pressure are those who activate the areas most involved in the perception of others’ actions, whereas subjects who are less sensitive to peer pressure are those with better connectivity between these areas and those of cognitive control in decision-making.
The transition from adolescence to adulthood thus seems to be a period of “tuning”, thanks to a better connectivity between the prefrontal and the limbic, which allows a better cognitive control of emotions. For as long as this adjustment is not made, adolescence will be a period of vulnerability, because the two cortical systems are in conflict during decision-making and risk-taking, and when one system predominates over the other – for example, the socioemotional system – immediate rewards will be too prevalent.
To conclude on this neurobiological agenda, it leads to the idea that risk-taking is a question of tempo, or, more precisely, of two different tempi, between the rapid socioemotional system of reward and the much slower system of cognitive control. Adolescents will (fortunately) not take risks all the time, but there will be times when emotions and peer pressure will activate the emotional system to such an extent that it will overwhelm the adaptive capacity of cognitive control.
This helps to explain why early puberty and early initiation of substance use behaviors are predictive risk factors, which occur at a time in life when the prefrontal and executive functions are not yet controlling the reward system.
However, adolescent behavior also depends on the social and relational context. To take just one example, English adolescents are killed half as much on roads as their French counterparts, with the same number of individuals and cars. While biology is the same, it is culture that explains the differences.
Furthermore, the discovery of the dual agenda by neurobiology may lead actors to two conflicting conclusions:
– some may argue that the lack of maturation of prefrontal control means that nothing can be done and that adolescents must be protected in spite of themselves, by measures to reduce exposure to risk;
– others will argue, on the other hand, that adolescence is a time of maximum plasticity for learning and experience and that intervention is needed. Furthermore, testosterone also increases social status sensitivity at puberty, not just reward sensitivity; this could allow for status to be played out in peer intervention and prevention.
1.7.2. Questioning the existence of adolescence
The concepts used to categorize individuals between the ages of 10 and 30 (such as “pre-adolescent”, “post-adolescent”, “adolescent”, “Tanguy4”, “early adolescence” and “late adolescence”) have little scientific validity; this led René Zazzo to his provocative formulas: “childhood and adolescence do not exist”.
Indeed, a dual variability is highly characteristic of the second decade of life and casts considerable doubts over the validity of categorizations:
– a strong “interindividual” variability: subjects at the same age are very different from one another (girls are two years more advanced than boys in terms of maturation and, within the same sex, boys with very early puberty or very late puberty can be very different);
– a strong “intraindividual” variability: at this period of life, the individual can change rapidly and strongly.
On the other hand, one phenomenon will affect all young people in France the extension and precariousness of youth, as shown by the statistical data in Table 1.1.
Table 1.1. Average age at end of education in France
| Year | 1930 | 1970 | 1990 |
| Age | 15.8 | 20.3 | 21.5 |
This extension, which is desirable, is sometimes even decided politically, when a minister declares that 80% of an age group must obtain their baccalaureate. The price to be paid is the prolongation of dependence on parents. Thus, 72% of 18–24 year-olds live with their parents (EU average).
Another consequence is the delay of parenthood (see Table 1.2).
Another negative consequence is that many people enter the world of work in a precarious way; previously, it was done in a way of integration, but today, it is more a question of experimentation (the archetype of the trainee).
Table 1.2. Average age of mothers at first child in France
| Year | 1974 | 2019 |
| Age | 24 | 29 |
As a result, unemployment is twice as high among young people (23% compared with 10% for the general population) and 20% of young French people live below the poverty line, a reality that the country does not dare to face.
Experimentation is therefore what specifically characterizes this period of life: experimentation with work, roles, psychoactive products and so on.
Still, within this cohort, the university dropout rate is massive: 30% in the first year.
Another contemporary phenomenon strongly influences adolescence today: the rise of “individualism”, the disappearance of traditional solidarities and therefore the autonomization of identity constructs and “intergenerational transmissions deficit”. The loss of influences such as family, religion and communism will disturb identity construction, a fundamental developmental task of adolescence, hence the “uncertain individual”.
1.7.3. Risk behaviors and rites of passage
From birth to death, the individual passes through a certain number of states and statuses and, since the beginning of humanity, societies have created rites to frame and operate these passages. These rites can concern the stages of life (such as burial to pass from the state of life to that of death), changes in religious status (baptism to pass from the profane to the sacred state), temporal markers (seasonal rites) and so on.
Each society has developed its own rites, but we owe to ethnologist and folklorist Arnold van Gennep (1909) the idea of an anthropological structure common to all rites in his work The Rites of Passage, a systematic study of the rites of “passing through the door and over the threshold” of, for example, hospitality, adoption, pregnancy and labor, birth, childhood, puberty, initiation, ordination, coronation, engagement and marriage, funerals and the seasons.
The duration of the rites of passage between childhood and adulthood can vary in traditional societies (from two weeks to several years), but a temporal sequence and common meanings emerge; this sequential structure unfolds in three stages: the first is organized around the separation, the second around the intermediary and the margin and the third around acknowledgment of the
