LOOKING GOOD AND SAVING FACE

If you peeked in from the back of his classroom, all the guys in Jake's English class would look about the same. You could hardly tell them apart--their clothes a few sizes too big, sloppily hanging off their bodies, their hair purposely left messed up, their faces marked by unshaven facial hair and pimples. Slouched at their desks with expressions of boredom or disdain, they'd look as though they'd just rolled out of bed--and they had. Everything about a teen boy says he couldn't care less about what other people think of him or how he looks. But in reality, just the opposite is true.

Teens are painfully sensitive to the subtle, and sometimes not so subtle, feedback they get from their peers. Even though Jake's face didn't show it, it was clear to me that he had become more and more obsessed with what his classmates thought about him. At his next appointment, he proudly told me that one of Zoe's girlfriends told him Zoe really liked his hair since he'd let it grow long. And he angrily told me that he wasn't going to attend his usual Friday night poker game, because one of the guys had criticized him for taking so long to play his cards. Neither the compliment nor the criticism would have jiggled his brain circuits at all before puberty. Nowadays, every socially relevant comment or look painfully pierced him, or at least his rostral cingulate zone, or RCZ, an area that acts as the brain's barometer for social approval or disapproval. This "I am accepted or not by others" brain area was in the process of a massive recalibration. Now his friends' approval trumped that of his parents. Evolutionary psychologists theorize that brain circuits like the RCZ developed in primitive societies to keep people from making social mistakes that could result in being ostracized by their clans or tribes. Social acceptance could make the difference between life and death. To teenagers, disapproval from peers feels like death. Fitting in is everything.