One factor that may influence the improvement in recognizing emotions during the teenage years is the hormones that your body produces. As you grow from a child into an adult, your body changes in various ways and these changes are caused by hormones which are released in your body. The process is called puberty. The hormones released make you grow taller and your body become more adult-like in its appearance, but did you know that these hormones also affect how your brain develops? Scientists who study the brain have found that changes in the way the brain develops during puberty are related to changes in behavior. Brain cells re-organize their connections with each other during this time and it is possible that, during this reorganization, our ability to recognize emotions gets a little worse before it starts to improve. Even though young children in our study were good at recognizing angry faces, they got even better at it during the teenage years. We found that the ability of children and teenagers to recognize facial expressions of anger and disgust was related to the stage of puberty they were in.

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Go to source: https://kids.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/frym.2016.00015