Emotionally competent teens have brains that fire “in tune” with their parents’ brains

By Christian Jarrett Up and down the land parents and teenagers are engaged in tense negotiation and diplomacy in an effort to maintain domestic peace. Some households are finding more success than others. Their secret, according to a new paper in NeuroImage, is a literal meeting of minds – synchronisation of brain cell firing seems to foster emotional harmony. Moreover, when parents and their teenagers display this “neural similarity”, write Tae-Ho Lee and his colleagues, “this promotes youths’ psychological adjustment”. These are intriguing findings – in the fact the researchers claim this is the first time that anyone has compared the brain activity of parent-child dyads with their interpersonal relations. However, sceptics will baulk at the rampant neuro-reductionism and at the paper’s repeated claims of brain-based causation on the basis of purely correlational evidence. The researchers recruited 31 teens and their primary caregiver. The latter was always either the teen’s mother or father, genetically related to them. The average age of the parents was 43 years and just under 90 per cent were mothers. The teens were a roughly 50-50 mix of boys and girls, with an average age of 15. Each parent and teen participant underwent a 6-minute brain scan in which they lay still and looked at a cross on a screen. From this, the researchers identified each person’s resting state “connectome” showing the patterns of ne...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Brain Methods Source Type: blogs