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editorial
. 2025 Apr 9;73:101558. doi: 10.1016/j.dcn.2025.101558

A developmental neuroscience perspective on youth contributions and challenges in a changing society

Kathy T Do 1,2,⁎, Suzanne van de Groep 3, Eveline A Crone 3, Christian K Tamnes 4
PMCID: PMC12190688  PMID: 40254497

With technology at their fingertips, young people today can engage with communities around the world and stay informed about issues and events more quickly and frequently than any previous generation. This broad cultural exposure from an early age brings a diversity of opportunities for learning and connection, but also amplifies major societal challenges that shape their daily lives and future. Young people in this generation grow up acutely aware of racial, ethnic, gender, and socioeconomic disparities. Roughly half of U.S. youth identify as racial or ethnic minorities (Pew Research Center, 2018). In the European Union, 18 % of people aged 15–29 were born abroad (Eurostat, 2024), and 23 % of youth in the Netherlands, for example, have at least one foreign-born parent (Centraal Bureau voor de Statistiek, 2023). Globally, one in five Gen Z young adults aged 18–24 identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer or other gender identities or sexual orientations (PRRI, 2024). In addition, the escalating effects of climate change fuel both anxiety and activism, driving youth to demand accountability from governments and businesses (Hickman et al., 2021). Young people have led the charge in advocating for the rights of marginalized communities through public protests and online activism, challenging world leaders to take action on pressing societal issues more than past generations (Burrow et al., 2023, Oliver Wyman Forum, & The News Movement, 2023). At the same time, they are navigating an era of increased political polarization and uncivil discourse about complex issues that require understanding varied positionalities. Social media and technology can broaden perspectives and foster community, especially for youth from diverse backgrounds (Charmaraman et al., 2022, Hernandez et al., 2023). However, its artificial intelligence-driven algorithms can also harm youths’ mental health by amplifying social comparisons, spreading misinformation and inappropriate content, and intensifying tensions with family or peers over conflicting identity and values (American Psychological Association, 2024). Despite current global and domestic challenges, young people are already demonstrating resilience, adaptability, and a commitment to social change—leveraging their experiences and values to shape their communities and influence broader societal structures as they transition into adulthood.

Developmental cognitive neuroscience research can deepen our understanding of how young people find their place in society, contribute to others, and navigate modern challenges. Significant biological and behavioral changes from childhood to young adulthood heighten sensitivity to social contexts, shaping the balance between personal and societal goals that guide social decision-making such as giving or sharing (Crone and Dahl, 2012, Crone and Fuligni, 2020, Telzer et al., 2018). In parallel, increasing independence and expanding social networks open new opportunities for connection and purpose, which are important for youths’ developing sense of identity and belonging and long-term health and well-being (Fuligni, 2019). Crucially, for adolescents from underserved communities facing poverty, racism, and other challenges, meeting basic needs like safety and housing takes precedence over exploring identity, purpose, and meaningful connections. Breaking down systemic barriers that limit opportunities for youth with diverse experiences can foster positive societal engagement and mitigate the risk of behavioral, social, and health challenges as they transition to adulthood. Connecting brain-behavioral science at the individual level to diverse societal contexts is key for identifying and explaining the pathways that not only enrich opportunities for societal engagement and contributions, but also address why some people may disengage or act antisocially.

