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For parents, the terrible twos seem tame compared to the terrible teens. As this ScienCentral News video reports, new research shows that the adolescent brain may be programmed for a kind of laziness that makes it harder for parents to get help around the house and to keep teens from engaging in risky behavior.
Risk and Reward
Parents who complain about their lazy teenagers, take note—new research is revealing that laziness could be programmed in growing teens' brains, and can lead some kids to risky behavior.
James Bjork, a neuroscientist at the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, used magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to study the brains of 12 adolescents (ages 12-17) and 12 adults in their twenties (22-28). While being scanned, both groups played a computer game using monetary gain or loss as a motivator.
Bjork reported in the Journal of Neuroscience that even though both teen and adult brains showed a high desire to win, a different area of the brain lit up much less in the teen brains. "What we found is that the parts of the brain that are in the frontal lobe, that tend to assign picture value to rewards in the environment—the enjoyment of, say, having won five bucks—[were] the same in adolescents and adults," explains Bjork, "but what was deficient in the adolescents is the circuitry at the base of the brain in a region called the ventral striatum…and that region is a motivational center. It energizes action toward a goal. And we found that that was markedly deficient in the adolescents. This is despite the fact that questionnaires after the test indicated that the adults and the adolescents were equally happy and excited about the prospect of winning five dollars. But the adolescent brains didn't show in the actual circuitry and their activation in their brain."
Bjork says that could explain why it may be harder for some teens to get motivated, and this can lead to trouble. "Consider a person who has a motivational deficit," he says. "This kind of person would be drawn toward behaviors or activities that have either a very high reward or payoff factor or a very low effort factor because it's…a ratio [of] 'What do I get out of this activity?' versus 'How much effort do I have to expend to get it?' Examples of activities with really high reward-to-effort payoffs would be sitting on the couch playing video games with your buddies, or pounding drinks with your buddies, whereas adults might have a broad spectrum of activities that motivate them, that they derive pleasure from—volunteering, altruism, that kind of thing."
Psychiatrist Eric Hollander at the Mt. Sinai Medical Center agrees that lack of motivation can lead to problem behavior. "What [this study] tells you really is that you need to keep your adolescents really busy," says Hollander. "You have to keep them in some kind of active, structured stimulation to be sure they're getting the optimal level of arousal therefore they'll be less likely to go off and engage in high risk behavior. If they're in a situation that's unstructured and they have a lot of free time, they're going to be very bored, they're going to be under-aroused, they're going to feel uncomfortable, and that's going to put them at high risk for going out and doing risky behavior."
To combat this, Hollander suggests that "the old kind of strategies of having kids, for example, get involved in after school activities, get actively engaged in other meaningful relationships, and meaningful activities is really the most effective prescription really for decreasing the risk for substance abuse or other high risk behaviors."
Bjork says that a preliminary study suggests that teens with an alcoholic parent have motivational circuitry in the brain that's particularly silent compared to teens whose parents are not alcoholics. This research appeared in the February 25th, 2004 issue of the Journal of Neuroscience, and was funded by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism.
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