Because Josh Michaels stands almost 6-feet-4, weighs more than 200 pounds and talks in a resonant tenor, you might be tempted to think he's a fully grown man, capable of making fully thought-out decisions.

But ask his mom about the intricacies of his 15-year-old brain and she laughs, reaches over and ruffles his hair.

"They look like real people, but ... " Carolyn Michaels says, smiling at her son. The Iolani School student glances at her from the corner of his eye and smiles a charming, lopsided grin.

As a teacher at Aliamanu Intermediate School who has seen 13-year-olds — though, thank heavens, not the one she raised — driven off in police cars, Carolyn Michaels knows that teenagers don't process information the same way adults do. And research is proving her right.

Teens may mean well, but their ability to cipher right and wrong can be a work in progress. A new poll released by Junior Achievement and Deloitte & Touche indicates teens may be fine-tuning their ability to make ethical decisions, but lack the courage of their convictions. And a Honolulu Advertiser poll of local teens bears that out.

Teens belong to the age group statistically more likely to try risky and even self-destructive things, like experimenting with drugs, practicing unsafe sex and street racing. In an even more common scenario, teens are prone to ignore the long-term implications of their actions by taking ethical shortcuts: disobeying parents, cheating on tests or talking trash about other teens online.

Why?

Let's look at the teenage brain.

Ain't misbehaving?

Brain research is not only helping educators see how teenagers learn, but also helping the rest of us understand how teenagers think. Watching these developments closely is Andria Macdonald, a teacher at Le Jardin Academy who has attended several Mainland workshops on the subject.

"There's a lot of really interesting research on the adolescent brain," Macdonald said.

Scientists are learning more about the frontal lobe, the area where abstract thinking (including the ability to realize consequences) occurs. New evidence indicates that, contrary to previous belief, the frontal lobe is not fully functional until the end of the teenage years — or even later.

"Teens do impulsive things, and when their parents ask them why and they answer, 'I don't know,' they probably don't!" Macdonald said.

Teen brains also are more sensitive to dopamine, a neurotransmitter that affects sensations of pleasure and pain, and this also may be part of their risk-taking behavior and their penchant for strong puppy love, Macdonald said.

Leilani Ahina, a clinical psychologist at Punahou School, said functional MRI imaging studies (see accompanying story) have led to a better understanding of why even wise teens make foolish choices, which can have long-term consequences — some devastating.

"Biologically, teens are set up for head injuries," Ahina said. "They're less likely to see long-term consequences when it comes to issues like driving too fast, drinking, drug use. A lot of things that converge during the teen years make it a hard time."

WHAT TEENS SAY

When it comes to ethical quandaries, O'ahu teens are wrestling with choices, especially if it means helping out a friend. How you're perceived by your peer group is paramount, experts and parents know.

Even the good kids face hard choices when it comes to peers. Take Laurel Servies, a McKinley junior who turned 16 on Tuesday. She describes herself as a fairly ethical person.

"I pretty much follow the rules," she said. "I know the consequences and don't want to sacrifice now for what pays later."

"She's more mature than I am, actually," said her mom, Marcia Servies. "I'm real proud of her. And her dad's a 'You must do the right thing' kind of guy."

Still, when it comes to friends in a pinch, Laurel's been known to "help out a bit" by letting someone take a look at her work.

"I turned over homework a couple times, but it wasn't something I was proud of," Laurel said.

Damien Casken, 17, struggles with the homework dilemma at Maryknoll School, too: "Sometimes I say no, sometimes I don't," he said. However, he recognizes that homework should come with an explanation of the coursework: "Pure copying isn't going to help them at all," he said.

SURVEY SAYS ...

A recent Honolulu Advertiser survey of nearly 100 teens in four high schools — McKinley, Iolani, Pacific Buddhist Academy and Maryknoll — found the teen internal compass is indeed there, just maybe not as calibrated as parents might want. (To see the survey and take it yourself, go to www.honoluluadvertiser.com.)

Teens were given scenarios such as going to a beach party where alcohol would likely be present. Would they go? Drink while there? Tell someone in authority about the party plans?

Some most-chosen answers were, happily, what most of us would call the most ethical, such as recognizing it's wrong to cheat, lie or steal. However, in other cases, teens chose to take the riskiest route, given a choice: They want to go where they want to go, consequences or not. And most of these teenagers felt fairly free to share their homework.

The survey also asked respondents to explain why they chose the answers they did. The most common write-in response? On the question of witnessing someone else cheating, they chose not to rat out the cheater, but to let it pass. "Don't care" and "Don't want to get involved" cropped up often.

A common write-in answer to why they chose not to steal or cheat was "Don't want to get in trouble/caught."

However, when responding to the question of attending parties where drinking or drugs could be found, there were plenty of "I've done it before," "Because I want to" and "You only live once" answers to explain why they would, indeed, go.

THERE'S HOPE

Middle-school teacher and Josh's mom, Carolyn Michaels, was heartened to hear the survey results. There are times when she expects less of students. She trusts her son, however, and Josh gives her good reason.

