mediate the risk-reducing effect of advice during decision making under risk via specific enhancements and reductions of the correlation strength between brain activity and valuation parameters.