Are We Wrong About Teens?

The notion of rebellious teenage behavior may be more nuanced than previously thought

By Alina Dizik 

Picture a TikTok-loving teen living in the US: rebellious, bored with school, disconnected from family life, and focused on relationships with friends. At least that’s how the stereotype goes.

But that’s only part of the story, says Yang Qu, a psychologist at SESP who explores how parenting, stereo- types, and cultural experiences can shape teenagers’ brains. During adolescence, the brain undergoes sweeping changes as neural processes reshape how teens act, think, and function. And in the US, teens are steeped in an environment that dramatizes their irresponsibility and moodiness, setting up what Qu calls a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Developmental cultural neuroscience, an emerging field Qu has helped create, can fill this gap by blending theories and tools from developmental psychology, cultural psychology, and neuroscience.

Using novel research methods, including functional magnetic resonance imaging, or MRIs, to capture the brain in action, Qu’s work with Chinese and American children suggests that thwarting negative stereotypes and helping teens see themselves as responsible can improve their outcomes in school, decrease risky behavior, and allow them to flourish in other ways.

“How children think about teens in general can influence what expectations they set for themselves as they navigate these years,” he says. “Guiding youth to see teens as responsible can help them thrive during adolescence.”

Qu is among several SESP researchers at the school’s Center for Culture, Brain, Biology, and Learning who are exploring the power of culture on behavior and brain development. Despite a long history of incorporating culture into the study of behavioral and psychological development in children—and more recent cultural neuroscience research on how culture influences brain function—researchers know little about the role of culture in youth’s brain development.

“Yang’s work highlights the power of belief in contouring our realities and is transforming our entire discipline,” says Claudia Haase, associate professor of human development and social policy.

Culture and brain development

Qu, who spent his own teenage years in Beijing, studied psychology at Fudan University in Shanghai and at New York University, where he earned a master’s degree. He later earned a master’s in statistics and a doctorate in psychology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Since arriving at Northwestern in 2018 after a postdoctoral psychology fellowship at Stanford University, he’s won four early-career awards, including from the National Science Foundation and the Society for the Study of Human Development. But his research path began to take shape after he moved to the US and began noticing a contrast with his own upbringing in China.

“During my teen years, I started to pursue my own interests, such as writing poetry, yet I always felt a strong sense of obligation toward my parents,” he says. “For me, being a teenager was never synonymous with disrespecting parents or disengaging from school. I was quite surprised by the predominantly negative portrayal of teens in Western societies and wondered if changing this narrative could have a positive effect on them.”

Decades of psychology and anthropology research show the teenage experience varies across cultures and people. Qu, intrigued by the underlying mechanism, began to suspect cultural stereotypes or over- simplified beliefs might play a role after his own research found that American and Chinese youth view the teenage years differently.

In his review paper “Stereotypes of Adolescence” in Child Development Perspectives, he showed that both US and Chinese seventh graders saw the teens years as a time for hanging out with peers and gaining independence.

But the Americans imagined more negative stereotypical behavior, such as ignoring parents and skipping schoolwork. Chinese youth, influenced by Confucian tradition, felt teens should be fulfilling family responsibilities and excelling academically. Hong Kong youth were on a middle ground: They had more Westernized views of adolescence than did their mainland Chinese peers.

These culturally rooted notions about adolescence can influence brain development, says Qu, who uses neuroimaging to demonstrate significant changes in brain function.

In one of the first studies to explore how youth stereotypes affect the brain, he showed that negative views increased activity in the part of the brain involved in cognitive control, leading to more risk-taking over time. The study, published in Child Development, “high- lighted that internalized negative stereotypes can shape neural and behavioral development,” he says.

Moreover, the stereotypes are crucial in understanding different development paths during adolescence. The teens’ differing views partly explain “why US teens show decreased school engagement over time compared to their Chinese counter- parts,” Qu says. Hong Kong youth’s views of teens as irresponsible contributes to a higher rate of risky behavior, such as lying or stealing, compared to mainland China, according to his study of teen stereotypes in Hong Kong and Chongqing.

Debunking perceptions

Qu later helped develop an experimental intervention that suggested that stereotypes are not destiny and it’s possible to counter negative perceptions. In a study of more than 400 Chinese youth, published in 2020 in Child Development, researchers talked with students about adults’ stereo- types of teens, then suggested that the teenage years are in fact a time when youth take on greater responsibility.

Students were asked to describe specific examples of teens behaving responsibly at home, at school, and elsewhere. The study tracked how students thought about teens in general and how they behaved after this intervention, comparing them with control groups that only described typical teen behavior. The research underscored the causal link between stereotypes of teens and youth adjustment, laying the groundwork for future interventions in schools and families.

“Rather than just telling them that teens are responsible, we wanted the students to generate their own examples that they had observed,” says study coauthor Eva Pomerantz, Qu’s mentor and director of the Center for Social and Behavioral Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

“We wanted them to envision it and for it to be theirs. We now know that changing students’ stereotypes about teens can influence their behavior in the short term. The big question is, could we develop a program for long-term change?”

Qu’s work is now driven by what he sees as a gaping hole in the field: the lack of attention to culture in the study of brain development. In an article in the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science, he points out that 99 percent of publications related to adolescent developmental neuroscience use samples from Western countries or whose race and ethnicity is unknown.

“Yang is not afraid to suggest bold ideas and then pursue them in his research,” Pomerantz says. “He is really passionate about what he is doing, which means he reads and thinks and then does what needs to be done, even if it seems like it might be impossible.”

“Imagine a shift where society and media highlight the strengths and potential of teenagers,” Qu says. “It’s time to change the narrative. A positive portrayal could spread uplifting messages and help teens flourish.”