Study Notes on Development: Adolescence and Adulthood
DEVELOPMENT: ADOLESCENCE AND ADULTHOOD
Modules 13-14
Authored by Jenna H. Beffel Tolman, Hope College 2024
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
By the end of this lesson, students should be able to answer the following questions:
• What are the major physical, cognitive, and social changes in adolescence?
• What is emerging adulthood?
• What are the major physical, cognitive, and social changes in adulthood?
ADOLESCENCE
Phases of Development
Prenatal: Before birth, a period of rapid physical development from conception to birth.
Newborn and Infancy: Birth - 1 year, characterized by foundational physical growth, sensory development, and attachment formation.
Childhood:
Early Childhood: 1 - 6 years, marked by significant language acquisition, imaginative play, and increasing independence.
Late Childhood: 6 years - Puberty, a time of developing social skills, academic learning, and concrete reasoning.
Adolescence: Puberty – Early 20s, a phase of intense physical, cognitive, and psychosocial change leading to adult identity.
Adulthood:
Early Adulthood: 20s – Early 40s, focused on career establishment, intimate relationships, and family formation.
Middle Adulthood: 40s – 60s, often involves career stability, raising children, and contributing to society.
Late Adulthood: 60s and up, a period of reflection, potential retirement, and adapting to physical and social changes.
Definition of Adolescence
Adolescence: The transitional period from childhood to adulthood, extending from the onset of puberty to full independence. This independence encompasses financial autonomy, residential separation from parents, and emotional maturity.
Physical Development
Puberty:
Defined as the period of sexual maturation, during which an individual becomes capable of reproduction. This process involves a surge in hormones (androgens and estrogens) leading to the development of primary sex characteristics (reproductive organs) and secondary sex characteristics (e.g., breasts and hips in females, facial hair and deepened voice in males, pubic and underarm hair in both sexes). The timing of puberty can vary significantly among individuals.
Brain Development:
Significant growth occurs, particularly in the frontal lobe and prefrontal cortex. The prefrontal cortex, responsible for executive functions such as decision-making, planning, judgment, and impulse control, is not fully developed until around age 25. This immaturity can contribute to adolescents' tendencies towards risk-taking behavior and emotional reactivity. Myelin sheathing, a fatty tissue that insulates axons, continues to grow, which facilitates faster and more efficient neural communication and improved cognitive abilities.
Social Development
During adolescence, social development shifts significantly, with peer relationships becoming increasingly influential compared to family ties. Adolescents explore their identities through social interactions and group affiliations, often leading to conformity pressures and the formation of distinct social crowds or cliques. Independence from parents increases, though family relationships remain crucial for support and guidance. Conflicts with parents may arise as adolescents assert autonomy.
Discussion Topic:
Students are prompted to engage in a think-pair-share activity regarding whether adolescents should be tried as adults in court, considering their still-developing prefrontal cortex and moral reasoning. This discussion often uses example cases, such as a news article discussing a group of Michigan teens accused in a fatal incident.
Cognitive Development
Erikson's Stages of Psychosocial Development
Erik Erikson proposed a comprehensive psychoanalytic theory that identifies eight stages of psychosocial development, each characterized by a unique developmental task or crisis that individuals must resolve. Successful resolution leads to the development of specific virtues.
Table 13.2 outlines task descriptions and issues at various ages:
Infancy (to 1 year): Trust vs. mistrust
If needs are dependably met, infants develop a sense of basic trust.
Toddlerhood (1 to 3 years): Autonomy vs. shame and doubt
Toddlers learn to exercise their will & do things for themselves or doubt their abilities.
Preschool (3 to 6 years): Initiative vs. guilt
Preschoolers learn to initiate tasks and carry out plans or feel guilty about efforts at independence.
Elementary school (6 years to puberty): Competence vs. inferiority
Children learn the pleasure of applying themselves to tasks or feel inferior.
Adolescence (teen years into 20s): Identity vs. role confusion
Teenagers work at refining their sense of self by testing and integrating various roles to form a single identity or risk confusion about who they are. This involves exploring values, beliefs, and career paths.
Young adulthood (20s to early 40s): Intimacy vs. isolation
Young adults learn to form close interpersonal relationships and gain the capacity for intimate love versus feeling socially isolated.
