Lecture 11: Social and Emotional Development in Adolescence

Question 1

How do we study Emotional Development?

Answer 1

Researchers track adolescents’ feelings using experience sampling and daily diaries, and both confirm adolescents’ high emotional volatility

Question 2

What is experience sampling?

Answer 2

Using experience sampling, they asked adolescents to carry electronic pagers that beeped at random intervals, and to report on how they were feeling when the pager went off

Question 3

What are the daily diaries EMTHOD?

Answer 3

In this method, teens rate emotions such as happiness, anger, sadness, and anxiety over several days or weeks is another common way to assess adolescents’ emotional experiences from day to day and across longer time frames.

Question 4

What is emotional reactivity on adolescences?

Answer 4

During adolescence, higher intensity of emotions and emotions fluctuate
more frequently

Question 5

What is Emotional Valence?

Answer 5

How often adolescents experience positive and negative emotions, and how their emotions change with age

Question 6

Most adolescent’s cope fairly well, but how do the other adolescents cope?

Answer 6

Internalizing problems: by directing their negative thoughts and feelings inward, which may lead to depression and low self-worth.

Externalizing problems, by directing their negative feelings outwards, in the form of aggression.

Question 7

What is Adolescent Depression?

Answer 7

Negative symptoms that are experienced nearly every day, including depressed mood, diminished interest and pleasure in activities, social withdrawal, significant weight loss or gain, insomnia or excessive sleep, fatigue or loss of energy, diminished concentration, recurrent thoughts of death, and feelings of worthlessness

**Adolescents are vulnerable to depression

Question 8

What are the Sex differences in depression?

Answer 8

Female adolescents show higher scores on depressive symptoms than do male adolescents, with sex differences maintaining and even increasing over the past three decades.

Question 9

Why do such sex differences exist?

Answer 9

1.One possibility is that male adolescents are less inclined than female adolescents to seek treatment for psychological problems, leading to lower rates of diagnosis

2. Female adolescents experience higher rates of cyberbullying and use mobile phones more than do male adolescents, which can produce symptoms of depression

Question 10

Treating depression?

Answer 10

Cognitive behavior therapy—an approach that focuses on a person’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviors—is effective for treating mild to moderate depression

A family-systems approach, working with the adolescent, parents, and other family members to facilitate change

Question 11

What is self regulation?

Answer 11

Self-regulation refers to the purposeful control of thoughts, emotions, and behaviors.

Question 12

What is Delay discounting tasks?

Answer 12

In a classic delay discounting task, an immediate and small monetary reward is pitted against a delayed, larger monetary reward, much like the delay-of-gratification marshmallow task introduced in

Question 13

What is risk taking in adolescents?

Answer 13

Decision making that has potentially harmful consequences

It follows an inverted U-shaped pattern: It increases during early adolescence, peaks in middle and late adolescence, and then declines in adulthood

Question 14

What is sensation seeking?

Answer 14

Sensation seeking is the pursuit of novel, intense, and varied experiences

Adolescents show higher sensation seeking than do children and adults, based on their responses to questions such as, “I like doing things just for the thrill of it”

Question 15

How are risk-taking and
sensation-seeking assessed?

Answer 15

1. Surveys (ask teens
   themselves)
2. Behavioural tasks
   * Balloon analogue risk task
   * Simulated driving tasks
3. Real world outcomes

Question 16

What are Simulated driving tasks?

Answer 16

Steinberg and colleagues interpreted fast driving as risk taking and sensation seeking and the money as “the reward”

They placed adolescents in a simulated driving task, where they had to decide between running a yellow traffic signal and risking a crash versus playing it safe and driving slowly

Adolescents were more likely to run the light and crash than were adults, seemingly unable to control their behaviors in the presence of a possible high, immediate reward. Furthermore, adolescents’ tendency to drive fast to receive a reward was magnified when teens were led to believe that a friend was watching from another room..

Adults, on the other hand, were not affected by the supposed presence of a friend and were willing to drive safely to obtain a later reward.

Therefore, Male adolescents and young adults incur the highest rate of accidents in the United States, and accidents in this population rise each year until beginning a slow descent by age 25 years

Question 17

What affect does the Family context have on emotional development?

