Adolescent Development

Introduction, Issues, and Theories

Balamand, PSYC214
Pascale Kolakez
DEFINITION OF
ADOLESCENCE
Santrock’s Definition and its Problems
• The developmental period of transition between childhood and
adulthood that involves biological, cognitive and socio-
emotional changes. (Santrock, p. 24).
• Early adolescence: Middle or junior high school.
• The period encompassing puberty
• Late adolescence: Latter half of the second decade of life.
• Career interests, dating, and identity exploration are pronounced.
 Santrock’s Definition and its Problems

• But Santock’s definition of adolescence has problems.

• Implies Universality: Contrary to the definition, adolescence may
not be a completely universal phenomenon.
• Adolescence may not exist in some places, where one goes from
childhood to adulthood by passing through a rite of passage or a
special ceremony.
• Based on Ages: Age is not helpful in explaining development.
Maturation is not simply age-based.
• Vague: Defines adolescence by default as not being either
childhood or adulthood.
Amsel’s Definition and its Strengths
• The period of time that there is a process of accommodation to
puberty and the adoption the adult responsibilities and social
roles as defined by the culture.
• Strengths
• Interactionist: Focus on the fact that there is an interaction
between biological (Universal)and social, cultural, and historical
(non-Universal) factors associated with adolescence.
• The physical changes adolescents faced during puberty interact with
the social, cultural, and historical context in which they find
themselves.
 Amsel’s Definition and its Strengths

• Strengths continue

• Psychological Processes: Focus on the relations between changes in a

range of psychological processes.
• There are not only biological but also cognitive(thinking) and social (self
and social relations) changes which are interrelated.
• Social Context: Focus on social, cultural, and historical factors
associated with adolescence.
• The definition is sensitive to socio-historical context.
• Imagine what it might be an adolescent today vs. 100-years ago in
Utah. Which time would it be easier?
Culture and
Adolescence
 Issue

• Adolescence might not really exist in some cultures.

• Adolescence in our culture began about 100 years ago, with the development
of the High School and the requirement that kids get an education.
• Culturally, the transition from childhood to adulthood may be a matter of
passing through a “rite of passage”.
• The rite is a cultural designation of adulthood:
• Ancient Jewish religious culture: Bar Mitzvah
• In African tribal communities: Go from being a child to be an adult in a ceremony.
• Going on a Mission: Come back and get married.
Mead and the Transitions to Adulthood
• In some cultures, the transition to adulthood may be quite easy.
• Margaret Mead discussed this in her account of the Samoan culture, in
the 1928 book, The coming of age in Samoa
• Mead describes how adolescents had an easy time making the transition
from childhood to adulthood because of cultural traditions, practices, and
attitudes.
• There was a casualness about matters sexual that made accommodating to
puberty easy and a clear.
• There was no confusion about the appropriate social roles and responsibilities
they were to adopt as adults, so no confusion about their identity.
Contemporary Transitions to Adulthood
• In our culture, the transition may be more difficult.
• There is much confusion and contradictory info about age of
consent.
• 14 to choose the parent to live with after a divorce, 16 to drive a car,
18 to vote and be drafted, and 21 to drink
• Adolescent are to remain sexually naive but also expected to sow
their wild oats.
• Teens are not supposed to drink or smoke but smoking and
drinking advertising targets them.
Storm and Stress in
Adolescence
 Introduction

• Typically, the period during puberty, as the adolescents adopt adult

social roles and responsibilities, is considered a time of storm and
stress.
• According to G. Stanley Hall, adolescents…
• Display mood alterations.
• Distressing and unpredictable thoughts.
• High anxiety and exaggerated defense mechanisms
• Impulsive, inconsistent, or inappropriate behavior.
• Inner disturbance.
• Storm and Stress is related to hormonal changes associated with
puberty and offers a good account of the uniqueness of adolescence.
 Status

• Is Storm and Stress true of adolescents in our culture?

• Research work suggests it may not be, at least as originally specified.
• Offer et al., (1988) shows that storm and stress may account for only a
minority of teens’ experience –
• 20% (anxiety depression, distrust, extreme mood swings, lack of self-
confidence)
• 45% seemed to have little trouble and coped well with internal and external
stimuli and dealt well with parents.
• 35% were generally ok but had difficulty dealing with unexpected stress.
• There is some evidence of an increased intensity of emotions among
young adolescents, but certainly not the storm and stress described
above.
 Issues of
Adolescent
Development
 Issues of Adolescent Development

• The nature–nurture controversy addresses whether endogenous

(internal) or exogenous (external) factors are the cause of development.
• Nature means inborn biological givens—the hereditary information we receive
from our parents at the moment of conception and the maturation process
that signals the body to grow and affects all our characteristics and skills.
• Nurture means the complex forces of the physical and social world that
influence our biological makeup and psychological experiences before and
after birth.

