Children whose brains develop at an atypical pace during late childhood are significantly more likely to rely on unhealthy emotional coping strategies by early adolescence, according to new research published in Translational Psychiatry. The finding suggests that brain maturation speed, not just behavioral symptoms, is the key predictor of whether a child will bottle up their feelings rather than process them in healthier ways.

What Does Brain Maturation Have to Do With Emotional Health?

Learning to manage intense emotions is a normal part of growing up, but the process depends on the brain's physical development. As children age, neural pathways gradually connect the emotional centers deep inside the brain to the self-control regions located behind the forehead. When these connections mature properly, children become better at soothing themselves and responding appropriately to frustration.

When brain maturation happens at an unusual pace, children can experience lasting difficulties with emotional regulation. Some conditions, such as attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), are characterized by delays in this expected biological timeline. Children with ADHD often experience intense emotions and struggle to moderate their responses, which can lead to social and academic challenges.

To measure this, researchers use a metric called brain-predicted age difference. A machine learning algorithm reviews tens of thousands of brain scans to learn what a typical brain looks like at any given age. When researchers feed a new brain scan into the algorithm, the computer estimates the person's age based on their brain structure. The gap between this computer-generated estimate and the child's actual birth date creates a quantifiable score that indicates whether development is on track.

How Did Researchers Study This Connection?

Scientists at the HUN-REN Research Centre for Natural Sciences in Budapest, Hungary, led by researcher Kristóf Ágrez, examined data from 2,711 children who underwent brain scans at around age ten. Three years later, when the participants were entering early adolescence, the children completed questionnaires about how they handle intense feelings.

The research team focused on two specific emotional coping strategies. The first is cognitive reappraisal, which involves changing how one thinks about a stressful situation to reduce its emotional impact. This is generally considered an adaptive, healthy way to manage stress. The second is expressive suppression, which involves hiding outward signs of emotion once a reaction has already begun, often referred to as bottling up feelings. Relying heavily on expressive suppression is widely considered unhealthy and is consistently linked to prolonged stress and an increased risk for mood disorders.

What Did the Study Actually Find?

The analysis revealed that a greater gap between a child's actual age and their predicted brain age at age ten predicted a higher reliance on expressive suppression at age thirteen. In other words, an atypical rate of brain maturation directly correlated with a child's later tendency to hide their emotions.

Interestingly, when researchers looked at cognitive reappraisal, they found no such link. Neither the brain age gap nor the presence of ADHD symptoms predicted whether a child would use the healthier strategy of rethinking a stressful situation. Cognitive reappraisal requires advanced mental flexibility, and researchers suspect it relies on different neural mechanisms than the simpler act of suppressing an outward reaction.

The team also examined whether parent-reported behavioral problems offered any additional predictive power. Children with ADHD often experience emotional outbursts and difficulty managing feelings, so researchers anticipated that these specific behavioral symptoms might help identify which children would struggle with expressive suppression. However, the statistical analysis showed that once the brain age gap was factored in, behavioral problems did not help predict the tendency to suppress emotions. The underlying brain maturation pace appeared to be the primary driver of this specific coping habit.

Why Should Parents and Doctors Care About This?

Expressive suppression is known to play a role in the development and maintenance of numerous mental health conditions, including anxiety, depression, and substance use disorders. Identifying the biological markers that precede these habits can help scientists map out how early brain development sets the stage for psychological vulnerabilities. By understanding which children are at risk based on their brain development patterns, medical professionals may eventually be able to design better, highly personalized interventions for young people before mental health struggles take hold.

Steps to Support Healthy Emotional Development in Children

• Teach emotion-naming skills: Help children identify and label their feelings using simple language, which supports the development of healthy emotional awareness and processing rather than suppression.
• Model cognitive reappraisal: Demonstrate how to reframe stressful situations in a more positive light, showing children that changing how they think about a problem can reduce emotional distress.
• Create safe spaces for emotional expression: Establish family environments where children feel comfortable talking about their feelings without judgment, reducing the need to bottle up emotions.
• Monitor developmental milestones: Work with pediatricians to track whether your child's emotional regulation abilities are developing at an expected pace, and discuss any concerns about atypical emotional responses.

What Are the Study's Limitations?

While the study relied on a large and diverse sample, researchers noted several important caveats. Evaluating brain scans requires the images to be highly clear. The researchers had to exclude participants whose scans were blurry due to movement in the machine. Children with severe hyperactivity or impulse control issues are often the ones who struggle most to stay perfectly still during a brain scan. By excluding those blurred scans, the final group of participants may have been slightly less representative of extreme clinical cases. It remains possible that in a more severely affected population, behavioral symptoms might act as an independent predictor of emotional regulation habits.

Another consideration involves the artificial intelligence tool used to estimate participants' brain ages. The algorithm was originally trained on a dataset of more than 50,000 brain scans, but the vast majority of those images came from adults over the age of forty-five. While the program is highly accurate, an algorithm trained exclusively on developing brains might catch even more subtle nuances in preteen maturation. Future studies will likely utilize machine learning models built specifically around thousands of teenage brain scans as new pediatric datasets become available to scientists.

By continuing to track these children as they progress through high school, researchers hope to see if these patterns hold steady over time. Tracking the association between brain anatomy and daily coping skills will eventually help medical professionals design better, highly personalized interventions for young people at risk for prolonged mental health struggles.