Lecture 8: physical, cognitive and psychosocial development in adolescence Flashcards
Adolescence
Aus Indigenous vs Modern Western cultures
- Period from about age 12-18 years
- Traditional Indigenous Australians
- Initiation at puberty
- Abrupt social role change to adult
- Modern Western cultures
- Period of gradual transition
• Coming-of-age
Puberty
Primary sex characteristics
Secondary sex characterisitcs
gonadotrophin
Primary sex characteristics
• Development of sex organs
Secondary sex characteristics
• External/physiological changes/signs of sexual maturation
Release of gonadotrophin stimulates
- Male testes to increase testosterone
- Female ovaries to increase oestrogen
- Both sexes produce both hormones but to different levels
Variations in Timing of Puberty
Environmental factors
Amennorrhea
Largely genetically determined
Environmental factors include:
- Nutrition
- Underweight delays puberty
• Obesity accelerates puberty
Amenorrhoea
• Associated with extreme weight loss or malnutrition
Non-Normative Puberty: Males
Early maturing
Late maturing
Early maturing males
- Have opportunities for leadership and higher social status with peers
- Academic, emotional, and behavioural problems, but these might be short-lived
Late maturing males
- Negative impact on esteem short-lived
- Develop positive qualities (e.g., insight)
- Less pressure to engage in risk behaviours
Non-Normative Puberty: Females
Early maturing
Late maturing
Early maturing females
- Negative long- and short-term effects
- Premature dating and sexual encounters
- Vulnerable to STIs, eating disorders, smoking and drinking, depression, anxiety, poor academic achievement
- Related to family environment
Late maturing females
- Lower peer status, but generally more positive outcomes
Adolescent Obesity
- 25% Australian adolescents are overweight or obese
- Rate of obesity doubled between 1985 and 1995
Associated health risks:
- High blood pressure, respiratory disease, orthopaedic disorders, diabetes
- Psychosocial consequences
- Causes complex
- Combination of genetics and environment
Body Image
- How one believes one looks
- Concern most intense during adolescence
- Pattern is more intense with females
- Normal increase in girls’ body fat
Eating Disorders: Anorexia Nervosa
- Involves self-starvation
- Loss of 25-50% of original body weight
- Less than 85% normal weight for age
- Found across cultures and over time
- Distorted body image – belief they are fat
- Constant dieting and exercising
- May cause irregularity/cessation of menstruation
- Often good students and “perfectionists”
- Family dynamics: very involved mothers, emotionally absent fathers
Eating Disorders: Bulimia Nervosa
• Bingeing and undoing of caloric intake on regular basis
“Undo” calories by:
• Self-induced vomiting
- Excessive exercise
- Laxatives or enemas
- Diuretics
- Dieting
Linked with depression and low self-esteem
Treatment of Anorexia and Bulimia
- Immediate goal is to get patient to eat and gain weight
- Patients may be hospitalised if severely malnourished
- Behaviour therapy – reward eating
- Cognitive therapy – change body image
• Institutional settings and family therapy
Sexually Transmitted Infections (STIs)
- Syphilis, gonorrhoea, genital lice, scabies, chlamydia, herpes, genital warts, trichomoniasis, hepatitis, HIV/AIDS
- May result in infertility, life-threatening complications
- Abstinence the only complete prevention, but practicing ‘safer sex’ may be more achievable
Australian Statistics STIs
ABS (2008) for the whole population:
- STIs the most commonly reported communicable diseases, accounting for 43% of all notifications, followed by vaccine preventable diseases (21%), and gastrointestinal diseases (17%)
- Chlamydia was the most common STI (58,515 notifications, 84% of total STIs)
- The average number of new HIV cases from 2004 – 2008 was 984 per year
Drug Use and Abuse
Substance abuse
Addiction
- Experimentation
- Substance use
- Habitual use
-
Substance abuse
- Harmful use of alcohol or other drugs
-
Addiction
- Can be psychological or physiological
- Especially dangerous for adolescents because of changing brain structures
- Tolerance
- Short- and long-term health threats
-
Substance abuse
Alcohol Use and Abuse
- Significant proportion engage in regular use of alcohol
- Binge drinking: consecutive consumption of 5- 7+ drinks in less than 2hrs
