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96 CHARACTERISTICS OF BRAIN AND BEHAVIORronment. This representation seems to engender contextual expectancies thathave an inherently positive hedonic tone (Luu & Tucker, 2003a, 2003b; Tucker& Luu, in press), an affective bias that may be congruent with a right hemispheredominance in cognition in disorders such as histrionic and impulsive personalities.In addition to clarifying how differing motives may be integral to left andright hemispheric cognition, a theoretical model of asymmetric self-regulationmay help to explain how motive controls on social interaction are at the sametime motive controls on the balance between left and right hemisphere contributionsto cognition.Mechanisms and Implications of the Adolescent AttitudeWe can now bring this general model of asymmetric corticolimbic self-regulationto the specific challenges facing the adolescent brain. The adolescent brain selfregulatesin the social context of transition from being a juvenile in a family oforigin to a functioning person in an autonomous adult social role. The mechanismsof this transition, like those in the formation of the juvenile foundations ofthe self in the first years of life, are those that self-regulate social orientations. Wehave seen that these mechanisms are also multifaceted, with implications for boththe mode of motive arousal and the consolidation of cognitive structure.As the child develops in the context of the family, the attachment relation servesas the foundation of both self and social relations. The adolescent must reject thisjuvenile attachment orientation, individuate a separate identity, and use this newidentity as the basis for adult attachment relations. The object relations with parentsnow recede to the unconscious background (where they continue of courseto provide not only essential implicit security but the indelible templates for newrelations). As a result, it is the relations with peers that must form the provinggrounds for the freshly individuated self.In considering this process, we can apply our model of neural mechanisms todevelopmental functions achieved by the adolescent attitude. The dorsal and ventral(right and left) corticolimbic motive regulatory systems can be seen to achievecognitive capacities and interpersonal orientations at the same time. Just as theinfant learns language not through mere exposure but through identifying andfollowing the mother’s intention (Baldwin, 1989), the adolescent learns about life,forming abstract concepts of the meaning of events, not primarily through academicinstruction, but through the dialectical process of acting on individual intentionsand understanding the intentional experience of others. As a result, it isno accident that there is a close parallel between Piaget’s analysis of the developmentof formal operations (Piaget, 1992) and Kohlberg’s analysis of moral reasoning(Kohlberg, 1981).The critical experience for achieving abstract conceptual capacity may be thatof individuation. The act of rebelling from parents and exercising an autonomousview of the world may be integral to the capacity for understanding the mutuality