Ch. 10: Becoming an Adult Flashcards
Emerging Adulthood
Period between mid teens and mid-to-late twenties when people are no longer adolescents but are not yet fully adults
role transitions
movement into the next stage of development marked by assumption of new responsibilities and duties (graduation, voting, marriage, etc.)
Edgework
desire to live more on the edge through physically and emotionally threatening situations on the boundary between life and death. Typically better planned and prepared for than adolescent impulsive behavior
Returning Adult Students
College students usually over age 25
Intimacy vs. Isolation
According to Erikson, the major task of young adults is dealing with the psychosocial conflict between these two. (Sixth stage of his theory)
Metabolism
How much energy the body needs
Low-density Lipoproteins (LDLs)
“Bad” cholesterol. Cause fatty deposits to accumulate in arteries, impeding blood flow
High-density Lipoproteins (HDLs)
“Good” cholesterol. help keep arteries clear and break down LDLs
Body Mass Index
BMI = w/hxh (weight/height squared)
Baltes et al. Three Concepts Vital to Intelligence
Multidirectionality: pattern in which some aspects of intelligence improve and other aspects decline during adulthood.
Interindividual Variability: patterns of change that vary from one person to another
Plasticity: intellectual abilities are not fixed and can be modified under the right conditions at just about any point in adulthood.
Multidimensional
Applies to most theories of intelligence and means they identify several types of intellectual abilities
Structure of Intelligence
Organization of interrelated intellectual abilities (Most common way to describe is a five level heirarchy)
Factor (as related to intelligence)
interrelated abilities measured by two tests if the performance on one test is highly related to the performance on another
Primary Mental Abilities
Groups of related intellectual skills (such as memory or spatial ability). The is the first/lowest level in the heirarchy
Secondary Mental Abilities
Broader intellectual abilities that subsume and organize the primary abilities (ex: crystallized intelligence)
Five main areas of primary mental abilities (focus of most research)
-Number
-Word Fluency
-Verbal Meaning
-Inductive Reasoning (ability to extrapolate from particular facts to general concepts)
-Spatial Orientation
Fluid Intelligence
Abilities that make you a flexible and adaptive thinker, to make inferences, and understand relations among concepts
Crystallized Intelligence
Knowledge you have acquired through education and life experience in a particular culture
Major Secondary Mental Abilities
-Crystallized Intelligence
-Fluid Intelligence
-Visual Organization
-Auditory Organization
-Short-term acquisition and retrieval
-Long-term storage and retrieval
Parieto-Frontal Integration Theory (P-FIT)
Proposes that intelligence comes from a distributed and integrated network of neurons in the parietal and frontal lobes of the brain
Neural Efficiency Hypothesis
Intelligent people process information more efficiently, showing weaker neural activations in a smaller number of areas than less intelligent people
Postformal Thought
Characterized by recognizing that the correct answer varies from one situation to another, that solutions should be realistic, that ambiguity and contradiction are typical, and that subjective factors play a role in thinking
Reflective Judgement
way in which adults reason through dilemmas involving current affairs, religion, science, personal relationships, etc.
Stages of Reflective Judgement
-Prereflective Reasoning (stages 1-3): Knowledge is gained through authority figure or direct observation and belief that what what knows is absolutely correct (ex: It’s on Fox News it must be true)
-Quasi-Reflective Reasoning (stages 4-5): Belief that knowledge or knowledge claims contain uncertainty (ex: I would believe in climate change if I could see the proof. How do you know scientists aren’t making up the data?)
-Reflective Reasoning (stages 6-7): knowledge claims cannot be made with certainty but make judgements about most reasonable and relatively certain based on evaluation of available data
Emotional Intelligence
ability to recognize their own and others’ emotions, correctly identify and appropriately tell differences between emotions and use this info to guide thinking and behavior
impression formation
the way we form and revise first impressions about others
Life-span Construct
based on personal experience and influence from others, adults create a unified sense of past, present, and future
Scenario
manifestation of life-span construct through expectations about the future
social clock
tagging future events with a particular time or age by which they are to be completed
life story
people created an internalized narrative with a beginning, middle, and end
Possible Selves
Representations of what we could become, what we would like to become, and what we are afraid of becoming
Personal Control Beliefs
Degree to which you believe your performance in a situation depends on something you do
Primary Control
Behavior aimed at affecting the individual’s external world
Secondary Control
Behavior or cognition aimed at affecting the individual’s internal world
