CHAPTER 12

Social and Personality Development in Adolescence

Overview of Cognitive Development in Adolescence

  • Adolescents exhibit increased cognitive abilities, enabling them to acquire knowledge more rapidly.
  • There is a common tendency for adults to overestimate the cognitive maturity of adolescents.

Emergent Cognitive Abilities and the Dual Process Model

  • Dual Process Model:
    • Comprises two distinct cognitive processes:
    • Cognitive Control System:
      • Also known as "cool" cognition.
      • Involves rational decision-making and problem-solving.
    • Reward System:
      • Known as "hot" cognition.
      • Involves impulsive and emotional-driven responses to rewards and risks.
    • This model is helpful for understanding why adolescents engage in risky behaviors, suggesting that it may only represent part of their cognitive landscape.

Transition to Secondary School

  • Historical Context:
    • Prior to the 1960s, lower schools were not perceived as rigorous enough.
    • In the 1990s, middle school systems began to replace junior high systems, aiming to accommodate both social-emotional and cognitive development.

Transition to Middle School

  • The changes observed when transitioning from elementary to middle school often resemble those of moving to junior high.
  • Achievement declines are commonly noted during this transition, potentially caused by shifts in academic goals:
    • Academic Goals:
    • Task Goals:
      • Focused on personal control and positive learning attitudes.
    • Ability Goals:
      • Relate to relative performance standards.
      • A shift towards ability goals by the 6th grade influences behaviors in students.

School Climate and Achievement

  • The school climate, including structure and expectations, greatly affects student outcomes:
    • High task-goal orientation leads to higher academic achievement and a favorable perception of the school environment.
    • Successful academic experiences bolster goal-setting and self-regulation skills, assisting students in managing stressors.
    • Students lacking self-regulation may experience feelings of powerlessness.

Theories of Social and Personality Development in Adolescence

  • Psychoanalytic Perspectives:
    • Sigmund Freud:
    • Proposed that adolescence marks the last stage of personality development.
    • Puberty ignites sexual drives, leading to the genital stage where satisfactory sexual relationships become a focus.
    • Erik Erikson:
    • Emphasized the importance of identity, noting that a sense of identity often becomes fragmented in early adolescence, leading to a moratorium phase, which functions as a transitional time between childhood and adulthood characterized by identity crises.

Marcia’s Theory of Identity Achievement

  • James Marcia:
    • Advanced Erikson's theories with a more structured approach to identity development comprising two key components:
    • Crisis:
      • The process of re-evaluating old values and beliefs, leading to a commitment to new goals or ideologies.
    • Commitment:
    • Four identity statuses based on the presence or absence of crisis and commitment:
    • Identity Achievement:
      • Example: "I want to help people and am good at science, so I decided to be a nurse."
    • Moratorium:
      • Example: "I like psychology and am taking a variety of courses to determine whether I want to major in it or not."
    • Identity Foreclosure:
      • Example: "I am going into the military, because that's what everyone in my family does when they finish high school."
    • Identity Diffusion:
      • Example: "I haven't given the future a lot of thought. I'm sure something will come along to push me in one direction or another."

Research on Identity Development

  • Identity achievement may occur later than previously anticipated, often fluctuating during the teenage years and extending into adulthood.
  • High levels of stress can influence the likelihood of foreclosure in the identity formation process.

Self-Concept in Adolescence

  • Bronfenbrenner's Model of Development:
    • Considers layered contexts affecting self-concept and identity.
    • Emphasizes inner characteristics reflecting current identity status and various social influences:
    • Family, peers, school, media, and societal factors.

Self-Understanding

  • The concept of the psychological self comprises:
    • Personality Traits:
    • Essential elements showing increasing stability in the ''Big Five'' traits.
    • The emergence of enduring beliefs, personal philosophies, and moral standards, influencing self-descriptions.

Differentiated Self-Concepts

  • Linked to decreased identity diffusion, with domains of competence (e.g., academic, social, physical) predicting lower levels of diffusion, particularly among males.
  • Domain-specific self-concepts significantly influence adolescent behavior.

Self-Esteem

  • A competent self-view fosters healthy self-esteem but tends to be unstable in adolescence.
  • Self-esteem typically experiences a steady rise during adolescence and correlates with various positive outcomes, such as social competence.
  • Interventions to support self-esteem include:
    • Nutrition and exercise, educational strategies, medication, neurofeedback, parenting strategies, sleep, coaching, and cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT).

Gender Role Identity

  • Gender Identity:
    • Relates to an individual's self-perception concerning gender, aligning with their assigned sex.
    • Is connected to social self-presentation, shaped by parental attitudes and behaviors.
    • Flexible gender roles have evolved through social conventions.

Ethnic-Racial Identity (ERI)

  • Adolescents of color often navigate dual identities comprising:
    • Racial Identity:
    • Identified through external shared characteristics.
    • Ethnic Identity:
    • Steeped in shared cultural heritage, which can involve complexities during adolescence.

Phinney’s Stages of Ethnic Identity

  • Jean Phinney:
    • Proposed three stages in developing ethnic identity:
    • Unexamined Ethnic Identity:
      • Lack of awareness and exploration of one's ethnic background.
    • Ethnic Identity Search:
      • A quest for understanding ethnic identity significantly.
    • Ethnic Identity Achievement:
      • A solid understanding and affiliation with one’s ethnic group.
    • Many adolescents develop dual identities, combining belonging to the dominant group and their ethnic group.

