Attachment style can have an impact on how teenagers process social-emotional information in interactions with those outside their family structure, says one social neuroscientist.
Pascal Vrticka’s article in the Huffington Post talks about how often teens separate from their families as they get older.
“This social-adaptation process requires adolescents not only to integrate new and diverse experiences in relation to the world and themselves but to resolve many disagreements and interpersonal conflicts. In a nutshell, one of the central developmental tasks teenagers are confronted with is the establishment of an accurate understanding of their changing social environment.”
His interest as a neuroscientist is in human attachment behavior and attachment styles with other scientists he “measured social-emotional brain activity in 33 healthy adolescents ages 12 to 19 by means of functional magnetic resonance imaging and also obtained measures of their attachment style.”
What they found was that teens with an insecure attachment may avoid social conflict more often compared to their securely-attached peers. In addition, adolescents with attachment anxiety may give too much attention to social conflict.
“Future investigations should also address the question of how such altered social-emotional brain-activation patterns as a function of attachment insecurity in adolescents are related to the neural signature of attachment insecurity emerging in adults.”
