Emerging Adulthood: Cognitive Development

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Part VI
Chapter Eighteen

• Emerging Adulthood Cognitive Development

Postformal Thought Morals and Religion Cognitive
Growth and Higher Education
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Cognitive Development in Emerging Adulthood

• Cognitive development can be described as the
• stage approach
• evaluates whether a new stage or level is
  reachedpostformal stage of thinking and
  reasoning in adulthood
• psychometric approach
• analyzes intelligence by means of IQ tests and
  other measures
• information-processing approach
• studies how the brain encodes, stores, and
  retrieves information

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Postformal Thought

• The Practical and the Personal A Fifth Stage?
• Postformal thought
• a proposed adult stage of cognitive development
• following Piagets fourth, a stage that goes
  beyond adolescent thinking by being more
  practical, more flexible, and more dialectical
• more capable of combing contradictory elements
  into a comprehensive whole

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Postformal Thought

• The Practical and the Personal A Fifth Stage?
• Really a Stage?
• Piaget considered formal operations to be the
  final cognitive stage
• brain researchers report that the prefrontal
  cortex is finally developed by age 20
• non-western cultures describe adult though as
  qualitatively different from adolescent thought

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Postformal Thought

• The Practical and the Personal A Fifth Stage?
• Really a Stage?
• in Hinduism a stage of social embeddedness
  (similar to problem finding) lasts through middle
  age, then a new stage appears at which people are
  expected to be less engaged in immediate social
  concerns

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Postformal Thought

• The Practical and the Personal A Fifth Stage?
• Really a Stage?
• stages that are neurologically based do not
  appear in adulthood
• many scholars find a qualitative and
  quantitative change in cognitive functioning
  through the adult life span
• may be a misnomer
• a new cognitive level
• reached if adult life circumstances allow it
• adults think different than adolescents

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Postformal Thought

• The Fifth Stage
• self-protectivehigh in self-involvement, low in
  self-doubt
• complexvaluing openness and independence above
  all
• dysregulatedfragmented, overwhelmed by emotions
  or problems
• integratedable to regulate emotions and logic

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Postformal Thought

• Combining Subjective and Objective Thought
• subjective thought
• rises from the personal experiences and
  perceptions of an individual
• objective thought
• devalues subjective feelings, personal faith, and
  emotional experience while overvaluing objective,
  logical thinking

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Postformal Thought

• Consolidating Emotions and Logic
• complex problem solving is the crucial
  intellectual accomplishment of adulthood
• combining affect (emotion) and logic (cognition)

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Postformal Thought

• Cognitive Flexibility
• the ability
• to be practical
• to predict
• to plan
• to combine objective and subjective mental
  processes

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Postformal Thought

• Cognitive Flexibility
• plans can go awry
• corporate restructuring
• failure of birth control
• parents illness
• adults with cognitive flexibility avoid
  retreating into either emotions or intellect

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Postformal Thought

• Working Together
• cognitive flexibility
• problem-solving
• talking through problems with others
• changing your mind once you made a mistake
• behavioral changes

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Postformal Thought

• Working Together
• cognitive flexibility
• adults are more likely than children to imagine
  several solutions for every problem and then
  choose the best one
• research on problem-solving abilities concludes
  that emerging adults are better problem solvers
  than both adolescents and the oldest adults

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Postformal Thought

• Countering Stereotypes
• cognitive flexibility
• to change ones childhood assumptions
• younger adults hold less gender-stereotyped views
• stereotype threat
• the possibility that ones appearance or behavior
  will be misread to confirm another persons
  oversimplified prejudiced attitudes

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Postformal Thought

• Dialectical Thought
• a most advanced cognitive process, characterized
  by the ability to consider a thesis and its
  antithesis simultaneously and thus to arrive at a
  synthesis
• makes possible an ongoing awareness of pros and
  cons, advantages and disadvantages, possibilities
  and limitations

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Postformal Thought

• Dialectical Thought
• thesis
• a proposition or statement of belief the first
  stage of the process of dialectical thinking
• antithesis
• a proposition or statement of belief that opposes
  the thesis the second stage of the process of
  dialectical thinking

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Postformal Thought

• Dialectical Thought
• synthesis
• a new idea that integrates the thesis and its
  antithesis, thus representing a new and more
  comprehensive level of truth the third stage of
  the process of dialectical thinking

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Postformal Thought

• A Broken Love Affair
• nondialectical thinker
• likely to believe that each person has stable,
  independent traits
• concludes that one partner is at fault
• a mistake from the beginning bad match

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Postformal Thought

• A Broken Love Affair
• dialectical thinkers
• see people and relationships as constantly
  evolving
• partners are changed by time as well as by their
  interaction

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Postformal Thought

• Culture and Dialectics
• researchers believe that background affects
  cognitive processes
• Greek philosophy led Europeans to use analytic
  absolution logic
• to take sides in a battle between right and
  wrong, good and evil
• Confucianism and Taoism led the Chinese to seek
  compromise - Middle Way
• to think holistically, the whole rather than the
  parts

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Postformal Thought

• Culture and Dialectics
• Respond to the following
• Mary, Phoebe, and Julie all have daughters. Each
  mother has held a set of values that has guided
  her efforts to raise her daughter. Now the
  daughters have grown up, and each of them is
  rejecting many of her mother's values. How did
  it happen and what should they do?