How do young people successfully grow up in an increasingly complex society, and what are the main causes for differences in becoming engaged and contributing citizens in society? How does neurobiological development interact with social and societal experiences, such as relations with family, peers, and social-economic opportunities? How can we understand and predict the extent to which young people develop into engaged citizens that contribute to the needs of themselves and others? These questions are explored in this special issue of Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, which highlights recent empirical and theoretical advances on the mechanisms that shape societal engagement and contributions. The present collection of articles is pioneering in the field of social-cognitive neuroscience by bringing together experts who examine the interplay between individual neurobiological development and diversity in social and societal opportunities and challenges. The interdisciplinary, longitudinal, multi-method, and multi-cohort approaches employed and proposed across these articles emphasize the dynamic interplay between neurodevelopment and social-economic contexts from childhood to adulthood. These interactions, shaped by experiences over time, offer valuable insights for fostering healthy brain and behavioral development while building resilience against modern societal challenges. Specifically, the special issue offers developmental neuroscience perspectives on three key pathways through which young people engage with and contribute to society: (1) balancing self and other-oriented goals for self-development, (2) building meaningful connections with others for social development, and (3) navigating societal structures that shape young people’s diverse experiences and trajectories. Below, we detail the central findings from the articles in this issue, which address these three pathways.

1. Balancing self and other-oriented goals for self-development

Adolescence is a crucial period for social and self-development (Crone and Fuligni, 2020), which is characterized by increasing affective, cognitive, social, and neurobiological sophistication (Blakemore, 2008, Crone and Dahl, 2012, Silvers, 2022). One key theme uniting research in this special issue is how adolescents navigate their social worlds while balancing their own needs with considering those of others. Five contributions in this issue shed new light on this interplay by highlighting how balancing self- and other-oriented motives in adolescence influences decision-making, identity and purpose, and engagement in prosocial and risk-taking behaviors.

In an introduction to the special issue, Dahl et al. (2024) describe the concept of wanting to matter, emphasizing how adolescence represents a sensitive period for learning how to gain social value through prosocial actions. They argue that the increased motivational salience of mattering—linked to pubertal development—facilitates action-outcome learning, allowing adolescents to explore ways to contribute meaningfully to their social environments. This perspective integrates prosocial and identity learning and their possible neurobiological mechanisms, illuminating how adolescents construct their sense of belonging and roles within broader social contexts. van Rijn et al. (2024) examined how these self and other considerations unfold in the moment of social decision-making–specifically, how adolescents weigh immediate versus delayed rewards for themselves, friends, or unknown others. Their findings show that adolescents were more inclined to wait for rewards that benefit themselves, with decreasing patience for rewards benefiting more socially distant others. Neuroimaging data highlight increased activation of the medial prefrontal cortex, precuneus, and temporoparietal junction when considering delayed rewards for others compared to self, and greater engagement of the bilateral insula and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex when prioritizing immediate rewards for close others and delayed rewards for unknown individuals. This work provides compelling evidence that adolescents’ capacity for future-oriented decision-making is modulated by how they balance goals and outcomes of self and others.

Opportunities to make decisions about prioritizing their own needs versus helping others support young people’s growing sense of identity and purpose, deepening their engagement within communities. Williamson et al. (2025) examined longitudinal changes in perspective-taking and self-concept formation in adolescent girls. Their findings suggest that as adolescents refine their ability to take others' perspectives, they simultaneously develop a more prosocial self-concept. Neuroimaging findings revealed positive associations with age and activity in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, and perspective taking and precuneus activation, reflecting neural mechanisms underlying the development of mentalizing abilities. This research links taking the perspective of others with self-development, suggesting that perspective taking fosters a more integrated sense of self and others within one’s identity, ultimately contributing to a more prosocial self-concept. Moreover, Kwon et al. (2024) examined the longitudinal neural predictors of community-focused prosocial behaviors, focusing on neural changes over a period of three years during a task in which adolescents could donate time to charity. Their results indicate that adolescents donated less time to charities from early to mid-adolescence. Neural findings showed age-related declines in ventrolateral prefrontal (vlPFC) activation, and a peak in precuneus activation when adolescents donated their time from early to mid adolescence. Less steep declines in vlPFC activation predicted greater community-focused prosocial behaviors in a daily diary study two years later. This study highlights that neurodevelopmental mechanisms of balancing self and others during early adolescence have enduring effects on daily prosocial behaviors in late adolescence.

