Popular belief has it that once children hit puberty, they are virtually unable to control this flood of hormones that apparently drives their every move. And, it seems that it’s primarily the boys that are most subject to this power. Now, I think I understand that at first, the gonads don’t always deliver a consistent level of these chemicals, and that could theoretically affect mood or behavior to some degree. But isn’t this commonly held “wisdom” a bit overstated - that kids that age are just totally subject to their hormones? Isn’t it more like they are first experiencing some sensations, beliefs, and feelings that are not familiar, but that as they mature, they become more attuned to them? After all, adults produce the same hormones. Do adolescents produce so much more per body weight that they are literally controlled by them? What’s the straight dope (vs popular belief)?
There’s a nice graph of testosterone levels vs age here:
VI. Testosterone
When boys hit puberty, plasma testosterone suddenly rises from ~5ng/dl to 500ng/dl.
I’m not sure about the science, and generally agree that the effect is overstated, but there seems to be an element that you’re not considering. Even if the level (per body weight) just rises to a certain level during puberty and maintains that way for most of adulthood, maybe the key point, (to whatever extent the effect exists) that teenagers are still so new to the effect that hormones have on their mental state that they can’t compensate for it well. 
I assume that there’s a decimal point missing here?
Or a hyphen (5-10).
Either that, or we float up into the clouds.
Everyone responding to this thread is operating upon the assumption that testosterone has a direct and linear relationship upon sexual behavior, impulsivity, or other “adolescent” behavioral traits.
Would some one care to provide a cite for that assumption?
From here:
http://jcem.endojournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/89/6/2837
“TU treatment did not increase aggressive behavior or induce any changes in nonaggressive or sexual behavior.”
I think it’s an immature finding at best. Rather, I think the link between testosterone or any other hormone and behavior is a complex one that has been greatly simplified by pop-psychology and the popular media.
I think that there is far more support for the role of brain development in executive areas like the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex or cingulate gyrus, plus plain old experience and the human ability to learn from mistakes.
I’m not sure where you got that impression. Most dose response curves (log) in biology are sigmoidal.
While the hundred fold increase in testosterone at puberty is a large enough change to take a typical receptor from 0 to 99.9% saturation, you still wont see much in the way of a physiological response if the receptors themselves aren’t there.
I apologize, I should have worded my first post much more carefully. Actually, no one has explicitly argued that testosterone leads to the behavioral changes associated with adolescence.
To directly address the OP again, no I don’t think it’s true that a “flood of hormones” drives every mood. Rather, adolescent behavior is a complex set of interactions between physical (including hormonal changes), cognitive, and social development that pop-science I think tends to over-attribute to hormonal changes.
Even fully adult people can have orders of magnitude swings in their testosterone levels or a number of other hormones and I don’t think that people describe middle aged men as moody or puerile due to that fact in the same way they can sometimes glibly attribute adolescent behavior to, “hormones.”
There could, however, be a link between homone levels and the functioning or coding of the neurons in those areas.