- Associated with accidental death and injury, interpersonal violence, suicide
- Health and social problems
Tobacco
Primary and secondary prevention
- Nicotine highly addictive
- As few as 10 cigarettes can establish psychological and physical dependency
• Primary prevention
• Advertising, tax impost, bans
• Secondary prevention
• Life-skills and decision-making training
• ‘Immunisation’ against substance abuse
Piaget Formal Operational
Hypothetico-deductive reasoning
Propositional reasoning
• Move from concrete to formal operational thought
• Hypothetico-deductive reasoning
• Systematic, scientific approach
• Propositional reasoning
• Making logical inferences
• May apply to premises that are not factually true
• Understand validity of logic
Individual Differences in Formal Operational Thinking
- Piaget assumed horizontal décalage – formal operations found in some domains but not others
- Achievement of formal operations overestimated
- Only half achieve full operational thought, some never achieve it
- Influenced by sociocultural context
- Post-formal thinking – formal operations used as a problem solving tool for ambiguous problems
Impact of Formal Operations
- Become more critical of adult authority and can argue more skillfully
- Better able to understand philosophical and abstract topics at school
- May become more judgemental about perceived short-comings of social systems
- May try to apply logic to bigger, more complex problems such as world peace – may appear naive
Kohlberg’s Levels of Moral Reasoning
- preconventional
- conventional
- postconventional
Concerns About Kohlberg’s Theory
- Scoring procedures not sufficiently objective or consistent
- Content of dilemmas too narrow
- Dilemmas not aligned with real-life
- No distinction between moral knowledge and social conventions
- Gender and culture bias
Gilligan’s Ethics of Care Model
female moral reasoning
Morality in Adolescence
• Kohlberg claimed moral reasoning a good predictor of moral behaviour
- The correlation is fairly modest though
- May be a gap between reasoning and actual behaviour
- The development of moral self-relevance may be important
- Integration of morality into self-concept may have impact on behaviour
Adolescence and Identity Formation
• Traditionally a time of turbulence, now a period of transition
Three stages:
• Early (11-13yrs)
• Middle (14-16yrs)
• Late (17-18yrs)
• Identity issues are central – questions of identity arising from cognitive and hormonal changes; awakening sexual interest; normative societal expectations; vocational expectations
Erikson: Identity Formation
• THE major task of adolescence
- Successful identity formation necessary for future development of friendships and intimate relationships
- Struggle to become an adult with unique sense of self and role in society
- Individuals must achieve balance – identity an ongoing life project
Process of Identity Formation
- Content of identity contains multiple aspects
- Identity achieved through exploration and experimentation with various domains
- Identity evaluation important within the process of experimentation
- Psychological moratorium
- May take “developmental time out”, e.g., a gap year
Resolving Erikson’s Identity Crisis
Successful resolution leads to the virtue of “fidelity”:
• Feelings of belonginess to friends or family
- Identification with a set of values
- Sustained loyalty and faith
- Able to trust oneself
The danger is identity confusion
• Some degree of confusion is normal
Marcia: Identity Status Model
Factors Affecting Identity Formation
• Gender: studies have mixed findings; gender role may be more important than gender per se
• Peers: increasing importance of influence during adolescence
• Parents: identity diffusion associated with lack of parental support, warmth, and open communication
- *• Personality:** bidirectional relationship
- *• Societal and cultural factors:** ethnic identity
Development of Self
Personal fabel
Imaginary audience
- Self-concept becomes more complex and abstract reflecting formal operational thought
- Increased skills in perspective taking
- Adolescent egocentrism
• Personal fable (i.e., belief adolescent’s life embodies special story that is heroic/unique; no-one else understands them)
• Imaginary audience (i.e., adolescent egocentrism - group of followers exist who constantly watch and judge their every move)
