Emotional Volatility

What better words express the confused minds and reactions of young people in their teen years than emotional volatility? Well, perhaps to those could be added emerging assertiveness, psychic instability, confused priorities, parental adversity, profound resentment, immature introspection, and hysteria. That's a mouthful, and experiencing all of those discrete and indiscreet balancing acts of emerging adulthood confused by wistful childhood exacts a toll of patience and indiscretion on parents painfully witnessing and experiencing the backlash of children trying to distance themselves.

A new study on teen emotions by a researcher/author at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, published in the journal Psychological Science points out, among other things, that teen-agers tend to wallow in misery. Although self-pity wasn't mentioned per se, that would certainly add to their misery, a condition that most appear to groom, as a needed psychological advance into adulthood. With the mindset that nobody understands them or cares about them, and life isn't much to celebrate, self-pity and misery embrace.

Hormonal changes are often pointed out as the major clue to the almost universal incidents of tension between the young emerging into adulthood and their parents, or the generation of their parents. Of course societal mores and values also come into play, exacerbating the differences of generational change. The teen years are confusing years for boys and girls, their childhood ebbing behind them, their early adult years beckoning before them. They're relieved to leave the former and anxious to receive the latter.

But there are many perceived obstacles placed in their way, by society, by parents, before they are permitted the kinds of independence and choices and priorities they feel themselves entitled to, adding to their confusion and resentment. All of which conspire to make misery a low-hanging and perpetual cloud dimming their intelligence. The study discovered that teens in a state of negative emotions prefer most often to remain in that state, rather than seek ameliorative alternatives toward a positive state.

There must be a link there also to the newly-evolving types of reading materials now hugely appealing to the younger teen generations. Where once writers of youth fiction would sketch happiness, normalcy, adventure and fulfilment, now the trend is toward tragedy, mystery and the arcane. Pre-teens and teen-agers become absorbed in reading about the personal tragedies visited upon others; it is their introduction to the vicissitudes of life that may or may not present to them.

To add to the general confusion, the study also pointed out the ambivalent situation that exists where teens imbibe in both negative and positive emotions simultaneously. Enough to confuse anyone. A conclusion may have been achieved whereby researchers feel that absorbed cycles of misery are a prerequisite to the formation of a mature personality. In their struggle against adult control over a fierce and emerging independence.

"It might help them, for example, in becoming emotionally more independent from adults, and in learning how to deal with negative feelings", according to the study's lead author. That is, if these negatives become resolved in time and meld into a total learning experience resulting in a well-balanced personality prepared to take on adulthood.

Another matter entirely if emotional needs have not been met, despite the thrusting away of concerned parents, leading to children deliberately going astray, and rejecting social values to the extent that they do real and lasting damage to themselves through the threats that drugs and crime and street life - all of them offering a type of 'independence' from responsibility to self and society - offer.