Azih said:
luxso: Firstly I disagree with the amount of correlation you're giving to logic and emotional maturity. There's no lack of emotionally unstable but really logical people, or illogical people who are very stable. And that's also why insanity is still a valid defense even in cases where the defendendent clearly planned their actions out and are defending themselves against a charge of first degree murder (sure he planned it out, but he's not stable)
If you don't know: kids are very selfish (their emotions are centered on themselves). They think only of themselves and have very little empathy for others. You might say they're "cold-hearted" in the way they go about their lives. When they get angry and kill another person and they realize what they've done they feel sorry for themselves and worry about getting in trouble, not about the victim. As they rise through the stages they develop empathy for others. These are emotions and how they deal with them.
There is a direct correlation between the Piaget stages, the way the brain is developing, and their emotions. Your article about the brain directly shows how Piaget's stages correlate (the ages directly correlate).
As expected, areas of the frontal lobe showed the largest differences between young adults and teens. This increased myelination in the adult frontal cortex likely relates to the maturation of cognitive processing and other "executive" functions. Parietal and temporal areas mediating spatial, sensory, auditory and language functions appeared largely mature in the teen brain.
Children have to deal with their emotions on a logical level, and the more logical they are the better they can deal with their emotions. Makes sense, doesn't it?
Azih said:
And what I'm saying is that their age is a HUGE determinant on their
emotional state of mind. Not only for preteens (My previous quote: Children are not little adults. Until they reach the age of 15 or so they are not capable of reasoning as an adult) but for teenagers as well (
http://www.nimh.nih.gov/publicat/teenbrain.cfm ... Another series of MRI studies is shedding light on how teens may process emotions differently than adults...).
Once again, I'm drawing a distinction between logical operation of the mind and the processing of emotions and I think the brain development dudes back me on this one.
I'm not even understanding what you're trying to say here... but read this
http://cybermesa.com/~bjackson/Papers/EmotionalDevelopmentArticle.pdf
It pretty much states that kids are through growing up "emotionally" around the beginning of adolescense (puberty/10-15) but now they're dealing with them on a rational level. They're not "little adults" like you say because they're just beginning to deal with their emotions on a rational level. It's not until late teens (adults) that they should (65% don't) have mastered this ability. The piaget model doesn't end in describing the levels of reasoning, it goes beyond that.
So back to the death sentences for kids (what a third of this thread was about)... after 16, they can fry them, anything before they can still change their reasoning and the way they deal with emotions pretty easily cause they're still developing. =P
Oh, and it wouldn't surprise me if many criminals never left the second to last stage (emotionally)