Adolescence-Adulthood

Adolescence

Adolescence is the transition period from childhood to adulthood,

extending from puberty to

independence

Adolescence

G. Stanley Hall described adolescence as the tension between biological maturity and social dependence

Physical Development

• Puberty paves way to a surge of hormones, creating mood swings.

• The primary sex characteristics (reproductive organs) develop dramatically

• Menarche- first menstrual period

• Spermarche-first ejaculation

Physical Development• Early developing boys become stronger and more

athletic, as well as more popular and have a higher self esteem.

• Hereditary and environmental interaction plays a major role of how both boys and girls feel about puberty

• During puberty, unused neural connections are weakened

• Myelin also grows in the frontal lobe during puberty• The frontal lobe maturation slows down the emotional

limbic system. This explains why teenagers can be impulsive

• Younger teens are more likely to smoke or do drugs since they are unable to plan ahead.

Cognitive Development• Adolescents are more

likely to worry about what others think about themselves. Since this is when they start to think about how others perceive them

• During the early teenage years, reasoning is often self-focused. They feel that their private experiences are unique. They think that others can not understand their unique experiences

• Formal operations is the shift from preadolescents thinking concretely to adolescents becoming more capable of abstract logic. This is Piaget’s theory

• The teenager’s ability to reason hypothetically and deduce consequences allows them to detect inconsistencies in other’s reasoning and to spot hypocrisy

Developing Morality

Kohlberg did studies in which he recorded the morality thoughts of people of different ages. He found that there were 3 different stages

Developing Morality

o Preconventional Morality- When children before 9 years old, have a preconventional morality of self interest. These children obey either to avoid punishment or to gain concrete awards

Developing Morality

Conventional Morality – When young teenagers, use morality which includes caring for others as well as upholding laws and social rules just because they are rules and laws.

Developing Morality

o Post conventional morality- When someone develops personally perceived ethical principles, they confirm people’s agreed upon rights

Developing Morality

• Kohlberg constructed the moral ladder, which included the three stages

• Once our thinking matures, our behavior becomes less selfish and more caring

• Elevation- tingly, warm, glowing feeling in the chest, usually felt when witnessing someone doing charity

Developing Morality

• Jonathan Haidt exclaimed in his book social intuitionist, that moral feelings overpower moral reasoning. He revealed that moral reasoning aims to convince others of what we feel

• Joshua Greene found that when a person is faced with dilemmas, their neural responses varied, based on how much their emotion areas lit up

• Despite the identical logic, the personal dilemma allowed emotions that altered mood judgment.

Developing Morality

• Morality is influenced by social influences, and is doing the right thing.

• Children are taught to be empathetic to others.• Those who rely on delay gratification (restraining

one’s impulse and waiting for a greater award) became more socially responsible as well as academically successfully. Students are engaged in responsible action through service learning.

Social Development

• Erik Erikson exclaimed that individuals go through eight stages in life, each with a psychosocial task.

• Till age 1, the issue was that of trust and mistrust

• Till age 2, it becomes autonomy vs. shame and doubt

• Till age 5, the issue is initiative and guilt

Social Development

• Till puberty, the child is given the issues of inferiority and competence

• From adolescence till becoming a young adult, it becomes about finding one’s identity

• For young adults, the issue is between intimacy and isolation

• From 50-60 years old, it becomes generativity vs. stagnation.

• From 60s up, the issue becomes integrity vs. despair.

Forming an identity

• Erikson revealed that some teenagers take their parents values and expectations and use it as their identity.

• Other teenagers tend to gain a negative identity by rejecting traditional values ant conforming to a particular group

Forming an identity• William Damon revealed that a main idea of

teenagers is to try to make a difference in the world

• Daniel Hart discovered that younger teenagers were more likely to reflect the values of a certain group while older teenagers were more likely to reflect their own personal values.

• Older teenagers were also more likely to have intimacy, the ability to form emotionally close relationships. This is after these individuals get a better sense of who they are

Parent and Peer Influence

• Positive relations with parents support positive peer relations

• Teenage years is a time of decreasing parental connection and a more peer connection

Parent and Peer Influence

Parents have a bigger influence on religious faith, career, college and thinking values. Most teenagers share their parents political views

Emerging Adulthood

• Emerging adulthood are people who are no longer teenagers but are not ready to take on adulthood responsibilities.

• Due to this emerging adulthood, marriage has been delayed by several years.

Physical Changes in Middle Adulthood

• Physical vigor has less to do with age; it has more to do with a person’s health and exercise habits.

• In Eastern countries, respect is given to the aged. Power is seen to be derived over age

• In many western cultures, young people are more prized.

• Menopause is the ending of the menstrual cycle beginning around when a woman hits her 50th birthday. Estrogen is reduced during this period.

Physical Changes in Middle Adulthood

• Menopause usually does not create psychological problems for women.

• A woman’s attitudes reflect on how she will perceive and go through menopause

• Bernice Neugarten went around and asked women who had their menopause how they felt. The majority felt at the prime of their lives.

• Men experience a more gradual decline of sperm production over age. Testosterone levels, erection and ejaculation are also at a declining rate.

