Severe psychosocial deprivation in early childhood experienced by institutionally reared children changes the course of structural brain development. Evidence from the Bucharest Early Intervention Project (BEIP) has demonstrated a causal association of random assignment to high-quality foster care intervention in early childhood with remediation…

Understanding neuroscience can provide a more effective educational approach based on neuroscientific discoveries. In this paper, we present the results of a continuing professional development course for schoolteachers on neuroscience applied to education, focusing on adolescent learning. One of the key outcomes of the course was improving…

Students' sense of belonging presents an essential resource for academic and health outcomes, whereas social exclusion at school negatively impacts students' well-being and academic performance. Aiming to understand how feelings of school-related belonging and exclusion shape the "structural" brain development, this study applied…

This small-scale study investigated the impact of training teachers on early attachment and adolescent neuroscience. The aim was to assess change in empathy pre and post training. Forty secondary school teachers in England completed the Empathy Components Questionnaire before and after Attachment Awareness training, showing small but…

Throughout childhood and adolescence, humans experience marked changes in cortical structure and cognitive ability. Cortical thickness and surface area, in particular, have been associated with cognitive ability. Here we ask the question: What are the time-related associations between cognitive changes and cortical structure maturation.…

Music plays an important part in the transitional period of life for adolescents as they define their personal and social identities and build their preferences for music. Recent neuroscientific research into the adolescent brain has produced developmental models that work to explain the neural reasons behind teenage behavior and development.…

Background: Many school-based abstinence-only sex education curricula state that sexual activity outside of marriage is likely to have harmful psychological effects. Recent advances in neuroscience have expanded our understanding of the neural underpinnings of romantic love, marriage, sexual desire, and sexual behavior and improved our…

Creativity is a multifaceted construct that recruits different cognitive processes. Here, we summarize studies that show that creativity develops considerably during adolescence with different developmental trajectories for insight, verbal divergent thinking, and visuospatial divergent thinking. Next, these developmental time courses are mapped to…

It is important to account for timing of puberty when studying the adolescent brain and cognition. The use of classical methods for assessing pubertal status may not be feasible in some studies, especially in male adolescents. Using data from a sample of 478 males from a longitudinal birth cohort, we describe the calculations of three independent…

Developmental neuroscience models suggest that changes in responsiveness to incentives contribute to increases in adolescent risk behavior, including substance use. Trajectories of sensitivity to reward (SR) and sensitivity to punishment (SP) were examined and tested as predictors of escalation of early substance use in a community sample of…

Adolescence is a period of radical normative changes and increased risk for substance use, mood disorders, and physical injury. Researchers have proposed that increases in reward sensitivity (i.e., sensitivity of the behavioral approach system [BAS]) and/or increases in reactivity to all emotional stimuli (i.e., reward and threat sensitivities)…

Aim: The aim of this article was to clarify the impact and consequences of very preterm birth (born less than 32wks of gestation) and/or very low birthweight ([VLBW], weighing less than 1500g) on brain volume development throughout childhood and adolescence. Method: The computerized databases PubMed, Web of Knowledge, and EMBASE were searched for…

Converging developmental decision-making studies have demonstrated that until late adolescence, individuals prefer options for which the risk of a loss is low regardless of the final outcome. Recent works have shown a similar inability to consider both loss frequency and final outcome among adults. The current study aimed to identify developmental…

The social brain undergoes developmental change during adolescence, and pubertal hormones are hypothesized to contribute to this development. We used fMRI to explore how pubertal indicators (salivary concentrations of testosterone, oestradiol and DHEA; pubertal stage; menarcheal status) relate to brain activity during a social emotion task.…

Recent developmental cognitive neuroscience research has supported the notion that puberty and adolescence are periods of profound socio-emotional development. The current study was designed to investigate whether the onset of puberty marks an increase in the awareness of complex, or "mixed," emotions. Eighty-three female participants (aged 9-16…