Intersectionality and Ethnic-Racial Identity

  • The concept of intersectionality encompasses:
    • Interactive identity categories such as gender identity, sexual orientation, and temperament.
    • Involves situational variables that affect experiences of multiethnic-multiracial and immigrant adolescents.
    • Highlights issues related to marginalized groups, including transgender and gender-diverse individuals and the stressors they face.

Kohlberg’s Theory of Moral Reasoning

  • Historical Context:
    • Piaget first identified two stages of moral reasoning, upon which Kohlberg expanded by measuring responses to moral dilemmas using three levels, each with two substages, based on the reasoning forms employed in responses.

Levels of Moral Development

  • Level 1: Preconventional Morality:

    • Decisions are based on external judgments of what is right or wrong:
    • Stage 1: Punishment and obedience orientation.
    • Stage 2: Individualism, instrumental purpose, and exchange, focusing on personal gain.

  • Level 2: Conventional Morality:

    • Moral judgments based on social norms:
    • Stage 3: Mutual interpersonal conformity.
    • Stage 4: Law-and-order orientation, where rules become crucial.

  • Level 3: Postconventional Morality:

    • Moral reasoning choices are influenced by principles transcending individual or group needs:
    • Stage 5: Social contract orientation.
    • Stage 6: Universal ethical principles orientation prioritizing societal and individual rights.

Influences on Moral Development

  • Stages correlate with age and cognitive development, prominently featuring the decline of egocentrism.
  • Role-taking is essential for moral reasoning, supported by the social environment, particularly parental support in understanding and responding to moral dilemmas.

Criticisms of Kohlberg’s Theory

  • Controversy surrounds:
    • Stage 6 reasoning and its practicality.
    • Insufficient emphasis on family and external influences on moral developments.
    • The role of identity in moral reasoning processes.
    • Issues emerging from a heavy focus on justice, raised by Carol Gilligan’s distinction between two moral orientations: justice and care.

Moral Development and Antisocial Behavior

  • Moral behavior is context-dependent, with consistent low scores associated with antisocial behavior:
    • Factors such as cyberbullying and possession of callous-unemotional traits may inhibit empathy, leading to poorer recognition of emotional cues, particularly fearful or sad expressions.

Relationships with Parents

  • Key Tasks for Adolescents:
    • Establishing autonomy while maintaining connection with parents.
    • Entails a cycle characterized by increased misbehavior and conflict, often insightfully tied to parental responses and controls, leading to heightened emotional responses from both teens and parents.

Attachment to Parents

  • Influences of Parental Attachment:
    • Strong, secure attachments correlate positively with well-being and happiness.
    • Enhances social competence and inversely affects engagement in drug use and other risk behaviors.

Friendships in Adolescence

  • Peer relationships gain prominence during adolescence, displaying distinct characteristics:
    • Significance of friendships increases, marked by the depth of relationships.

Smartphones and Peer Communication

  • Present Communication Context:
    • Approximately 88% of adolescents aged 13 to 18 possess smartphones.
    • About 50% use them for over 30 hours weekly.
    • 60% engage with social media daily, averaging 1.5 hours of use.

Social Comparison on Platforms

  • The prevalence of global social comparison is facilitated by smartphones, raising concerns regarding the authenticity of online personas.
    • Notably high rates of smartphone ownership amongst teens necessitate therapeutic interventions to address these issues.

Popularity and Peer Acceptance

  • The importance of popularity peaks in early adolescence but shifts to valuing quality in relationships as teens mature.
    • Intimacy in friendships demonstrates significant variability over time, influenced by factors such as loyalty and emotional support.

Stability of Friendships

  • Friendships tend to stabilize in adolescence, characterized by efforts to maintain positive interactions, with a tendency to select friends sharing similar inner characteristics and mutual commitments.
    • Factors like shyness or aggressiveness also play a role in the quality of these relationships.

Cliques and Crowds

  • Cliques:
    • Small, tightly knit groups of about 4 to 6 close friends known for deep intimacy and sharing, and potentially exhibiting within-group aggression.
    • Crowds:
    • Larger, more loosely associated groups formed by combining multiple cliques, often characterized by mixed-gender dynamics and social gatherings.

Reputation-Based Groups

  • Reputation-based groups contribute to the formation of identity prototypes, allowing individuals to define and reinforce their own identities.
  • Membership within such groups can shape long-lasting effects into adulthood, influencing post-graduation goals such as college attendance.

Romantic Relationships in Adolescence

  • Approximately one-third of adolescents engage in relationships at some point during each year.
  • Differences in experiences arise between heterosexual and sexually diverse teens, with each group encountering different relational dynamics and challenges, including anxiety around disclosure for bisexual teens.

Heterosexual Teen Relationships

  • Romantic relationships generally begin around the age of 15, providing social support and being influenced by cultural factors.
    • Quality of parent and peer relationships along with early peer associations significantly predict later romantic endeavors.

Sexually Diverse Teen Relationships

  • Bisexual teens face heightened anxiety and fear related to coming out, displaying a tendency to rely heavily on partners for support.
  • Same-sex relationships among LGBTQ+ youth are sometimes correlated with incidences of dating violence.
    • The teen years emerge as a critical period for sexual identity exploration, with most individuals recognizing their sexual orientation by age 15.
    • Challenges for gender-diverse teens include navigating hormone therapy, transphobia, and frequent victimization related to their identity.