• Typically, either of these extremes is considered too limited an

explanation. Development usually involves
an interaction between nature and nurture.
Issues of Adolescent Development
• Continuous development is a
process that consists of gradually
adding one more of the same types
of skills that were there to begin
with.

• Discontinuous development is a
process in which new ways of
understanding and responding to
the world emerge at particular
periods

• Theories that accept the

discontinuous perspective regard
development as taking place
in stages — qualitative changes in
thinking, feeling, and behaving that
characterize particular time periods
of development.
Domains of Adolescent Development
• Early vs. later experience: The impact of the timing of experiences
on development
• The role of early experience: Holds that early experiences play a
decisive role in development.
• If it is assumed that we are shaped by our past, then the impact of
adolescence is minimized.
• How we are now is associated with past experiences.(e.g., attachment, and
temperament).
• The role of later experience: Holds that we are not shaped exclusively
by our past.
• New experience can influence our development, so that adolescence is
more important a time (e.g., change in temperament with experience and
role of peers).
 Issues of Adolescent Development

• Biological: Involve physical changes in an individual’s body.

• Attention given to the biological and evolutionary uniqueness of
adolescence.

• Cognitive: Involves changes in an individual’s ways of thinking

and levels of intelligence
• The ways adolescents think may make them unique.

• Socio-emotional: Involves changes in an individual’s relation to

himself or herself and to other people.
 Contexts of Adolescent Development

• The impact and importance of different kinds of contexts or settings

on adolescent development.
• Two kinds of contexts which affect development
• Face-to-face contexts: Factors or forces with affect development
through direct interpersonal interaction: Home school, peers.
• Are peers more influential than home in adolescence?
• Indirect contexts: Factors or forces which affect development
indirectly, including culture, economic, political, or historical factors or
forces.
• Economic or political Decisions about schooling or healthcare may affect
adolescent development.
THEORIES
 Psychoanalytic Theory
• Assumes that development is the movement through a series of
stages in which involve negotiating conflicts between biological
drives and social expectations.
• Psychological adjustment determined by how conflicts are resolve the
conflicts.

• Assumptions
• Nature and Nurture. Innate impulses meeting social reality. There is an
emphasis on the role early experience.
• Discontinuous: Stages.
• Early experience emphasized much more strongly than later
experiences.
 Psychoanalytic Theory

• Freud’s theory has two components

• Structure of Personality
• The id is the innate and unconscious biological needs and instincts that
require immediate gratification.
• The ego develops in infancy and is the conscious, rational part of
personality.
• The superego develops in early childhood and includes the values of society
which is the basis of conscience.
• Psycho-sexual Development
• Freud held that personality structures develop as sexual impulses shift
focus onto different bodily regions.
• To advance to a subsequent stage, a child must receive the correct amount
of gratification, otherwise there is fixation in psycho-sexual development.
 Psychoanalytic Theory

• Erikson, a student of Freud proposed two significant changes to

Freud’s theory
• Assumed that the ego itself was innate, rather than being acquired in
childhood.
• Like others, Erikson was part of the movement in psychoanalytic theory
called Ego Psychology which examined the importance of the ego in
normal and pathological functioning.
• Accounted for the psycho-social, and not psycho-sexual stages.
• Erikson outlined crisis between ego functioning and social demands at each
stage of development.
• He extended the analysis to adolescence (Identity Crisis) and beyond.
 Social Development:
Erik Erikson (1902-1994)
 Erik Erikson’s model of lifelong psychosocial
development sees adolescence as a struggle
to form an identity, a sense of self, out of
the social roles adolescents are asked to
play.
 Adolescents may try out different “selves”
with peers, with parents, and with teachers.
 For Erikson, the challenge in adolescence
was to test and integrate the roles in order
to prevent role confusion (which of those
selves, or what combination, is really me?).
 Some teens solve this problem simply by
adopting one role, defined by parents or
peers.
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Erik Erikson: Stages of Psychosocial Development

