How Social Sensitivity Affects Adolescent Learning — BrainPost | Easy-to-read summaries of the latest neuroscience publications

How is adolescent learning different?

Adolescence, a period from ages 10-24, is a transformative time when most people are extremely sensitive to peer influence and their own emotions. Learning during adolescence may be different than learning during childhood or adulthood, since adolescents are more sensitive to their social environment. This sensitivity could contribute to adolescents’ vulnerability to developing mental health issues.

How is the adolescent brain different?

Adolescents report more frequent and intense emotions than adults and experience more complex emotions than children. Self-consciousness and embarrassment, as well as the desire to be liked, peak during this time. These heightened emotions are most often and most strongly experienced in social settings. Adolescents have more activity in areas of their brain involved in emotional processing such as the amygdala and the hippocampus, which help them respond to social cues. Social exclusion also causes adolescents to respond with more neural activity than children.

During adolescence, learning can be heightened in some situations. We more easily remember this time period than memories from childhood or later adulthood. Older adolescents (16-18) learn more efficiently than younger adolescents (11-16). This stage is critical for learning a second language, developing taste in music, and sociocultural learning. So how is learning in adolescence affected by this social and emotional sensitivity? First, let’s take a step back and introduce two types of learning that happen in adolescence.

What is associative learning?

Associative learning, or learning to associate two unrelated things to each other, can be easier to study experimentally than other types of learning. There are two main types of associative learning:

1) Pavlovian learning: when you learn one stimulus is associated with another stimulus, leading to the first stimulus becoming associated with the response to the second stimulus. Also known as classical conditioning. An example is a dog learning that a bell chiming means it will soon get fed dinner and begins to get hungry just when hearing the bell.

2) Instrumental learning: when you learn a stimulus is associated with a response, which is then either rewarded or punished. This leads to the stimulus itself causing a change in the response levels. Also known as operant conditioning. An example is a mouse learning that a light turning on means that it should press on a button, which will be rewarded with food.

Learning happens in several stages. During acquisition, the association between stimuli and responses is formed. After a learning test is over and the stimuli stops being rewarded or punished, extinction occurs and the response to the stimulus is “unlearned”. Researchers use these techniques to better understand how learning is affected by social sensitivity in adolescence.

What are the advantages and disadvantages of social sensitivity?

Many studies have tried to understand human emotional sensitivity by drawing comparisons with adolescent rats. One associative learning experiment found that adolescent rats were more affected by social rewards than drug rewards when compared to adult rats. In humans, adolescents were motivated by all positive peer feedback, even from the least reinforcing peer, while children and adults responded only to the most positive peer feedback. Taken together, this means that social contact, even in the smallest amounts, can be a strong reward for adolescents.

On the other hand, adolescents continue to respond to social threats, even after the initial threat is gone, long after children and adults stop responding. This presents the issue that social punishments impact adolescents much more than children or adults. In addition to this, adolescents are worse at instrumental learning - when behaviors are strengthened or weakened based on whether they are reinforced or punished - than adults, even though they are more sensitive to social stimuli. As adolescents become adults, they get better at social learning, despite being more sensitive to social feedback when they’re younger.

How does this impact adolescent development?

Being able to learn from social cues is crucial, especially during adolescence. Since adolescents show more Pavlovian reward learning, researchers have suggested a connection with addiction vulnerability. It is well known that adolescents are more likely to use drugs or alcohol if their peers do.

While social sensitivity can lead to negative outcomes such as drug addiction, researchers also suggest it can positively impact adolescents as well. For example, while adolescents have higher vulnerability to mental health conditions like anxiety, they are also more affected by social feedback. Exposure therapy, like that used in Pavlovian learning, can be effective at treating anxiety. Because of this, researchers suggest that supportive friends might be better able to help buffer stress since adolescents are particularly influenced by social rewards during associative learning. By studying these effects of social sensitivity on adolescents, we may be able to better treat the mental health and addictive disorders that adolescents are particularly at risk from.

References +

Altikulaç, S., Bos, M. G., Foulkes, L., Crone, E. A., & Van Hoorn, J. (2019). Age and gender effects in sensitivity to social rewards in adolescents and young adults. Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience, 171.

Guyer, A. E., Silk, J. S., & Nelson, E. E. (2016). The neurobiology of the emotional adolescent: From the inside out. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 70, 74-85.

Johnson, D. C., & Casey, B. J. (2015). Extinction during memory reconsolidation blocks recovery of fear in adolescents. Scientific Reports, 5(1), 8863.

Jones, R. M., Somerville, L. H., Li, J., Ruberry, E. J., Powers, A., Mehta, N., ... & Casey, B. J. (2014). Adolescent-specific patterns of behavior and neural activity during social reinforcement learning. Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience, 14, 683-697.

Knoll, L. J., Fuhrmann, D., Sakhardande, A. L., Stamp, F., Speekenbrink, M., & Blakemore, S. J. (2016). A window of opportunity for cognitive training in adolescence. Psychological Science, 27(12), 1620-1631.

Koppel, J., & Rubin, D. C. (2016). Recent advances in understanding the reminiscence bump: The importance of cues in guiding recall from autobiographical memory. Current directions in psychological science, 25(2), 135-140.

Tang, A., Lahat, A., Crowley, M. J., Wu, J., & Schmidt, L. A. (2021). Children’s shyness and neural responses to social exclusion: Patterns of midfrontal theta power usually not observed until adolescence. Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience, 21(6), 1262-1275.

Towner, E., Chierchia, G., & Blakemore, S. J. (2023). Sensitivity and specificity in affective and social learning in adolescence. Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

Vink, M., Derks, J. M., Hoogendam, J. M., Hillegers, M., & Kahn, R. S. (2014). Functional differences in emotion processing during adolescence and early adulthood. Neuroimage, 91, 70-76.

Yates, J. R., Beckmann, J. S., Meyer, A. C., & Bardo, M. T. (2013). Concurrent choice for social interaction and amphetamine using conditioned place preference in rats: effects of age and housing condition. Drug and alcohol dependence, 129(3), 240-246.