Middle adulthood (40s to 60s): Generativity vs. stagnation
Middle-aged adults discover a sense of contributing to the world through family and work or risk feeling a lack of purpose.
Late adulthood (late 60s and up): Integrity vs. despair
Older adults reflect on their lives and may feel satisfaction or failure, leading to a sense of integrity or despair.
Piaget's Stages of Cognitive Development
Jean Piaget's theory describes how children construct a mental model of the world and posits four major stages of cognitive development, each characterized by distinct ways of thinking and understanding.
Table 12.1 outlines different stages and milestones:
Sensorimotor Stage (Birth to nearly 2 years):
Experiencing the world through senses and actions (looking, hearing, touching, mouthing, grasping). Infants develop schemes for relating objects and events.
Key milestones include object permanence (awareness that things continue to exist even when not perceived) and stranger anxiety (distress when confronted with unfamiliar people).
Preoperational Stage (About 2 to 6 or 7 years):
Representing things with words and images; using intuitive rather than logical reasoning. Children in this stage are often egocentric, meaning they have difficulty perceiving things from another's point of view.
Key milestones include pretend play (using objects to symbolize other things) and egocentrism.
Concrete Operational Stage (About 7 to 11 years):
Thinking logically about concrete events; grasping concrete analogies and performing arithmetic operations. Children gain the mental operations that enable them to think logically about tangible events.
Key milestones include conservation (the principle that properties such as mass, volume, and number remain the same despite changes in the forms of objects) and mathematical transformations.
Formal Operational Stage (About 12 through adulthood):
Reasoning abstractly. Adolescents and adults gain the ability to think logically about abstract concepts, form hypotheses, and plan systematic approaches to problem-solving.
Key milestones include abstract logic and potential for mature moral reasoning.
Kohlberg's Theory of Moral Development
Lawrence Kohlberg extended Piaget's work, proposing that moral development progresses through three broad levels, each with two stages. This theory focuses on how individuals reason about moral dilemmas.
Three Levels of Moral Reasoning:
Preconventional Reasoning:
Individual’s moral reasoning is primarily controlled by external rewards and punishments. Moral decisions are based on self-interest.
Conventional Reasoning:
Individual abides by certain standards, but these are standards set by others, such as parents, laws, or societal norms. Moral decisions are driven by a desire to gain social approval or maintain the social order.
Postconventional Reasoning:
Individual recognizes alternative moral courses, explores options, and decides on a personal moral code. Moral decisions reflect belief in basic rights and self-defined ethical principles, sometimes even challenging conventional laws.
Kohlberg posits that these levels occur in sequence and are age-related, though not everyone reaches the postconventional level.
Heinz Dilemma
Case Study:
In Europe, a woman was near death from cancer. A druggist had discovered a drug potentially able to save her but charged 10 times the cost to make it (200 for ingredients, selling for 2000). Her husband, Heinz, was unable to gather enough money, having only collected 1000, and broke into the druggist’s store to steal the drug.
Ethical question posed: Should Heinz have stolen the drug? Why or why not?
Conclusion: The way a person reasons about the dilemma, rather than the content of their response, determines their level of moral maturity according to Kohlberg's theory. For example, a preconventional response might focus on avoiding punishment for stealing, a conventional response on upholding the law, and a postconventional response on the sanctity of life over property rights.
ADULTHOOD
Phases of Development
Prenatal: Before birth, a period of rapid physical development from conception to birth.
Newborn and Infancy: Birth - 1 year, characterized by foundational physical growth, sensory development, and attachment formation.
Childhood:
Early Childhood: 1 - 6 years, marked by significant language acquisition, imaginative play, and increasing independence.
Late Childhood: 6 years - Puberty, a time of developing social skills, academic learning, and concrete reasoning.
Adolescence: Puberty – Early 20s, a phase of intense physical, cognitive, and psychosocial change leading to adult identity.
Adulthood:
Early Adulthood: 20s – Early 40s, focused on career establishment, intimate relationships, and family formation.
Middle Adulthood: 40s – 60s, often involves career stability, raising children, and contributing to society.
Late Adulthood: 60s and up, a period of reflection, potential retirement, and adapting to physical and social changes.