Josh doesn't share homework — it's frowned upon at his school, Iolani. A guy once asked to "borrow" a history paper, and Josh firmly told him no. Josh had stayed up till 1 a.m. working on it and wasn't about to just hand it over.

His group of friends tends to stay ahead of the homework demon. Still one or two (not him, Mom, honest!) have taken to jumping out of trees for laughs.

"We're the nerds," said Josh, his hand rubbing his chin in an endearing, goofy way. "We aren't going to go around smashing mailboxes. We go home after school and study."

But he also has a mother with a watchful eye. Josh, who stands about as tall and wide as the trunk of a royal palm tree, explains that his mother doesn't like him to walk home alone after dark: "She's thinks I'm going to be abducted."

He laughs.

Parents try hard to find the right way to help a teen learn ethical behavior, but there's not one approach that fits all, finds Damien's mother, Sarah Casken. She knows her son was always more aware of the world around him. That's why parents have to have flexibility, she said.

"The underlying foundation stays the same, but one can handle more freedom than another, so you give them more freedom," said the mother of five. "They might demonstrate they can handle dilemmas, make wise choices, while another child may not have that same degree of strength at the same age to withstand peer pressure or be able to make quick, wise decisions."

'EMERGING ADULTS'

Ahina, the Punahou psychologist, recommends that adults realize teens are what she calls "emerging adults."

"If they are going to be independent, we must help them to become independent thinkers," Ahina said. "We should be their external frontal lobe, engaging them in the process of thinking through decisions. 'What are reasons you do these things?' 'What are short-term gains, the long-term consequences?' Asking questions, though not necessarily telling the answer."

It's not always easy, but the payoff is great.

"They want to be adults," Ahina said. "We have to use it to our benefit, (saying), 'Tell me, I really want to hear what drove your decision for you.' "

And understand that values differ: An adult might not put a high premium on instant-messaging a friend who's suffering after a breakup, but a teen does.

For a family, Ahina said, "matters of taste might differ, but core values are similar — ethics, trust, loyalty, honesty all match up with the parents'. "The way I explain it to parents is, they have the same values as you, just in a slightly different order."

His mother at his side, Josh says he knows right from wrong, that with his mother's help, he's cultivated a "pretty good compass."

When she's out of earshot, however, he says he knows there are some things a teen doesn't tell his mother: "We're on a 'don't ask, don't tell' philosophy," Josh jokes in an exaggerated whisper.

At 15, however, Josh and his mother, a single parent, seem aligned fairly closely. His curfew is when she, the chauffeur, picks him up.

"I'm a low-risk guy," Josh says. "My mother knows I'm not going to do anything totally stupid. I'm on scholarship, and I don't want to jeopardize anything."

STUDIES SHOW PARTS OF BRAIN ‘SWITCH ON’ AS WE GROW OLDER

Much of the groundbreaking research on the teenage brain comes from imaging studies that began in the early 1990s.

The National Institute of Mental Health, University of California, Los Angeles, and Harvard University all have studied youth brains, shedding light on teen behavior. Harvard’s study showed that teens process emotions differently from adults; UCLA’s focused on cognitive processing, and the NIMH discovered a second wave of overproduction of gray matter, the thinking part of the brain, just before puberty.

However, Lawrence Lowery, a professor emeritus at the University of California-Berkeley, sounds a note of caution: “It’s a new frontier, so the data coming in is kind of preliminary. We need more verification from further studies.”

Will this help us understand those crazy creatures called teenagers?
Leilani Ahina, a clinical psychologist at Punahou School, explained that research shows that even though the size of the frontal lobe doesn’t change throughout adolescence, the neural connections do.
“We thought the frontal lobe was done by the early teen years,” Ahina said. “What we know now is there’s a buildup and pruning, a different configuration of neurons. The system becomes much more efficient — those that don’t get used get cut away.”

And while adults use the frontal lobes to make decisions, teens are more likely to react at the level of the amygdala, the primitive part of the brain that drives our fight-or-flight instincts.

“During the teenage years, we’re more likely to respond with that emotional part of the brain,” Ahina said. “That’s why they take more risks, respond more impulsively.”

Unlike adults, who avoid fear, “teens really like that emotionally intense feeling,” she said. “Teens like to ride down steep hills on skateboards and like to get things pierced. And teen relationships are very intense. … Everything can just be the end of the world, because it really does feel like that.”

Lowery notes that as people grow, different parts of the brain switch on — well, maybe it’s more like a slow fade. The last major part to come in is the prefrontal lobes, where we are able to plan ahead, organize tasks, and believe things outside of our own time and space.
“It means Plato can talk to me now, though he’s not here,” said Lowery, an educational consultant who has worked with the state Department of Education.

That part of brain takes about six to 10 years from puberty to fully develop, usually at about ages 20 or 21, Lowery said.

— Mary Kaye Ritz