25
 Behavioral

• In the Behavioral approach, attention is given to observable

events -- stimuli and responses -- as the only appropriate focus
of study. The development of behavior as determined by the
stimuli in the environment causing changes in the behavioral
response.
• Assumptions
• Nurture: Nothing but the environment is important
• Continuous: No stages
• Later experiences are as important as earlier ones.
 Behavioral

• Classical Conditioning (Ivan Pavlov)

• Behavioral reactions controlled by neutral stimuli which can elicit it
(e.g., lightening elicits fear by being associated with thunder)

• Operant Conditioning (B.F. Skinner)

• Environmental reinforcements and punishments control behavior (the
behavior of an adolescent controlled by reinforcement and punishment
from peers).

• Social Learning Theory (Albert Bandura)

• Emphasizes the role of modeling (imitation or observational learning)
as a basis for development.
 Behavioral

• Social Cognitive Theory (Bandura)

• Extending social learning theory, Bandura argued that behavior is
the result of a complex interaction between the Person (P), the
Environment (E), and Behavior (B).
• This interaction is called Reciprocal Determinism
Cognitive-Developmental Theories
• Cognitive-developmental theories account for children’s and
adolescents’ acquisition of increasingly more powerful mental
structures to actively manipulate, explore, and understand the
environment.
• Assumptions
• Nature and Nurture. Development is a product of a maturing brain and
the exercising of innate curiosity in a rich environment.
• Piaget: Discontinuous; IP: Continuous.
• Although early experience may slow down the rate development, each
new stage acquisitions requires new and specific kinds of
experiences.
Jean Piaget’s Stages of Cognitive Development

30
 Cognitive-Developmental Theories

• Information processing uses a digital computer metaphor to explain

cognitive processes.
• The human mind is viewed as a symbol-manipulating system through
which information flows and is monitored, manipulated, evaluated,
storied, and recalled,
• IP Theory denies the importance of general cognitive stages in the
development of thinking and focuses instead on the role memory and
reasoning.
• Adolescents have greater capacity than children to remember and
make inferences about information.
• However, they still may not do as well as adults.
 Contextual Theories
• Contextual theories emphasize the importance of various social contexts
in influencing the behavior and development of the individual.
• The context in Contextual Theory exerts more of asocial, symbolic, and
indirect influence on behavior and development than does the environment in
Behaviorism, which exerts more of a physical, material, and direct influence.

• Assumptions
• Emphasis on nature and nurture as the biologically growing child interacts
with the social world.
• Interactions gradually promote development.
• Later experiences as important as earlier ones.
 Contextual Theories

• Lev Vigotsky’s socio-cultural theory is a contextual theory

which focuses on how culture is transmitted from one
generation to the next.
• Development is viewed as a social process mediated by parental
and peer support, as dictated by cultural values and traditions.
• Children and adolescents are socialized into the cultural appropriate
manner of thinking, feeling, and acting
• Process of actively internalizing the tools of the culture such as
language and other symbolic notations systems(mathematical and
writing systems) learned socially at home or school.
 Contextual Theories

• Urie Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems theory views development

contextually.
• Individuals develop within a complex system of multiple embedded
environmental levels
• The microsystem is the innermost level of the environment and refers to activities
and interaction patterns in the child’s immediate environment.
• The mesosystem is composed of connections among microsystems that foster
children’s development.
• The exosystem contains contexts that do not include children but affect their
experiences in microsystems.
• The macrosystem is the outermost layer and includes a culture’s laws, values,
customs, and resources.
• The model is embedded in the chronosystem which is the temporal dimension.
 Ethological/Evolutionary
• Ethological/Evolutionary theory involves studying the evolutionary history
of behavior.
• The Ethological/Evolutionary approach holds that there is an evolutionary
basis to development.
• Ethology is a branch of Biology which examines the environment niche into
which species’ behaviour evolved

• Assumptions
• Equal emphasis between nature and nurture as the fit between genes and
environments is central.
• Continuous adaptations punctuated by qualitative changes during “Sensitive
periods”.
• Central and important role played by early experience.
 Ethological/Evolutionary

• Ethologists seek a full understanding of the organism-

environment system.
• Observation of imprinting (Lorenz) led to a major concept that
has been widely applied in child development: the critical or
sensitive period.
• A sensitive period in development is an optimal time in a child’s
life for specific capabilities to emerge and in which the individual is
especially responsive to environmental influences.
• Language
• Attachment