Adolescent Brain Development - the Youth Advocacy Division

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Joline Krueger, Brain Science Offers Insight to Teen Crime, ALBUQUERQUE TRIB., December 8, 2006, http://www.abqtrib.com/news/2006/dec/08/brain-science-offers-insight-teen-crime/ (last visited Apr. 22, 2010). • Brief article discussing brain development and question of why adolescents act without thinking. “Cerebral construction is not complete until around ages 20 to 25, most scientists agree. The frontal lobe is one of the last areas of the brain to develop. In the adolescent brain, it's barely firing at all. Without the frontal lobe on board, it becomes physiologically harder for a teen to completely understand the future consequences of his or her emotional or impulsive actions, scientists contend.” Lee Bowman, New Research Shows Differences in Teen Brains, Scripps Howard, May 11, 2004, http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/new-research-shows-stark-differences-teen-brains (last visited Apr. 22, 2010). • Explains how while teens’ bodies maybe fully developed, their brains are nowhere near full maturity, especially in the areas related to culpability. • “Deborah Yurgelun-Todd of Harvard Medical School and McLean Hospital in Boston has studied how teenagers and adults respond differently to the same images. Shown a set of photos of people's faces contorted in fear, adults named the right emotion, but teens seldom did, often saying the person was angry. … Adults used both the advanced prefrontal cortex and the more basic amygdala to evaluate what they had seen; younger teens relied entirely on the amygdala, while older teens (top age in the group was 17) showed a progressive shift toward using the frontal area of the brain. ‘Just because teens are physically mature, they may not appreciate the consequences or weigh information the same way as adults do,’ Yurgelun-Todd said. ‘Good judgment is learned, but you can't learn it if you don't have the necessary hardware.’” Claudia Wallis, What Makes Teens Tick? TIME, May 10, 2004, http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,994126,00.html (last visited Apr. 22, 2010). • Discusses the new technology, processes, and findings relating to brain development (as of 2004). Cites many of the leading brain researchers in the field. • “The very last part of the brain to be pruned and shaped to its adult dimensions is the prefrontal cortex, home of the so-called executive functions--planning, setting priorities, organizing thoughts, suppressing impulses, weighing the consequences of one's actions. In other words, the final part of the brain to grow up is the part capable of deciding, I'll finish my homework and take out the garbage, and then I'll IM my friends about seeing a movie.” (4) Bruce Bower, Teen Brains on Trial: The Science of Neural Development Tangles with the Juvenile Death Penalty, SCIENCE NEWS, May 8, 2004, http://www.phschool.com/science/science_news/articles/teen_brains_trial.html (last visited Apr. 22, 2010). • A good overview of the science involved and its application to the juvenile death penalty. • “‘Our objection to the juvenile death penalty is rooted in the fact that adolescents' brains function in fundamentally different ways than adults' brains do,’ says David Fassler, a psychiatrist at the University of Vermont in Burlington and a leader of the effort to infuse capital-crime laws with brain science. Age-related brain differences pack a real-world wallop, in his view. ‘From a biological perspective,’ Fassler asserts, ‘an anxious adolescent with a gun in a convenience store is more likely to perceive a threat and pull the trigger than is an anxious adult with a gun in the same store.’” (1)
III. Academic Articles Elizabeth Cauffman et. al., Age Differences in Affective Decision Making as Indexed by Performance on the Iowa Gambling Test, DEV. PSYCHOL., 193 (2010). • Study showing that adolescents perform more poorly than adults in decision-making tasks where affective processing is involved and respond differently to rewards. • “[D]ecision making, which frequently precedes engaging in risk-taking behavior, indeed improves throughout adolescence and into young adulthood … this improvement may be due not to cognitive maturation but to changes in affective processing. Whereas adolescents may attend more to the potential rewards of a risky decision than to the potential costs, adults tend to consider both, even weighing costs more than rewards. This higher level of approach behavior during adolescence coupled with the lesser inclination toward harm avoidance may help explain increased novelty-seeking in adolescence, which can lead to various types of risk taking, including experimentation with drugs, unprotected sex, and delinquent activity.” (206) Laurence Steinberg, Adolescent Development and Juvenile Justice, 16 ANN. REV. OF CLINICAL PSYCHOL. 47 (2008). • Excellent overview of adolescent development research. Outlines the implications of adolescent brain, cognitive, and psychosocial development on culpability, competence to stand trial, and impact of sanctions on adolescents. Laurence Steinberg, A Social Neuroscience Perspective on Adolescent Risk-taking, 28 DEVELOPMENTAL REV. 78 (2008). • Summarizes brain development research and discusses why risk-taking behavior increases from childhood to adolescence and decreases from adolescence to adulthood. • “As a consequence of [neural transformations], relative to prepubertal individuals, adolescents who have gone through puberty are more inclined to take risks in order to gain rewards, an inclination that is exacerbated by the presence of peers. This increase in reward-seeking … has its onset around the onset of puberty, and likely peaks sometime around age 15, after which it begins to decline. Behavioral manifestations of these changes are evident in a wide range of experimental and correlational studies using a diverse array of tasks and self-report instruments … and are logically linked to well-documented structural and functional changes in the brain.” (92) Jeffrey Fagan, Juvenile Crime and Criminal Justice: Resolving Border Disputes, 18 FUTURE OF CHILDREN 81 (2008). http://futureofchildren.org/futureofchildren/publications/docs/18_02_05.pdf (last visited Apr. 30, 2010) • “Without exception the research evidence shows that policies promoting transfer of adolescents from juvenile to criminal court fail to deter crime among sanctioned juveniles and may even worsen public safety risks. The weight of empirical evidence strongly suggests that increasing the scope of transfer has no general deterrent effects on the incidence of serious juvenile crime or specific deterrent effects on the re-offending rates of transferred youth. In fact, compared with youth retained in juvenile court, youth prosecuted as adults had higher rates of rearrest for serious felony crimes such as robbery and assault. They were also rearrested more quickly and were more often returned to incarceration.” (105) Barry Feld, A Slower Form of Death, 22 NOTRE DAME J.L. ETHICS & PUB. POL’Y 9 (2008). • Argues that the diminished responsibility rationale in Roper should be extended by state legislatures to recognize youthfulness as a categorical mitigating factor in sentencing.
Page 1 and 2: Adolescent Brain Development A Yout
Page 3 and 4: VII. Legal Motions from MA 1. Motio
Page 5 and 6: Scientific Backing • Myelination
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Page 11 and 12: Margo Gardner & Laurence Steinberg,
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Page 15 and 16: Most of the materials for Sullivan
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