Teenagers really do get 'dumber'

Adolescence: Teenagers have a knack for being annoying but don't blame them, blame their hormones.

New research shows that puberty disturbs their ability to recognise their parents' emotional state, leaving the teen oblivious to their frustration.

The "Genetics of Brain Wiring" session at the BA meeting yesterday heard University College London's Prof David Skuse describe new findings that showed teenagers really do get "dumber" in their social intelligence around the time of puberty.

The finding came from research being done in an effort to understand why boys are 10 times more likely to be autistic than girls. Autistic children are poor at deciphering the meaning of facial expressions, Prof Skuse, the head of the behavioural and brain sciences unit, explained.

He set up a study involving 600 normal children aged between 6 and 17 years who performed tasks associated with their social intelligence. "We undertook the first comprehensive statistically valid survey of the ability of children to recognise certain social cues," he explained.

The tests involved three tasks, recognising facial emotions such as fear, anger, sadness and surprise; remembering faces; and telling whether someone is making eye contact with them. Autistic children perform badly at all three. All children performed well at remembering faces and recognising eye contact, but surprising findings emerged related to understanding the meaning of facial expressions, Prof Skuse said.

Boys just at school-going age did not perform anything like as well as girls at this task. "At the age of six there is really quite a substantial difference between boys and girls," he stated.

"This is the first objective evidence that there is a substantial difference between the sexes." His results showed that the difference declined as the boys aged and they became better at recognising the social clues evident in facial expressions until age 17 when there was virtually no difference. This makes it difficult for young boys new to school to recognise the meaning behind a teacher's arched eyebrows or annoyed face. Teachers must appreciate that boys are less able to read these meanings and may not simply be "mucking around", Prof Skuse said.

More surprisingly, he found that usually between the ages of 14 to 16 for girls and 15 to 17 for boys, teenagers are much less able to recognise the meanings of facial expressions such as fear and anger.

The assumption was that the teen's social intelligence diminishes as the brain begins to rewire itself during puberty. This dip in social intelligence quickly diminishes leaving girls and boys able to respond normally to facial expressions as older teens.