Emerging Adulthood
Emerging Adulthood:
A transitional period ranging from about age 18 to the mid-twenties, where individuals are no longer adolescents but have not yet fully achieved independence. This phase is characterized by five key features: identity exploration (especially in love and work), instability (in residence, relationships, and careers), being self-focused (less collective responsibility than in adulthood), feeling in-between (neither adolescent nor full adult), and a sense of possibilities (optimism about the future).
Physical Development
Middle Adulthood:
Physical decline gradually accelerates:
A gradual decline in fertility occurs; for women, this culminates in menopause (the natural cessation of menstruation, typically occurring around age 50), and men experience a more gradual decline in sperm count and testosterone levels.
Visible aging signs such as graying hair, thinning hair, and wrinkles increase, alongside decreased visual acuity (especially for near vision, presbyopia) and hearing sensitivity (especially for high-pitched sounds).
Late Adulthood:
Changes include:
Diminished muscle strength, stamina, and reaction time due to cellular and organ system decline.
A weakened immune system, making older adults more susceptible to illness.
Significant declines in smell, taste, vision (cataracts, glaucoma), and hearing, which can impact quality of life and safety.
Cognitive Development
Changes in memory reflect the type of memory in question, with some aspects improving and others declining.
Crystallized Intelligence: The accumulation of information and verbal skills, which continues to increase during middle adulthood. This includes vocabulary, general knowledge, and learned facts. It tends to hold steady or even improve with age.
Fluid Intelligence: The ability to reason abstractly, solve novel problems, and think quickly, which may begin to decline in middle adulthood. This involves processing speed, working memory, and the capacity to think flexibly.
Social Development
Adulthood is marked by significant social transitions and evolving relationships, often linked to Erikson's psychosocial stages.
Table 13.2 revisits Erikson's Stages of Psychosocial Development:
Young Adulthood (Intimacy vs. Isolation): The primary task is forming close, enduring relationships. Success leads to strong social bonds and love; failure can result in isolation.
Middle Adulthood (Generativity vs. Stagnation): Adults focus on contributing to the next generation, often through parenting, mentorship, or meaningful work. A lack of generativity can lead to feelings of stagnation or lack of purpose.
Late Adulthood (Integrity vs. Despair): Older adults reflect on their lives. A sense of satisfaction and fulfillment leads to integrity; regret or unfulfilled desires can lead to despair.
Major social changes in adulthood include establishing romantic relationships (marriage or partnerships), starting and raising families, navigating career development, and adapting to changes in friend groups and community involvement. Parenthood significantly alters social roles, and later life can involve grandparenthood and adjusting to the loss of loved ones.
Death and Dying
Five Stages of Grief (Kubler-Ross, 1969):
Elisabeth KĂĽbler-Ross identified five common emotional stages experienced by individuals facing terminal illness or significant loss. These stages are not necessarily linear and individuals may move back and forth between them.
Denial and Isolation:
The individual denies that death or loss is imminent, often as a psychological defense mechanism against overwhelming reality.
Anger:
A person’s denial often gives way to anger, frustration, resentment, rage, and envy, directed at others, themselves, or even fate.
Bargaining:
An individual develops hope that death can be postponed or avoided, often by attempting to negotiate with a higher power or medical professionals.
Depression:
Acceptance of the certainty of death or loss can lead to a period of profound sadness, withdrawal, and preparatory grief as the individual comes to terms with the impending loss.
Acceptance:
The individual reaches a stage of peace and resignation regarding their fate. This stage often involves a decrease in emotional intensity and a desire for solitude and quiet reflection.
Important Note
Grief is not a linear process. The expected stages of grief may not follow a sequential pattern, as seen in varied experiences. Individuals may revisit stages, skip stages, or experience them in a different order. For example, Acceptance may occur before Depression in some cases, highlighting the personal and fluid nature of grief.
Discussion Activity
Think-Pair-Share Inquiry:
Prompts regarding personal reflections on life accomplishments, desired social environments at the end of life, and personal legacy aspirations, encouraging students to consider their own development across the lifespan.
REMINDERS
Keep up with learning curves for continued understanding!
Worksheet #2 due Thursday, 10/10
SONA research participation: 2.5 credits due Wednesday, 10/16!
Exam #2: Thursday, 10/24