- Recognise inconsistencies of self
- Interpreted as differences between ‘true’ and ‘false’ selves
Self-Esteem
- Global self-esteem
- Overall view and evaluation of self
• Decreases in adolescence associated with
- Transitions, stresses and challenges of adolescence and school
- More realistic self-appraisals
• Authoritative parenting enhances self- esteem; authoritarian parenting reduces it
Gender Differences in Self-Esteem
- Girls’ self-esteem declines twice as much as boys’ during adolescence
- May be associated with girls’ greater concern for body image
- Sex-role effects may also be important
- Girls more vulnerable to negative aspects of opposite-sex friendships
• Romantic relationships more likely to enhance boys’ self-esteem
Family Relationships during Adolescence
Parent-child
- Adolescent parent-child relationships
- Based on those established in childhood
- Become more egalitarian
- Adolescents increase self-regulation; seek control, choice, and autonomy
- Parenting styles, gender and culture
- Behavioural vs. psychological control
- Parental monitoring
Parent-Child Conflict
- Conflict may arise from:
- Discrepancies between expectations of responsibilities and freedoms
- Views on appropriate and inappropriate behaviour
- Everyday issues
- Conflict more common in early adolescence than later
- Less than 10% of families experience significant intergenerational conflict
Reasons for Intergenerational Conflict
- A lack of understanding of the viewpoint and challenges of a different age group
- A lack of respect for a different age group
- Intolerance by parents of adolescents’ behaviour
- Resentment of parents’ power and restrictions by adolescents
Adolescent Friendships
- Based on mutuality and intimacy and appreciate each other’s uniqueness
- Complementarity is important – different strengths provide mutual benefit
- Benefits of adolescent friendships:
- Source of social and emotional support
- Help to promote autonomy
- Help in defining a sense of self
Romantic Relationships
- Dating considered to be recreational, fun, separate from ‘courting’ function
- Follow a dating script, based on gender roles
- Early relationships less enduring and more superficial
- Cultural differences relate to age for dating
- Relationships for homosexual adolescents more difficult
Sexual Behaviour
- Average age at first intercourse – 16 years
- Age is decreasing
- Concern about HIV/AIDS
- Transition to coitus depends on motivation, social
controls, attractiveness (Udry & Billy, 1987)
- Access to contraception changed attitudes
- Permissiveness with affection
- Double standard
- Premarital sex permitted for males, but not for females
- Cultural differences in attitudes to sexual behaviour
Sexual Orientation
- Sexual orientation
- Continuum from exclusively homosexual to exclusively heterosexual
- Some identify as lesbian, gay, or bisexual
- Individuals identify their minority sexual orientation
- Self-labelling
- Disclosure
Difficulties for Non-Heterosexual Adolescents
Factors determining sexual orientation
- Achieving personal identity more difficult
- May experience rejection from family, school, religious groups
- Feel isolated in a hostile environment
- Risk depression and suicide
- No association between homosexual orientation and emotional or social problems
- …apart from those caused by societal treatment of homosexuals
- Factors determining sexual orientation
- Biological and genetic predisposition
- Possible role of prenatal hormone – no definitive evidence
Adolescent Pregnancy and Parenthood
- Adolescent pregnancy:
- Australian rate – 17 per 1000
- Options: keep baby, terminate, adopt
- Reaction depends on:
- Self-esteem, feelings about school
- Relationship with baby’s father
- Relationship with and support from parents
• Peers who are parents
Consequences and Risks of Teenage Pregnancy
- More prenatal and birth complications:
- Prematurity and low birth-weight
- Fetal, neonatal or infant death
- Possible negative outcomes for children of teen mothers:
- Health and academic problems
- Abuse and neglect
- Developmental disabilities
- Teen mothers less likely to:
- Complete education, have stable well-paying job, enter secure marriage, achieve above average income
- Teen fathers less negatively affected
- Have early contact with baby, but declines over time