Self-development is a key factor in how young people engage with their communities. However, when they lack opportunities to explore their identities or struggle to meet their own needs, it can increase the risk of social disengagement and antisocial behaviors. In a data-driven study with 876 at-risk youth, Blankenstein et al. (2024) investigated the biopsychosocial underpinnings of delinquency, revealing distinct psychologically-driven biological clusters that interact with social-environmental factors to predict non-violent and violent delinquent behavior. Their work underscores the importance of considering balance between self and others not only in prosociality but also in risk-taking and antisocial behavior, demonstrating how individual vulnerabilities intersect with the environment in shaping adolescents’ behavior and how they impact society.

Together, these studies offer a nuanced understanding of how adolescents balance contributing to the needs of themselves and others, shaping their self-development in ways that can either foster positive societal contributions or lead to antisocial outcomes. Positioning adolescence as a possible sensitive period for prosocial development, they reveal that self-development provides the foundation for meaningful community engagement by fostering identity and purpose, perspective-taking, and prosocial motivation. These studies also highlight that the complex interplay among (neuro)biological, psychological, and environmental factors affects the extent to which adolescents prioritize oneself, others, or both. Given the pivotal role of self and others in adolescent decision-making, an intriguing avenue lies in uncovering how young people learn to negotiate this balance to build meaningful relationships and community networks—which naturally leads us into our next theme on social connection.

2. Building meaningful connections with others for social development

In addition to self-development, the social bonds formed in adolescence can shape future opportunities and challenges to engage with and influence society. The reviews and empirical papers included in this second theme focus on the core neurocognitive processes that support learning from positive and negative social experiences with individuals and communities from childhood to adulthood. Baker et al. (2025) describe how puberty-driven neuroplasticity and learning in adolescence motivate increased sensitivity and adaptability to social experiences when navigating new relationships and environments. The authors encourage future research to examine how experience-dependent plasticity and learning in adolescence can be harnessed across diverse contexts and timescales. Interventions and policies can then leverage key developmental windows, sources of learning, and enriched environments to mitigate adverse social experiences and promote healthy social and brain development. Extending the idea that adolescence is a window of opportunity for social learning, Do et al. (2024) propose that the dynamics of relationship formation and group membership in adolescence can be framed as a social explore-exploit decision dilemma and modeled within a reinforcement learning framework using experience-based tasks. To build positive relationships that afford social capital into adulthood, adolescents must learn from the outcomes of social interactions about the subjective value of bonds with different groups and its members, and adjust future interactions to strengthen bonds that provide valued resources like social support. Collectively, these reviews highlight new conceptual directions and testable predictions on how individual neurobiological development and contextual factors shape young people’s ability to learn from and adapt to diverse social experiences.

Other papers in this issue explore another mechanism involved in building positive relationships: the development of trust from childhood to adolescence, and how early experiences of social-economic adversity can undermine this trust. Drawing on theories of reinforcement learning to model mutually trusting relationships, Krabbendam et al. (2024) review behavioral and neuroimaging evidence of how initial trust with strangers develops across repeated interactions and is updated in response to the behavior of the other. Crucially, the updating of prior beliefs about the trustworthiness of others can vary based on a prior history of negative experiences with family or peers, as well as age differences in cognitive biases (e.g., uncertainty aversion) and brain networks associated with salience detection, cognitive control, reward learning, and perspective-taking. Dobbelaar et al. (2025) provide an empirical test of the former in their neuroimaging study examining the neural correlates of vicarious reward processing and subsequent trust behavior in late children with varying levels of peer victimization over the previous two years. Results suggest brain regions associated with reward processing and social cognition are sensitive to who benefits from a reward (self vs. peers who socially included or excluded them) and exposure to real-life peer victimization, which in turn influenced trust behavior. These papers highlight how negative past experiences with others shape neural responses during trust decisions, influencing how trust is formed, expressed, and restored over time.

