“I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying.” Oscar Wilde

OK, so this revision post (these are very tedious now) is about adolescence. Very amusing, and I know that adolescents and children have come up a lot recently, and I don't like them any more than any other guy, but continue we must. For fuck sake this suck, it's just awful.

Adolescence

Changes during adolescence (pretty obvious):

• Physical changes (productive organs, then other sex characteristics)
• Cognitive definition (reasoning, abstract thoughts, & meta-cognition)
• Sociological definition (from sexual maturity to when society recognising them as adult)
• Chronological (period of maturity, starts around 11)

Adolescence is supposedly a heaven for teenage stressors (and risks) as well as surges in cognitive and physical growth. Just a couple more: independence including having your own lunch money or keys, being in relationships, testing drugs, creating and settling into your own identity, working, any sexual activity, as well as autonomy..... crental I know.

Approached to studying adolescence

• Biological (G. Stanley. Hall)
• Psychoanalytical/psychosocial (Freud, Erikson)
• Cognitive (Piaget, Selman)
• Social-cognitive learning (Bandura)
• Impact of culture (Havighurst, Mead)

Biological

Granville, Stanley, Hall lived from 1844 - 1924 "father of adolescent psychology". This crazy cat did some cool things for psychology, but I won't bore you with it all now, so continue reading.

Psychoanalytical theory

Sigmund Freud was the chief in this area. Loosely speaking the psychoanalytical approach identifies:

• Human behaviour to be determined by irrational drives,
• That these drives are mainly not conscious,
• And that attempts to consciously retrieve these drives are met with defence mechanisms (resistance) in several forms (e.g. repression to protect from feelings of anxiety, or low self-esteem)
• Besides the original building blocks of personality, your development is determined by events in early childhood (prob between 2-12yrs old then adolescence put the specifics in while you mess around with your identity)
• constant conflicts between conscious ideas of reality and repressed material can lead to neurological disturbances (e.g. depression, anxiety, neurotic traits etc)
• bringing unconscious material into the conscious mind can only be done using psychiatrists (you know those long one person seats you see in American films all the time, a trip to one of those. personally i think its compete crap, but the Americans like to believe in all that fairytale nonsense)

 psychoanalytical theories tend to strive to find solutions to someone's behaviour, mainly by trying to verbalise thoughts, fantasies, and dreams, even using free associations. These are then used as a sort of intervention by confronting the 'patient' with possible guilt or wishes being held unconsciously. A well known test you may have heard of is the Rorschach test, where by you tell the psychiatrist what you see in the ink blots.

Psychosocial theories merely revolve around the idea that psycholgical development interacts with the social environment.

Psychosocial stages of development

Erikson's stages of development (1968) consisted of 8 stages which every maturing human passes through by encountering and passes challenges. They are separated by age groups, of which 14 to 24 year olds are grouped to face the challenge of fidelity, where by their identity is in conflict with any role confusions they may have (the emo, goth, experimentation period).

The Fidelity (faithfulness to a cause, person or belief) stage's challenge incorporates the battles between your identity and role-confusion. Adolescents consider their roles into the adult world. Adolescents are able and supposed to experience mixed ideas and feelings about specific ways in which they will fit into society and may experiment with a variety of behaviors and activities (e.g. tinkering with cars, baby-sitting for neighbors, affiliating with certain political or religious groups). But in the end most adolescents achieve a sense of identity regarding who they are and where their lives are headed.

 

 As adolescents need to re-establish themselves (and their boundaries) in the newly experienced society, as the increase of responsibility and physical changes, their metacognition needs to adapt.

responsibilities are being asked of the teenagers before their identities have fully developed and as such creates the 'identity confusion'. Society as a whole generally recognises that adolescents need to adjust and lets them have this period for them for adapt. This state for adolescents is called Moratorium, where the person can gain their emotional identity and develop into an adult by experimenting with time and space.

Cognitive

Piaget (a silly Swiss man) theorized that children learn actively through sensations and movements to interact with (play time). He used socratic questioning to get the children to reflect and see their mistakes in their logic.

He came up with 4 stages:

1. Sensorimotor - birth - 2yrs old
2. Pre-operational - about the time they start to talk - 7yrs old
3. Concrete - happens between 7 - 11yrs old (when they begin to characterise things logically)
4. Formal operational stage - about 11yrs old or adolescence - adulthood (final form of cognition, no longer need concrete objects [tall thin mug vs. small fat mug], can make abstract, hypothetical and deductive reasoning, can consider more possibilities including things that aren't there]

Horizontal decalage - is the name that Piaget uses to describe a child's inability to solve problems at earlier stages as their understanding of 'things' does not progress simultaneously.

Social Cognitive Learning theory

The social cognitive learning theory was developed by Albert Bandura off the back of the social learning theory, where by people learn from observing others. However in this model people observe other people's actions and can change their way of thinking because of this.

Click here for a general overview of child development

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Next Post

Some research on adolescence

Something funn for your trouble

Are you an idiot? Check this site out. kept me busy for a minute or two
 

This BBC page has some interesting tests for you to take part in, including: 'The big personality test', 'Explore you memory', 'What sex is your brain' and more.

And now for something visually pleasing: