On a new page in the front of your books, miss the top two lines and… List: as many different emotions as you can

Our Feelings Change To understand how feelings and emotions change during puberty To consider the pressures of puberty

Our Feelings Change Read page 64 Copy and fill in the spaces on the top of page 64 Copy and complete the table on page 65 Give an example of a way that you reacted to a situation that was caused by going through puberty. Complete the “practical activity” on page 66 List as many pressures as you can that are on you as someone going through puberty. Eg. To wear the right clothes. How does this pressure make you feel? What negative affects can this pressure have on some people? What can we do to take this pressure off people? How can we cope with this pressure?

However, in recent years all that has changed However, in recent years all that has changed. Scientists now realise that the teenage brain undergoes the same sort of radical re-development seen in the rest of the body. The appearance of the secondary sexual characteristics during puberty, such as facial hair in boys and breasts in girls, appears to be paralleled inside the head with some equally dramatic changes in the physical structure and layout of the brain. It was not until the advent of brain scans - in particular magnetic resonance imaging technology, which allowed scientists to study the living brain in real time - that the true scale of the changes in teenage brain circuitry became fully apparent. Two main changes are now known to take place during adolescence. The first involves the growth of fatty insulation around the electrically charged neurons - the message-transmitting cells of the brain. This extra insulation increases the speed of transmission a hundredfold. The second change concerns the growth and then deliberate pruning back of the critical connections, or synapses, that link neurons to one another. This re-shaping of the brain's connections mirrors an earlier occurrence of "synaptic pruning" in the first few years of life and is considered a critical part of intellectual maturity. Tests show that there is a marked change in the way the adolescent brain handles information and deals with problems - a sign of growing maturity. adolescents are more self-aware and self-reflective than prepubescent children," "Adolescents develop a capacity to hold in mind more multi-dimensional concepts and are thus able to think in a more strategic manner." Dr Rapoport found a phase of overproduction of grey matter in the frontal cortex - the "thinking" part of the brain - just prior to puberty. The brain's grey matter is made of nerve cells, or neurons, and their connections. It became apparent that there was a second wave of growth and pruning during and after puberty.

Even more interesting was the discovery that this was focussed primarily on the brain's pre-frontal cortex, the part of the outer cortex responsible for "higher" functions such as decision-making, planning, the control of emotions, empathy and the understanding of other people's facial expressions. This provided one of the first clues that could explain the physical changes that might be behind some typical teenage behaviour. "One could speculate that some of the more immature aspects of adolescent behaviour may be due to the lack of maturity of some parts of the frontal lobes of the brain," says Dr Rapoport. "What you see is a wave of loss of nerve connections sweeping from the back of the brain to the front." It may, at first glance, seem rather odd that cutting back on nerve connections is a critical part of achieving intellectual maturity. But in fact it is not a good thing to have too much grey matter. "We need to prune it back, to get rid of the excess," Dr Blakemore explains. It seems then that teenagers go through a period when their pre-frontal lobes are "learning" to work more efficiently, which is important because this is the part of the brain that distinguishes man from the rest of the animal kingdom. It's what makes us - and teenagers - human. One of the key roles of the pre-frontal cortex, for instance, is understanding and interpreting the facial expressions of others. Teenagers are not very good at this, or at least they seem to be not very good. Take the expression of fear. When taking part in psychological tests young teenagers are notoriously bad at detecting fear in the faces of others. Brain scans show why. In early adolescence, teenagers use a part of the brain called the amygdala to interpret fear in a facial expression. This is an evolutionary ancient part of the brain and it forms part of the primitive "gut reactions" - instincts that do not involve much thought. During adolescence, possibly because of the reshaping of the brain, adolescents shift from relying on the amygdala to using the pre-frontal cortex. This leads to more reasoned perceptions and improved performance - they get better at understanding the facial emotions of others.