Especially here in the United Kingdom, you only ever hear a nice thing about a teenager from a charity worker. Otherwise parents, teachers, the police, the criminal justice system, all are united, just for this instance: adolescents are awful.
This has permeated my consciousness so fully that when a teenage stranger does something nice my worldview is so disturbed, and it takes me so much extra bigotry to get everything back on its axis, that the day would have been easier if it hadn’t happened.
I read once that the pubescent growth spurt took so much raw energy that the individual’s brain effectively shuts down, leaving only the reptilian section — responsible for eating, breathing, but also the base emotions of anger, lust, rage, paranoia and anxiety. It explains a lot about why everyone is so wary of them, but if they really have nothing more than a beast’s functionality, is school the best place? Wouldn’t they be better off in some kind of secure unit? And yet we can’t escape the fact that we all lived through this period and it didn’t strike me that everything was my fault.
This week’s research about embarrassment cuts straight to the heart of this. According to Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, in a study for the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, adolescents use their medial prefrontal cortex even when considering situations that might cause them embarrassment; adults do not. Other emotions not connected to the opinions of other people are experienced in the same neural area by both teenagers and adults. So adolescents probably experience shame differently and more deeply, which is why they find their parents so appalling on so many levels.
Now that it’s all neurological, there’s no right and wrong. Who’s to say which is the truer experience of embarrassment, between the fervour of adolescence and the relative nonchalance of adults? Do our brains mature or just deteriorate? Impartiality is impossible: you just have to decide whose side you’re on, between inner teen and outer adult. Instinctively, I would side with the adults, but then I think of my mother dancing to All Around My Hat and I still worry that my insides will liquefy.
Blakemore, questioned about the purpose of the study, said adolescence was a key time in emotional development and, by extension, the development of mental illness. Overwhelmingly, the onset of depression and anxiety disorders, not to mention anorexia and similar, will occur in this window.
The more we understand, the better. True, but I wonder about the underlying assumptions, whenever we detect a difference in the teenage psychological profile. Because many adolescent traits are antisocial — specifically volatility and aggression — the assumption is that the immature mind is always disharmonious, where the mature mind always works towards community or at the very least is more civic-minded than it was when it was 14.
But embarrassment, surely, has a social imperative. In so many respects, and most of all in the business of getting laid, it pays to be disinhibited. So if shame didn’t have some rolling benefit we surely would have collectively bred it out, like gills and webbed toes? I have always associated embarrassment with deficiency, an underpowered engine of self: “What will people think?” is a very small-town mantra, and runs counter to the values of individualism that broadly characterise the culture.
But individualism and isolation are a hair’s breadth apart; unshackle yourself entirely from shame and sooner or later everyone is living alone, emerging only to be naked and whistle.
Maybe adolescents only went into embarrassment overdrive because the rest of us weren’t taking it seriously enough. Maybe we’re the feckless ones and they’re the ones trying to hold it together. Maybe they’re not reptiles after all. —