Environment plays role in teen brain development, study shows

UF Health Podcasts

It’s a question as old as time: Nature or nurture?

When it comes to the malleable, hormone-driven teenage brain, new research suggests the environment in which that adolescent brain develops plays a big role during a time when 75 percent of mental health disorders first appear.

Researchers from Yale University turned to a series of complex algorithms to test their theories. They also used “manifold learning,” a new technique for finding structure in thick biomedical data, like MRI scans.

Whether it’s the neighborhood you grew up in or your own family, when it comes to your emotional and behavioral development, your experience in that environment may be just as important as how your brain processes information.

Using data from the National institutes of Health and others, researchers used MRI scans to analyze teens’ brain activity during emotional and cognitive processing to predict differences in reasoning and emotional and behavioral symptoms.

Notably, researchers saw a greater association of brain activity with mental health symptoms when the algorithms took the neighborhood or family environments into account. The more environmental factors were fed to the model, the better its representation turned out to be.

Ultimately, this finding reinforced what researchers already knew: It’s imperative to consider the environmental situations adolescents must navigate in conjunction with how their brains take in information from those environments.

Being a teenager is hard enough as it is. At least now, however, researchers have more advanced tools to help us understand what’s making teens tick.