Christel Gumy

Christel Gumy is a historian of science and medicine. As part of her PhD thesis, she developed a social and cultural history of the adolescent brain from a gender perspective. She analyzed the way cognitive and developmental neurosciences, an evolutionary vision of adolescence and public health concerns about youth participate in the construction of a cerebral adolescence defined by its immaturity and propensity to take risks. More generally, she develops a critical reflection on the social and cultural neurosciences, particularly on the terms that govern the interdisciplinarity between neurosciences and the humanities and social sciences.

Picturing Teenage Feelings.

From Photographs of Facial Affect to fMRI Scans in the Construction of a Sexed Emotional Adolescent Brain.

Christel Gumy | 03.02.2015

Using sets of photographs of facial affect to test the emotional reactions of adolescents via fMRI, neuroscience research has taken part in the construction of a neurobiological model of adolescence which postulates that the particular brain configuration of young people indicates a lack of emotional control. This model tends to prevail in the sciences of adolescence, particularly in connection with the issue of risk behavior. This paper investigates the process whereby cognitive neurosciences, using photographic portraits of actors miming [...]