Finally, recent methodological advances in developmental cognitive neuroscience highlight promising, yet underexplored opportunities to capture how young people navigate the micro- (e.g., personal relationships) and macro- (e.g., network characteristics) level dynamics of their social environments. Grootjans et al. (2024) argue that electroencephalography (EEG), a temporally precise and low cost method for measuring neural activity linked to social interactions, can help make research in this area more inclusive and reflective of young people’s everyday social experiences. EEG can not only identify specific processes of social interactions in lab settings with experimental control, but also capture ecologically-valid, interactive processes outside the lab (e.g., in relationships or classrooms). In their framework for studying interactions among social networks, neurodevelopment, and psychosocial processes, Capella and Telzer (2024) propose that the structure of social relationships in an adolescent’s environment–measured using social network data–can also shape how adolescents interpret feedback from, and their own role in, real-life communities. For example, an individual’s centrality to well-connected others or evolving roles in an extracurricular group can reveal how neurodevelopment supports key behaviors underlying contributions to others, such as identity formation, sensitivity to peers, and pursuit of social goals.

In summary, the first theme of articles explores how opportunities to contribute to the needs of themselves and others are not equally accessible to all youth, despite its importance in shaping self-development and influencing engagement in either prosocial or antisocial behaviors. The second theme of articles highlights how neurobiological development and social contexts shape the dynamic process of building trust and relationships within social networks, with early negative experiences with families or peers potentially hindering desired connection and community. The final theme examines how daily interactions with diverse socioeconomic structures shape neurocognitive development, creating both risks and opportunities to support societal engagement and long-term health and well-being.

3. Navigating diverse contexts, risks, and opportunities

A third emerging theme across several papers in this special issue is the intertwined connections between the sociocultural context, neurocognition, and risks and opportunities (see also Ferschmann et al., 2022; Palacios-Barrios and Hanson, 2019). Ferschmann et al. (2024) leveraged data from a longitudinal United Kingdom cohort spanning more than 20 years to examine how the timing of socioeconomic disadvantage matters for brain structure and depressive symptoms in emerging adulthood. Their findings highlight that both family income in early childhood and personal income in early adulthood were associated with depressive symptoms in early adulthood. However, only family income in early childhood was linked to differences in brain structure in young adulthood, suggesting a sensitive period during early development when socioeconomic factors may have a lasting impact on neurobiology. Also within lab experiments, sociodemographic factors such—as race cues—can shape cognition and behavior. Using data from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study, Rubien-Thomas et al. (2024) tested same- and other-race effects of face stimuli on attention, working memory, and recognition memory in children. Despite being irrelevant to the experimental tasks, stimuli race information was found to in part differentially affect cognitive performance in Black and White children. This study underscores the need to consider sociodemographic factors in recruitment, task design, and interpretation of findings. Together, these studies illustrate how sociocultural factors interact with brain and behavior during development. While Ferschmann et al. (2024) highlight early socioeconomic influences on neurodevelopment and mental health, Rubien-Thomas et al. (2024) reveal how social cues impact cognitive performance. These findings emphasize the necessity of integrating broader contextual factors into neurodevelopmental research to better understand the mechanisms underlying mental health and cognitive disparities.

Other papers in this special issue examine the role of cognitive control processes in adolescents’ well-being and adjustment. In an Ecological Momentary Assessments study, Debra et al. (2024) found that individual differences in adolescents’ affective inhibition were associated with their average levels of daily ruminations. However, contrary to the preregistered hypotheses, affective inhibition did not moderate the relationship between daily cognitive reappraisal or rumination and momentary negative affect. Consistent with the hypotheses, heart rate variability, which is often considered a physiological marker of cognitive control processes, was found to moderate the relationship between rumination and negative affect. Boer et al. (2025) investigated whether electrophysiological markers related to cognitive control, specifically error detection and processing, were linked to substance-related and externalizing problems in adolescents. While previous research has established associations between these markers and various forms of psychopathology in youth (Tamnes et al., 2013), this study found no significant associations in a nonclinical sample. These studies underscore the need for further research to clarify the conditions under which cognitive control mechanisms contribute to adolescent mental health and adjustment. In fact, a promising avenue for probing cognitive processes and their underlying neural mechanisms in relation to contextual factors and mental health outcomes is cognitive computational neuroscience (Hauser et al., 2019, Kriegeskorte and Douglas, 2018). Schaaf et al. (2025) illustrates and discusses challenges with interpreting individual differences in this field, with a particular focus on reinforcement learning.

