Week 11 - Anger, Fear, and Confronting the Forbidden II / Cognitive Development

Formal operations

• Increased flexibility in thinking

• Increased capacities in abstract reasoning and attention

• Increased interpersonal awareness and interest in social activities

• Seeker of inconsistencies

Hypothetico-deductive reasoning

when faced with a problem, adolescents start a hypothesis from which they deduce logical, testable inferences

• Begins with possibility and ends in reality 

Propositional thought

ability to evaluate logic of propositions (verbal statements without needing concrete properties in front of them)

• Ex: all men are tall. Sally is tall. Is Sally a man? 

Plasticity

ability to change in response to the environment by modifying connections between brain regions

Peer pressure

• Being around peers increases teens’ interests in rewards

• Increased sensitivity to social exclusion

• Effects of social media on emotions

• Moderating effect of social success on risk-taking behaviors

Executive skills questionnaire

Consider your strengths

• Do you need to use these skills often in school? If so, how do they help you?

• Do they affect how you get things done in settings outside of school?

Consider your weaknesses

• Do these make being a student challenging?

• Do you have coping strategies to compensate for these weaknesses?

Distorted images

• Imaginary audience: adolescents believe that they’re the focus of everyone else’s attention and concern

• Personal Fable: certain of their imaginary audience, teens develop an inflated opinion of their own importance - they feel special and unique 

• Both images are rooted in perspective-taking, not egocentrism

Personal fables and limited experience

• Experience is a great educator - adults have learned from mistakes, but teens have had less experiences and less opportunities to learn

• Teens are more “here and now” - living in the present experience reduces their capacity to envision something going wrong

Smarter, but angrier teens?

• Emotional and intellectual development don’t always go hand in hand

  • Arguing skills might be more advanced

  • Once escalated, there may be insufficient skills to regulate these feelings

• Teens often perceive the world as “black and white”

  • Catastrophic thinking

  • Strong reactions to provocations or disappointment

  • Tendency to lash out at those who “can take it”

Decision making

Changes in the brain’s emotional/social network outpace the prefrontal cortex’s cognitive control network

• Consequences for planning and decision making

Decision making involves:

• Recognizing a range of options

• Identifying pros and cons of each

• Assessing likelihood of different outcomes 

• Evaluating one’s choice (did it meet goals?)

• Learning from mistakes

The Phantom Tollbooth Themes

• Education and learning as antidotes to juvenile boredom 

• Struggle of ignorance vs wisdom, nonsense vs logic

• Value of art

The world of The Phantom Tollbooth

• Movement to the suburbs

• Averages

• Quest stories (going out in search of something)

• American identity

• Humanities vs technology debate

• Dr. Seuss

• People began to feel that life was becoming too homogenized, too driven by averages and statistics, like, “the average family has 2.58 children”