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Postformal Thought

• Culture and Dialectics
• Respond to the following
• Suppose you are the police officer in charge of a
  case involving a graduate student who murdered a
  professor As a police officer, you must
  establish motive.

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Postformal Thought

• Culture and Dialectics
• dialectical thought affects priorities and values
• researchers agree that notable differences in
  culture are the result of nature, not nurture
• cognitive differences have ecological,
  historical, and sociological origins"

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Morals and Religion

• adult responsibilities, experiences, and
  education affect moral reasoning and religious
  beliefs.
• maturation of values appears first in emerging
  adulthood and continues through middle age.

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Morals and Religion

• one stimulus for young adults in moral reasoning
  is college education
• discussions of moral issues or required subtle
  ethical decisions (i.e., law and medicine)

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Morals and Religion

• Which Era? What Place?
• morals and culture
• morals
• affected by circumstance, including national
  background, culture, and era
• culture
• determines whether a particular practice is a
  moral issue

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Morals and Religion

• Which Era? What Place?
• the power of culture makes if difficult to assess
  whether adults morality changes with age
• moral thinking improves with age

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Morals and Religion
Dilemmas for Emerging Adults

• sex
• sexuality
• reproduction
• relationships
• contraception
• abortion

• drugs
• education
• vocation

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Morals and Religion

• Measuring Moral Growth
• shifts were seen as young adults incorporated
  human social concernsyoung adults became
  dialectical, reaching a new level
  (Kohlberg,Chapter 23Labouvie-Vief, 2006)

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Morals and Religion

• Measuring Moral Growth
• Defining Issues Test (DIT)
• a series of questions developed by James Rest and
  designed to asses respondents level of moral
  development by having them rank possible
  solutions to moral dilemmas

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Morals and Religion

• Stages of Faith James Fowler
• Stage 1 Intuitive projective faith
• Stage 2 Mythic-literal faith
• Stage 3 Synthetic-conventional faith
• Stage 4 Individual-reflective faith
• Stage 5 Conjunctive faith
• Stage 6 Universalizing faith

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Morals and Religion

• Stages of Faith James Fowler
• faith progresses from a simple, self-centered,
  one-sided perspective to a more complex,
  altruistic (unselfish) and many-sided view.
• faith is one way people combat stress, overcome
  adversity, and analyze challenges.

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Cognitive Growth and Higher Education

• college graduates seem to be not only healthier
  and wealthier as well as deeper and more flexible
  thinkers.
• scientists view these conclusions with suspicion.

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Cognitive Growth and Higher Education

• The Effects of College
• students attend college
• to secure better jobs, learn specific skills
• general education
• college correlates with
• better health
• less smoking
• better eating
• more exercise
• longer life

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Cognitive Growth and Higher Education

• Changes in the College Context
• the fact that colleges and universities are
  designed to foster cognitive growth does not
  necessarily mean that they succeed
• Changes in the Student
• students and social structures change over time
• Changes in the Institutions
• current colleges offer more career programs and
  hire more part-time faculty

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Cognitive Growth and Higher Education

• Evaluating the Changes
• what do todays students get out of attending
  college?
• colleges no longer produce the great
  intellectual flexibility that earlier research
  found

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Cognitive Growth and Higher Education

• Evaluating the Changes
• Diversity and Enrollment
• evidence on cognition suggests that interactions
  with people of different backgrounds and various
  views lead to intellectual challenges and deeper
  thought

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Cognitive Growth and Higher Education

• Evaluating the Changes
• Graduates and Dropouts
• if postformal thinkingthe ability to cope with
  the complexities of personal emotions and logical
  decision makingis the result of higher
  educationthen are the college students who
  dropout leaving before reaching this level of
  cognition?

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Cognitive Growth and Higher Education

• Evaluating the Changes
• Graduates and Dropouts
• many young students lack the cultural knowledge
  or cognitive maturity to acquire the social
  know-how needed to navigate through college
• some adapt to complexities better as they
  proceed through college