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Successful navigation of the social environment is dependent on a number of social cognitive processes, including mentalizing and resistance to peer influence. These processes continue to develop during adolescence, a time of significant social change, and are underpinned by regions of the social brain that continue to mature structurally and functionally into adulthood. In this review, we describe how mentalizing, peer influence, and emotion regulation capacities develop to aid the navigation of the social environment during adolescence. Heightened susceptibility to peer influence and hypersensitivity to social rejection in adolescence increase the likelihood of both risky and prosocial behavior in the presence of peers. Developmental differences in mentalizing and emotion regulation, and the corticosubcortical circuits that underpin these processes, might put adolescents at risk for developing mental health problems. We suggest how interventions aimed at improving prosocial behavior and emotion regulation abilities hold promise in reducing the risk of poor mental health as adolescents navigate the changes in their social environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Adolescence is a sensitive period for categorical self-concept development, which affects the ability to take others' perspectives, which might differ from one's own, and how self-related information is memorized. Little is known about whether these two processes are related in adolescence. The current study recruited 97 male participants aged 11–35 years. Using a self-referential memory task, we found that younger participants were less prone to recognize previously seen town-related adjectives, compared to self-related adjectives. However, this age-related reduction in recognition bias was unrelated to accurate memory performance. Using the Director task to assess perspective taking, we found an age-related decrease in egocentric biases in perspective taking from adolescence to early adulthood (i.e., perspective taking abilities improved with age). However, there was no evidence that these two processes were related. Overall, our findings suggest that male adolescents display parallel but independent age-related changes in self-referential biases in memory and perspective taking. • Age-related decrease in recognition biases for town vs. self-related adjectives. • Age-related decrease in egocentric biases in perspective taking. • Biases in self-referential memory and perspective taking were not related. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Emotion regulation is the ability to recruit processes to influence emotion generation. In recent years there has been mounting interest in how emotions are regulated at behavioural and neural levels, as well as in the relevance of emotional dysregulation to psychopathology. During adolescence, brain regions involved in affect generation and regulation, including the limbic system and prefrontal cortex, undergo protracted structural and functional development. Adolescence is also a time of increasing vulnerability to internalising and externalising psychopathologies associated with poor emotion regulation, including depression, anxiety and antisocial behaviour. It is therefore of particular interest to understand how emotion regulation develops over this time, and how this relates to ongoing brain development. However, to date relatively little research has addressed these questions directly. This review will discuss existing research in these areas in both typical adolescence and in adolescent psychopathology, and will highlight opportunities for future research. In particular, it is important to consider the social context in which adolescent emotion regulation develops. It is possible that while adolescence may be a time of vulnerability to emotional dysregulation, scaffolding the development of emotion regulation during this time may be a fruitful preventative target for psychopathology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]