Adolescent Brain Development: Implications for Behavior

This comprehensive yet brief overview of the adolescent human brain discusses how the brain develops during this critical period of life and how that development impacts decision-making and risk-taking behavior in the adolescent.

• This originated as a white paper requested by the Canadian government for a specific group looking to understand adolescent brain development in the context of adolescent behaviour
• The paper was not made available to the Canadian government outside of the specific task force that requested it nor to the general public

Michelle Jetha is a research associate of the Brock University Centre for Lifespan Development Research, works in the Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience Lab, and teaches at McMaster and Brock Universities. She completed her PhD in 2007, examining electrophysiological responses to social and affective stimuli in individuals with schizophrenia or autism. She has published extensively on these topics, a major review of adolescent EEG/ERP development, and most recently on how shyness influences early brain responses to emotional face stimuli. Jetha completed postdoctoral work at Pennsylvania State University which focused on the identification of trait factors that predispose children to disruptive behavioral disorders. She is currently conducting research with adolescents in collaboration with a Niagara regional mental health agency. Her focus is translational neuroscience involving developmental psychopathology.

Sid Segalowitz has been a professor at Brock University since 1974, during which time he has taught in the Psychology Department and the Centre for Neuroscience and in 2007 became the founding Director of the Jack and Nora Walker Centre for Lifespan Development Research at that institution. He is also Director of the Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience Laboratory at Brock University and focuses his research on psychophysiological indicators of brain functions reflective of self-regulation of information and affective processing, especially as this relates to personality and development through childhood and adolescence. He has been Editor of the Elsevier journal Brain and Cognition since 2002.