Adolescence-Adulthood

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Adolescence-Adulthood
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Adolescence

• Adolescence is the transition period from
  childhood to adulthood, extending from puberty to
  independence

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Adolescence

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

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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

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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.

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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

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• Formal operations is the shift from
  preadolescents thinking concretely to adolescents
  becoming more capable of abstract logic. This is
  Piagets theory
• The teenagers ability to reason hypothetically
  and deduce consequences allows them to detect
  inconsistencies in others reasoning and to spot
  hypocrisy

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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

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Developing Morality

• 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

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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.

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Developing Morality

• Post conventional morality- When someone develops
  personally perceived ethical principles, they
  confirm peoples agreed upon rights

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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

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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.

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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 ones 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.

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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

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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 ones 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.

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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

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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

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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

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Parent and Peer Influence

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

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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.

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Physical Changes in Middle Adulthood

• Physical vigor has less to do with age it has
  more to do with a persons 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.

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Physical Changes in Middle Adulthood

• Menopause usually does not create psychological
  problems for women.
• A womans 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.

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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.

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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.

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Physical Changes in later life

• Older adults who exercise regularly become smart
  thinkers due to the oxygen and nutrient
  circulation.
• Alzheimers disease affects over 3 of the
  worlds 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.

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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Adulthoods 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.

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Aging and Intelligence

• Romantic attraction is often influenced by chance
  encounters.
• Not many identical twins would feel attracted to
  their twins partners.
• The social clock varies from culture to culture

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Adulthoods 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 ones genes.

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Adulthoods Commitments

• Due to the increased expectations of both women
  and men and womens 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.

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Adulthoods 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

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Well Being Across the Life Span

• A persons feeling of satisfaction and well being
  are stable through out ones 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

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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.

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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

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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.
• Piagetss, Eriksons and Kohlbergs ideas have
  shown us the ways people differ at various points
  in the life span.

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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.