Research: Is teenage angst universal? Comparing England and Japan

We are happy to announce that our research based on the "In My Life" photography project in England and Japan has just been published in the Journal of Adolescent Research.

Below, lead author Dr Emily Emmott discusses the study.

Our study supports the idea that culture shapes how we become who are are.

Is teenage angst universal?

Traditional theories of identity development in developmental psychology assume a biological universal - that, globally, teenagers go through a period of feeling unsure and insecure before they "find themselves." However, this doesn't match up with anthropological literature that engages with a diverse range of societies. For example, Margaret Mead described how Samoan teenagers in the 1920s had defined understandings of their social roles and expectations from childhood, meaning they did not experience a period of identity confusion.

This is particularly problematic as contemporary studies of adolescent identity development frame Western patterns as "normal" and "good" - and deviation from this is seen as "bad." For example, a study from Japan found that 80% of teenagers were confused about their identity, where as a study from the Netherlands found 26% of teenagers were confused. The high level of identity confusion in Japan could be seen as something being wrong with Japanese adolescents or Japanese society.

However, evolutionary anthropology tells us that optimal developmental pathways will vary depending on the socio-ecological context. Before you can make any claim of biological universality, we need to study things across the world, not just the US and Europe! We also need to have a deep, thorough understanding of the local context to make meaningful inferences about local developmental pathways.

So that is what we tried to address in the study. We investigated how teenagers in England and Japan engaged with their environments, and reflected on what that told us about cultural variations in identity development between these countries. We did this by asking teenagers to take photographs about important aspects of their lives and provide a written description of them. 

Analysing the data, we found that teenagers across both countries valued things like skills development and feeling connected to their friends, family, school, and communities. However, in Japan, adolescents were more likely to consider changes over time, sometimes in a melancholy manner (where as, in England, students focused on the present and were predominantly positive). This suggests that adolescents in England and Japan relate to their world in different ways. This may explain why teenagers in Japan may be less certain about their identity - without it being a pathological or social problem!

Like many anthropologists and cultural psychologist have argued, our study supports the idea that culture shapes how we become who we are - and it's very important not to use Western standards to assess what is "normal" for development.

Research Paper:

Emmott, E. H., Ihara, Y., Tokumasu, Y., Nozaki, M., Saito, A., Kawamoto, T., Ito, S., Hassan, A., Brown, L. J., Dennett, T., Crane, A., Borra, C., Nesci, A., & Morita, M. (2025). Adolescence as a Key Period of Identity Development and Connectedness: A Comparative Autophotography Study in England and Japan. Journal of Adolescent Research https://doi.org/10.1177/07435584251349497