Answer 17

Teens who live in toxic family environments and have poor relationships with their parents are prone toward emotional problems.

Parents who offer low support of their children or adolescents, or display aggression and harsh punishment toward their adolescents, place their teens at risk of depression and antisocial behavior

Emotionally supportive parents who set reasonable limits on their children arm adolescents with strategies to deal with the hassles and emotional burdens of everyday life

Question 18

What do parent-child fight about?

Answer 18

– NOT (usually) core values – e.g., work, education, moral values

– Mundane issues – curfews, leisure time, clothing, cleanliness of room

– Disagreements stem from different perspectives on who should be in
charge of certain aspects of the teen’s life

– Increasing AUTONOMY

Question 19

What affect does the peer context have on emotional development?

Answer 19

– Supportive peers help teens in their emotional well being

– However, peers are also a source of influence in risk-taking..Peer feedback affects how an adolescent will behave the next time he or she encounters a situation

Question 20

What is monitoring?

Answer 20

Developmental researchers refer to parents’ attempts to gather information about their children’s everyday activities as monitoring

Question 21

What is parental solicitation?

Answer 21

Parent solicitation refers to the monitoring strategy of asking questions to obtain information.

Question 22

What is Adolescent disclosure?

Answer 22

Adolescent disclosure, is the willingness to divulge information to parents, strongly determines parental knowledge..

Teenagers sometimes intentionally hide information from parents or avoid parents’ questions. Consequently, a parent may be ignorant about their adolescent’s activities because the teen decides to keep certain things secret—a failure of disclosure—rather than because the parent did not ask the right questions—a failure of solicitation.

Question 23

What are the significant developments in friendships from children to teens?

Answer 23

Several significant developments in compatibility, stability, reciprocity, and individuality.

Question 24

What are the 4 concepts of friendship?

Answer 24

– Compatibility: Growing similarities between friends

– Stability: Enduring over time

– Reciprocity: Two-way street

– Respect for individuality

Question 25

What are peer groups?

Answer 25

– Groups of people who are roughly the same age

– Over half of North American adolescents’ waking hours are spent
with peer

• Adolescents’ moods are most positive when they are with peers

Question 26

What are Cliques?

Answer 26

Small groups ( less then 6 individuals) defined by common activities or friendship (e.g., having known each other for a long time)

Question 27

What are Crowds?

Answer 27

– Larger, more vaguely defined groups,
based on reputation

– Jocks, nerds, punks, popular kids

– Membership is based on reputation or
stereotype (not actual friendship)

Question 28

Cliques typically are composed of people of…

Answer 28

– same age
– same race/ethnicity
– same socioeconomic background
– same gender – at least during early and middle adolescence

Question 29

What are the Three factors are especially important for determining clique membership?

Answer 29

– Orientation toward school
– Orientation toward the teen culture
– Involvement in antisocial activity

Question 30

What are Deviant peer groups?

Answer 30

Antisocial, aggressive adolescents gravitate toward each other

Question 31

How stable are cliques and friendships over time?

Answer 31

– Moderate stability
– More stable during later years of high schoo

Question 32

How is Adolescent behavior is affected by crowds?

Answer 32

– Youth imitate the behavior of high-status peers
– Crowds establish social norms (values and expectations)
– Crowds reinforce social norms
– Adolescent identity

Question 33

How do The structures of crowds change over time, with crowd becoming….

Answer 33

• more differentiated
• more permeable
• less hierarchical

Question 34

What are the benefits of social media?

Answer 34

– Emotional connection
– Prosocial interactions
– Protective for adolescents who experience geographic or social
isolation

Question 35

What are the risks of social media?

Answer 35

– Overuse
– Misuse & disclosing too much information
– Online harassment and unwanted exposure to sexually explicit
material

Question 36

Consequences of Overuse of Social Media

Answer 36

• depression,
• low self-esteem,
• low social empathic skills and low life satisfaction,
• sleep disturbances and low school satisfaction
• generally high dysfunctional internet behaviors, including online gambling.