ADOLESCENTS’
COMPETENCIES
H236: Adolescent Development
The Plan…
• Reflecting on your beliefs about the purpose of
adolescence
• What should be true for an adolescent to “transition to
adulthood?”
• What are the competencies they bring to their
development?
• Uneveness of development
What is our modern purpose of
adolescence?
•
The modern purpose of adolescence is to form one's identity, ideally with a positive, experimental
approach. The variation in adolescence across cultures and times, however, makes it difficult to identify a
single set purpose for adolescence.
•
Trying-out or exploring the rules. Discovering your identity and finding a purpose.
•
- Not a disease – It’s a stage, a transition.
- Physiological transitions need structure and support.
- We need to shift our cultural perspective into a more balance and understanding.
- Purpose – to find out who you are, and start asking the biggest questions
•
To explore the social, biological, and personal identity realms of existence in a way that helps the
adolescent establish his or her own future character and path with greater levels of responsibility than in
previous stages of development.
•
Period of life where individuals explore and define the role they envision for themselves in their society.
•
Adolescence is a period of experimentation and self-discovery.
•
Prepare for adulthood: self-sufficiency, productive relationships with others, understanding your identity,
strong moral compass
•
It is a time of assuming or developing greater social independence and responsibility.
What is our modern purpose of
adolescence?
Legend:
Purpose of the stage
How to do it/process
What they need
•
The modern purpose of adolescence is to form one's identity, ideally with a positive, experimental
approach. The variation in adolescence across cultures and times, however, makes it difficult to identify a
single set purpose for adolescence.
•
Trying-out or exploring the rules. Discovering your identity and finding a purpose.
•
- Not a disease – It’s a stage, a transition.
- Physiological transitions need structure and support.
- We need to shift our cultural perspective into a more balance and understanding.
- Purpose – to find out who you are, and start asking the biggest questions
•
To explore the social, biological, and personal identity realms of existence in a way that helps the
adolescent establish his or her own future character and path with greater levels of responsibility than in
previous stages of development.
•
Period of life where individuals explore and define the role they envision for themselves in their society.
•
Adolescence is a period of experimentation and self-discovery.
•
Prepare for adulthood: self-sufficiency, productive relationships with others, understanding your identity,
strong moral compass
•
It is a time of assuming or developing greater social independence and responsibility.
What is our modern purpose of
adolescence?
Legend:
Purpose of the stage
How to do it/process
What they need
•
The modern purpose of adolescence is to form one's identity, ideally with a positive, experimental
approach. The variation in adolescence across cultures and times, however, makes it difficult to identify a
single set purpose for adolescence.
•
Trying-out or exploring the rules. Discovering your identity and finding a purpose.
•
- Not a disease – It’s a stage, a transition.
- Physiological transitions need structure and support.
- We need to shift our cultural perspective into a more balance and understanding.
- Purpose – to find out who you are, and start asking the biggest questions
•
To explore the social, biological, and personal identity realms of existence in a way that helps the
adolescent establish his or her own future character and path with greater levels of responsibility than in
previous stages of development.
•
Period of life where individuals explore and define the role they envision for themselves in their society.
•
Adolescence is a period of experimentation and self-discovery.
•
Prepare for adulthood: self-sufficiency, productive relationships with others, understanding your identity,
strong moral compass
•
It is a time of assuming or developing greater social independence and responsibility.
Is there anything else to accomplish?
How do you know when you have
reached adulthood?
“Do you feel that you’ve
reached adulthood?”
Characteristics of “emerging
Adulthood/extended adolescence
Identity explorations
Instability
Self-focus
Feeling in-between
Possibilities
Arnett, 2000; N=519
Adolescence’s End: Marking Adulthood
• Traditional markers
• Marriage, fulltime work, parenthood, financial independence
• Newer markers
70
responsibility
60
50
40
30
independent
decisions
consider others
financial
independence
75% would consider themselves
Adults without…
• Completing school
• Starting career
• Getting married (sig. rel.)
• Having children
20
10
0
“Adolescence has no precisely identifiable
end: it slowly shifts into adulthood as the
individual comes to terms with his (sic) new
state.” Brizio et al.
Competencies: Cognitive
• Mental Processing
• Speed
• Adolescents are faster than children at processing information
• Increase in processing speed from age 10 through the late teens
• Reaction Times
• Video games(?)
• Quick judgments
• Implicit beliefs/associations
• Automaticity
• Cognitive effort to process information
• Development of “gut” responses between emotion and decision-making
(desensitization)
• Allows for deep conceptual understanding necessary for developing
expertise.
• Not just abstract thinking, but reasoning about abstract ideas
• Understanding how to meet multiple goals with a single action
• Identify a wider range of choices/options
• Learning from their successes and failure & Anticipating consequences
• Envisioning and anticipating situations they have not experienced
Competencies: Social Cognition
• “Various psychological processes that enable individuals to
take advantage of being part of a social groups
• Requires…
• Social Perspective taking: Understanding the mental states of others
including their…
• Intentions and attributions
• Desires and beliefs
• Being able to predict and explain others’ actions and reason about
their actions
• Negotiate complex interpersonal relations
• Meta-cognition: being about to think about one’s own and others’
thinking (e.g., theory of mind)
• Complex role of emotion
Development is Uneven in Context
• Subjective feelings of maturity
• Maturity Gaps—discrepancy between social and biological age:
• Pseudo-Maturity—assumption of adult roles, without the development of
psychological maturity to go along with it.
•
•
•
•
•
Adultification
Mismatch across contexts
“proving” their adult status and independence
Lower connections to school and academic achievement
High subjective age, problem behavior, moderate self reliance; low work orientation,
undifferentiated identity
• Immature—felt and acting younger than age
• Low levels of problem behavior
• Low levels of psychosocial maturity
• Low across the all indicators
• Mature—felt slightly older than age, low levels of problem behavior high levels
of psychosocial maturity, good decision making
• High levels of identity, self reliance and work orientation
Uneven Cognitive Development
Less impulsive & Sensation Seeking
Logical Reasoning, resisting interference
% at each age to reach adult competency
Steinberg et al. 2009
When do teens make the best decisions?
When the decision is not emotionally charged (hot/cold
cognition)
When they have had practice making the decision
(exacerbated by imaginary audience & personal fable)
When those who they admire make similar decisions or
scaffold their decision (peer effects)
When an immediate “reward” is not offset by a
consequence well into the future
Applications.
• Politicalization of research on adolescent development.
• Given the unevenness of development, when and in what contexts
should “mature” behavior be expected?
• Policy makers want single recommendations, how do we
communicate nuance
• What should we know about research methodology?
• Who should be in our samples?
• Value of longitudinal versus cross sectional work
• Challenges of doing research, how do we build upon what we know
• Given our “age graded school system,” how can teachers
provide differential contexts to encourage development?