Finally, the special issue concludes with a pioneering example of the transdisciplinary research design and community partnerships needed to connect developmental cognitive neuroscience to real-world challenges, driving solutions that shape young people’s societal contributions and trajectories of well-being. Crone et al. (2024) introduce the Growing Up Together in Society program (GUTS: https://www.gutsproject.com/), a 10-year, multisite ongoing consortium funded by the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science. By integrating new perspectives, interdisciplinary collaborations, and a strong emphasis on stakeholder involvement and co-creation, GUTS offers valuable opportunities to better understand the complex, multifactorial influences of interpersonal, community, and institutional systems on the mental health and well-being of adolescents and young adults in contemporary society.

4. Conclusions and future directions

This special issue features a range of studies that examine how young people learn from, navigate, and influence their social environment. This is a timely question given the fast pace of complexities in our current society, with challenges at the global level (pandemics, geopolitical tensions) and challenges that do or will affect societies more locally (social inequalities, climate change). This special issue showed that adolescence is a time of hope. Many of the skills that develop during this developmental time window demonstrate that the adolescent brain is wired for social adaptation and creativity, suggesting that youth have the possibilities for making change. Even small changes can together lead to larger movements, and as history has shown, many of these movements are started by young people questioning the current situation. But each time of opportunity also comes with vulnerability; repeated negative experiences in the community or socioeconomic challenges from structural inequalities can also harm the fundamental needs of young people to explore, develop intimate social relations, and experience impact, purpose and meaning. Therefore, many of the studies in this issue make an explicit or implicit call for action to provide opportunities for all youth to help them shape their future society.

Strengths of this issue are the comprehensive methodological approaches both in terms of brain metrics (structural and functional brain development, including magnetic resonance imaging and event-related potentials), in terms of experimental designs (from social interaction tasks to computational modelling), and in terms of measurement tools (experiments, experience sampling methods, questionnaires). The studies rightfully demonstrate that each method has its strengths and weaknesses, but the true scientific advancement may lie in how these methods are used in combination. The special issue provides compelling examples, not only of this complementary vision, but also thoughtful and inspiring theoretical perspectives and description of new large-scale comprehensive studies, such as the GUTS program. The researchers in this issue exemplify how team science advances our scientific approach, by embracing collaboration over competition.

As demonstrated by the articles in this issue, including stakeholders (i.e., youth, youth organizations) can be a rich resource for shaping experiments that have ecological validity. Especially for research on societal engagement, interdisciplinary research is one step to bridging across disciplines, but transdisciplinary research is a promising approach for designing experiments that fit with the values and interests of young people. Moreover, transdisciplinary research can facilitate the interaction with policy makers by including them in the research process in early stages and informing them about the important steps and results along the way.

Important directions for future research will be to adopt the results of the studies in this issue to develop interventions that are based on understanding underlying developmental mechanisms. Studying how young people navigate a complex society is a challenging endeavor and we will need insights from complementary methods from neuroscience, psychology, psychiatry, family studies, data science, and sociology to provide the building blocks for societal engagement and contribution for current and future generations of youth. We hope that this collection of papers will provide important directions, while acknowledging that no intervention can be developed without including the target group, youth themselves, because they are the experts on their own lives.

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Do Kathy T: Conceptualization, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing. van de Groep Suzanne: Conceptualization, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing. Crone Eveline A.: Conceptualization, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing. Tamnes Christian K.: Conceptualization, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing.

Declaration of Competing Interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper

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