Meanwhile, hormones fuel the sort of “ showing off” that would have increased one’s attractiveness in early societies. Parents usually realize where the parent-offspring tension comes from. So the things that the parent thinks that the child should be concerned with (preparing for a career and developing important life skills) and the things that the child is emotionally driven to actually be concerned with (being popular and having fun) are often at odds. Parents want their children to succeed, but they usually have a more long-term perspective than that of their teen. The result is a splintering of the social world into competing cliques that grind each other up in the gears of the social hierarchy.īack home, conflict with parents is usually inevitable. It all requires forging alliances and demonstrating loyalty to others. Ostracism from the group in prehistoric times was tantamount to a death sentence. After all, your status as an adult primarily depends upon how you stack up compared with them, not with others.Īlso, strong pressures to conform ensure that you do not stray too far from a friend group’s values. Popularity can become an obsession, since you’ll be ranked against the people in your own age cohort for the rest of your life. However, even though we may be consciously aware of this (to the extent that we are consciously aware of anything when we are teenagers), the psychological buttons that get pushed in the adolescent brain make us become consumed with our social lives during this period. Of course, today, those who have unsavory high school experiences can move to new places after graduation and start over. Thus, from an evolutionary perspective, the competition of the teen years had lifelong repercussions. A person deemed to be a loser at 18 was unlikely to rise to a position of prominence at 40. How much one was admired as a warrior or hunter, how desirable one was perceived to be as a mate and how much trust and esteem was accorded to one by others – all of this was sorted out in young adulthood. Most people would live out their entire life in this group, and one’s social standing within it was determined during adolescence. But evolutionary psychology can also help explain why so much meaning is attached to these years and why they play such an important role in who we become.įor example, there’s a reason teenagers often strive to be popular.Īs far as scientists can tell, our prehistoric forebears lived in relatively small groups. Memory research may offer hints about why the mental snapshots of our high school years remain so vivid even decades later. This is precisely the stuff we need to pay attention to in order to successfully play the cards we have been dealt and to become socially and reproductively successful.
SWEETHEART MEMORY PICTURES FULL
Emotions signal the brain that important events are happening, and the teen years are chock full of important social feedback about one’s skills, attractiveness, status and desirability as a mate. What is it about this time of life that makes it stand out from the rest of our years? Part of it is undoubtedly due to changes in the brain’s sensitivity to certain types of information during adolescence. Photograph: Allstar/PARAMOUNT/Sportsphoto Ltd./Allstar
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