You might think your adolescent child is willfully blocking you out, but science now purports teenagers' brains shut down when their mothers nag.
Forty teenagers (ages 11 through 17) were tested in a study conducted by University of Pittsburgh, California-Berkeley and Harvard neuroscientists and published in the journal Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience.
Twenty-six participants had no diagnosed psychiatric disorders and 14 subjects had been diagnosed with Major Depressive Disorder. Every participant listened to two 30-second clips of their mother's voice - in one audio file, the mother talked about every day things and in the other, she criticized the teenager.
"One thing that bothers me about you is that you get upset over minor issues," one mother complained, according to Wired. "I could tell you to take your shoes from downstairs. You'll get mad that you have to pick them up and actually walk upstairs and put them in your room."
Three parts of the teenagers' brains were evaluated: the limbic system (the negative emotion processing zone), the prefrontal cortex (the zone that regulates the control of emotions) and the meeting place of the temporal and parietal lobes (empathy zone).
Scientists found that while being criticized (and for some time after), the subjects had decreased activity in the emotional and empathy zone and increased activity in the negative limbic system.
"Parents may benefit from understanding that when they criticize their adolescents, adolescents may experience strong negative emotional reaction, may have difficulty cognitively controlling this emotion and may also find it challenging to understand the parent's perspective or mental state," the study stated.
The effect of a father's voice on brain activity was not tested.
