Some Youth Too Immature to Stand Trial, Experts Say

ScienceDaily (Oct. 11, 2011) — Research from Aaron Kivisto, clinical psychology program graduate at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and current post-doctoral fellow at Massachusetts General Hospital; Todd Moore, assistant professor of psychology at UT; and Bruce Seidner, clinical assistant professor in the psychology clinic at UT, found that unlike adults, most children and adolescents who are found incompetent to stand trial are not psychotic; rather, they have cognitive impairments. And, they are often too immature to understand the magnitude of the situation.

In a study recently published in the Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and Law, Kivisto, Moore and Seidner found that a major contributor to maturity is "future orientation," or the ability of young people to take long-range consequences into account when making decisions. The authors theorize one reason young people are ill-equipped to be defendants in court is because they are present-focused and lack a more mature perspective on the future.

"When we're teenagers, we're focused on short-term consequences," said Kivisto. "Teens think about what might happen later today if they do something. Because courts can impose consequences that can affect someone's life for years, it appears that adolescents approach these longer-term and very serious implications blindly."

Testing the influence of future orientation on competency to stand trial, the researchers found that the well-established relationship between age and competency is partly explained by a child's degree of future orientation.

The researchers also found that competency is particularly "fragile" in immature children. In other words, children require less of a deficiency in their cognitive ability to have an impact on their competency in the courtroom than their adult, more mature peers.

For adolescents, the deficits can be much more subtle and easily undetected. The researchers hope their findings have an impact in the courtroom.

"Given the long-lasting consequences faced by adolescents in the courtroom, these findings suggest that forensic evaluators should give increased attention to the often neglected role of normal immaturity on adolescents' competence to stand trial and to appreciate these unique aspects of young defendants," said Kivisto.

Indeed, developmental maturity is a factor gaining greater attention from courts and legislatures. States such as California already require juvenile competency evaluators to assess developmental maturity.

If You Don't Snooze, Do You Lose? Wake-Sleep Patterns Affect Brain Synapses During Adolescence

ScienceDaily (Oct. 10, 2011) —
An ongoing lack of sleep during adolescence could lead to more than dragging, foggy teens, a University of Wisconsin-Madison study suggests. Researchers have found that short-term sleep restriction in adolescent mice prevented the balanced growth and depletion of brain synapses, connections between nerve cells where communication occurs.

"One possible implication of our study is that if you lose too much sleep during adolescence, especially chronically, there may be lasting consequences in terms of the wiring of the brain," says Dr. Chiara Cirelli, associate professor in the department of psychiatry at the School of Medicine and Public Health.

Mental illnesses such as schizophrenia tend to start during adolescence but the exact reasons remain unclear. The National Institute of Mental Health funded Cirelli's study; the findings appear in the current issue of Nature Neuroscience (Advance Online Publication).

"Adolescence is a sensitive period of development during which the brain changes dramatically," Cirelli says. "There is a massive remodeling of nerve circuits, with many new synapses formed and then eliminated."

Cirelli and colleagues wanted to see how alterations to the sleep-wake cycle affected the anatomy of the developing adolescent brain.

Their earlier molecular and electro-physiological studies showed that during sleep, synapses in adult rodents and flies become weaker and smaller, presumably preparing them for another period of wakefulness when synapses will strengthen again and become larger in response to ever-changing experiences and learning. They call this the synaptic homeostasis hypothesis of sleep.

Using a two-photon microscope, researchers indirectly followed the growth and retraction of synapses by counting dendritic spines, the elongated structures that contain synapses and thus allow brain cells to receive impulses from other brain cells. They compared adolescent mice that for eight to 10 hours were spontaneously awake, allowed to sleep or forced to stay awake.

The live images showed that being asleep or awake made a difference in the dynamic adolescent mouse brain: the overall density of dendritic spines fell during sleep and rose during spontaneous or forced wakefulness.

"These results using acute manipulations of just eight to 10 hours show that the time spent asleep or awake affects how many synapses are being formed or removed in the adolescent brain," Cirelli says. "The important next question is what happens with chronic sleep restriction, a condition that many adolescents are often experiencing."

The experiments are under way, but Cirelli can't predict the outcome. "It could be that the changes are benign, temporary and reversible," she says, "or there could be lasting consequences for brain maturation and functioning."