Dr. John's Health Matters

July 17, 2009 (Sciencedaily.com)—Ask middle-school students if they are popular or make friends easily, they likely will depend on social comparisons with their peers for an answer. Such reliance on the perceived opinions of others, or reflected self-appraisals, has long been assumed, but new evidence supporting this claim has now been found in the teen brain.

Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), researchers looked at adolescent and young-adult brain activity related to both direct self-appraisals, such as “Do I think I’m smart?” and perceptions of others’ opinions — reflected self-appraisals: “Do I think my friend thinks I’m lonely?”

During direct self-appraisals, researchers found that adolescents show more activity than adults in neural networks tied to self-perception (medial prefrontal and parietal cortices) and in areas linked to social cognition (dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, temporal-parietal junction and posterior superior temporal sulcus). The results, said lead author Jennifer H. Pfeifer, a psychology professor at the University of Oregon, suggest that adolescent self-perceptions depend heavily on others.

The findings even allowed researchers to extrapolate on which outside influences — such as friends or parents — drive particular self-appraisals. If a topic involves academics, moms got the nod, which translated into the brain tagging what teens believed mom though about these abilities as highly self-relevant, Pfeifer said. When it came to social skills, however, reflected self-appraisals from a best friend’s perspective mattered most at the neural level.

“As you transition into junior high, peers gain a lot of influence over certain domains, especially in the social realm,” Pfeifer said. “Parents manage to maintain this influence in the academic domain.”

For full article see link above.