Physical Changes in later life

• Life expectancy has increased from the average 49 years to 67 years

• Women outlive men and after the stage of infancy, outnumber them

• After age 70, hearing, distance perception, reaction time, stamina, muscle strength, sense of smell all decrease

• Neural process slow their rate• Around age 80, 5% of the brain shrinks.

Physical Changes in later life

• Physical exercise however, can stimulate the development of some new brain cells and connections.

• The risk of dementia increases, doubling every five years from age 60. It is not a normal part of the aging process.

Physical Changes in later life

• Older adults who exercise regularly become smart thinkers due to the oxygen and nutrient circulation.

• Alzheimer’s disease affects over 3% of the world’s population by age 75. They are not part of the normal aging process. It is the loss of brain cells and deterioration of neurons that produce the neurotransmitter acetylcholine. Memory and thinking thus decrease.

Aging and Memory

• Recalling new information declines during the early and middle adulthood years.

• Older adults are able to recall meaningful information more easily than meaningless information, they may however take longer to produce words to describe these memories

Aging and Memory• Thomas Cook and Robin West discovered that younger

adults were more likely to recall names after one introduction, while older age groups had a poorer performance.

• When asked how they heard a certain event or news , many could recall instantaneously upon a few moments, while asking after a couple of months prompted variations in their recalls.

• David Schonfield and Betty-Anne Robertson found that recognition memory is better for older adults early in the day rather late.

• Being able to recognize a set of words via multiple choices had a minimal decline when compared to the results of each age. It was the recall of the words which had a greater difficulty

• Time based tasks as well as habitual tasks decline over age

Aging and Intelligence

• Cross sectional studies are comparing people of different ages with one another.

• These studies revealed that intelligence declined after early adulthood

• They excluded the factors of generational differences of education as well as life experiences

Aging and Intelligence• Longitudinal studies is the

retesting the same people over a period of time, these studies showed that intelligence may be stable through out the years. They however, excluded the factors of people dropping out of studies, those who were less intelligent and that in poor health.

• The present day view is that fluid intelligence takes place by declining later in life and that crystallized intelligence does not. (Paul Baltes)

• Crystallized intelligence is the accumulation of knowledge and skills

Aging and Intelligence

• Fluid intelligence is the ability to reason speedily and abstractly

• Scientists and mathematicians are more likely to have their best outcomes in earlier adulthood, while historians and writers experience success later in life.

Adulthood’s Ages and Stages

• Midlife transition takes place in the early forties and is associated with struggle, regret, and feeling struck down. Usually triggered by illness, divorce or by job loss.

• The social clock is the cultural prescription of when the right time of each stage in life must occur. For example, what time to leave home, college, get a job, family, etc.

Aging and Intelligence

• Romantic attraction is often influenced by chance encounters.

• Not many identical twins would feel attracted to their twin’s partners.

• The social clock varies from culture to culture

Adulthood’s Commitments• Erik Erikson pinned two

aspects of our live. Intimacy and Generativity.

• Generativity is being productive and supporting future generations.

• Love and work are two major themes of adulthood

• The social expectation of families staying together, is explained by evolutionary psychologists in having a better chance of passing down one’s genes.

Adulthood’s Commitments

• Due to the increased expectations of both women and men and women’s increased independence, divorce rates have doubled in the past 40 years

• Those who tested out their marriage before getting married had a higher rate of divorce and marital dysfunction.

• The risk of poor martial outcomes appears greatest for those who cohabit prior to engagement. Cohabiters tend to be less committed to the ideal of enduring marriage.

Adulthood’s Commitments• John Gottman discovered

that stable marriages provide five times more instances of smiling, touching, complimenting, laughing than of sarcasm, criticism and insults.

• Work satisfaction reveals the roles of the woman, such as a paid worker or a wife did not matter, but the quality of her experiences in these roles meant a lot.

• Satisfying work correlates with life satisfaction

Well Being Across the Life Span• A person’s feeling of

satisfaction and well being are stable through out one’s lifespan

• Older adults may experience a higher rate of satisfactions since they had satisfied the tasks of early adulthood. They are filled with a strong sense of satisfaction and identity

Well Being Across the Life Span• Older adults are less sensitive

to negative facts. The amygalda show decreased activity in response to negative events while maintain its responsiveness to positive events.

• Mihalay Csikszentmihalyi and Reed Larson revealed that teenagers got over an emotion within an hour while older people endured their emotions longer.

Death and Dying

• Death of spouse is the hardest for a person

• When death comes at an expected time, grieving may be short lived.

• When death comes earlier, grief is more severe

• Erikson believed that older people were filled with a sense of meaning and identity when thinking about death

Continuity and Stages• Researchers who stress

biological maturation see development as a series of genetically predisposed steps.

• Researchers who stress slow continuous development stress experience and learning.

• Piagets’s, Erikson’s and Kohlberg’s ideas have shown us the ways people differ at various points in the life span.

Continuity and Stages• Lifelong development

also shows stability and change

• Personality gradually stabilizes throughout age.

• When we age, we may change our earlier personalities but sustaining characteristic traits in comparison to our age mates.