Life Span Development

Week 7, Chapter 9
Physical, Cognitive, and Identity Development
in Adolescence

Physical Development

Puberty
 Begins when the pituitary gland produces hormones that stimulate hormone production in
the gonads.
 Circulating hormones promote the maturing of both primary and secondary sexual
characteristics.
 Timing of puberty is affected by genes and environmental factors.
o Nutrition and various stressors.
 Hormones trigger and moderate developments in brain structure and function.
 decreases in gray matter volume (partly via pruning), especially in the prefrontal cortex.
 Increases in white matter due to myelination.
 Large changes in the production of neurotransmitters and the enzymes that metabolize
them.
 Imbalance in brain maturation
o Subcortical structures, or the “emotional brain” matures faster than the prefrontal
cortex or the “rational brain.”
o The circuitry that connects these structures may not mature fully until subcortical
and cortical developments are more aligned.
o May cause some characteristic teen behaviors.
 The stress response and the HPA axis mature
o Cortisol production increases, and the HPA axis becomes more responsive to
stressors.
o Severe, chronic, or unpredictable stress can have negative effects for teens.
Adolescent Growth Spurt
 Parallels puberty
 Includes large increases in height and weight.
 Different parts of the body grow at different times.
 Arms and legs before the torso.
 Gender differences in growth increase both internal and external sexual dimorphism.

Behavioral and Emotional Changes

Adolescent Sleep
 Affected by hormonal changes
 Causes delayed phase preference (later sleep onset and offset).
 Often inadequate due to delayed phase preference and early school start times, amongst
other things.
 Can have negative effects on the rapidly reorganizing brain.

The Adolescents’ Changes

 Effect mood and emotion.
 Teens show more mood disruptions than other age groups.
o More negative mood.
o More emotional reactivity.
o More difficulty suppressing responses to threats.
 Exaggerated emotional responding and other factors, put teens at risk for diagnoses of
serious mental disorders like first episodes of psychosis.

Adolescent Girls Mental Health

 Girls are more susceptible to depressed moods due to differences in stress and methods of
coping with stress.
 Girls’ stressors - The devaluing of the female role
  Worries about appearance and weight
 Fewer expectations of success.
 The double standard regarding sexuality.
 The use of a cooperative discourse that makes them less influential in mixed-sex groups.
 Earlier puberty - So girls are more likely to be making school transitions and coping with
the onset of puberty simultaneously.
 Unusually early pubertal onset and early sexual debut increases the risk of depression
further.
 Girls are more likely to deal with stress using a ruminative coping style.
 Increases the risk of depression.
 Boys are more likely to deal with stress using the distracting style.

Sexual Maturation
 Sexual exploration with the opposite sex and with the same sex, increases at puberty.
 Reasons for the increase are sexual maturation, familial, social, and cultural factors.
 Sexual orientation becomes manifest in adolescence.
 Approximately 89% of teens identify as heterosexual.
 Sexual fluidity is more common in adolescents than in other age groups.
 There is no evidence that social causes (e.g., parenting practices) influence sexual
orientation.
 Evidence exists for nonsocial causes - genetic factors and prenatal hormone levels.

Cognitive Development

Piaget’s Fourth Stage of Logical Thinking

 11- or 12-year-olds begin to be able to think logically about abstract
contents
 Discovering relationships among relationships.
 Formal thought is still somewhat difficult.
 Information processing skills continue to improve in adolescence. -
Executive functions.
 o Linked especially to maturation of the prefrontal cortex.
o Closely tied to improvements in reasoning ability.

Formal Operational Thinking

 When a formal operational thinker approaches a scientific problem they generate and
consider every possible solution, then tests each one.
 The pattern of results among all the tests determines the conclusion.
 Generating and evaluating possibilities is a hallmark of formal operational thought.
 Includes the ability to construct ideals, such as ideal political systems or ideal people.
 Young adolescents do not understand that the real always falls short of the ideal.
 The failure to understand the limits of ideas is a form of adolescent egocentrism
o It contributes to a critical attitude toward anything that is less than perfect,
including the self.
o Other aspects of adolescent egocentrism are derived from a distorting inward
focus.
 Partially a function of an improved capacity to think about one’s own
thinking.
 Self-focus may be necessary to form an adult identity.
 The imaginary audience and personal fable of adolescents are thought to
be results.

Identity Development

Erikson’s Notion of An Adolescent Identity Crisis

 Is a search for answers to questions.
o What do I want to make of myself?
o What do I have to work with?
 Identity attainment does not imply that no further change occurs.
 Identity is always in revision.
 Identity is also a product of the cultural contexts that shape
development.

Marcia’s Identity Status Categories

 Two processes, exploration, and
commitment, result in four
identity status categories.
o Diffusion - Adolescents
who lack both exploration
and commitment.
o Moratorium - Adolescents
who are exploring but
have made no
commitments.
o Foreclosure - Adolescents who lack exploration but have made commitments.
o Achievement - Adolescents who are exploring and have reached commitment.
  Each identity status is associated with certain personal and cognitive characteristics.

Assessment of Identity Status

 Involves a semi structured procedure in which status within several
domains is assessed.
o Marcia’s original Ego Identity Interview assessed status in
vocational choice, religious beliefs, and political ideology.
 Questionnaires are typically designed to determine the degree to which
adolescents are either exploring a domain or have already made commitments.
 Narrative methods ask participants to tell stories about their lives so that the content of
their identity formation process can be probed.
 Personal and behavioral characteristics are associated with identity statuses.
o Persons in moratorium are more anxious than those in other statuses.
 There is no fixed sequence of identity statuses, but there are some developmental trends.
 The number of achievements increases overtime, foreclosures decrease, and diffusions
decrease or remain the same. The number of moratoriums does not increase or decrease.

Differences in Identity Formation

 Some studies find gender differences in identity formation; some do not.
 When differences are found, women, as a group, are more likely to assign interpersonal,
communal aspects of themselves a higher priority.
 Ethnicity or race is not a salient feature of self-concept as children enter adolescence.
 For teens in marginalized groups, this aspect begins to take on greater importance.
 Studies indicate that ethnic/racial identity (ERI) development follows a course
comparable to that of other identity domains.
 Strong ERI tends to be a protective factor, supporting well-being even when
discrimination is experienced.
 Parent socialization practices often encourage strong ERI in minority youth.

References
Broderick, P. C., & Blewitt, P. (2019). The life span: Human development for helping
professionals. (5th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Allyn & Bacon.
Vocabulary
experience sampling method
-(Larson)
-participants wore beepers, at signal recorded thinking, feeling, and doing.
-more feelings of self-consciousness, embarrassment, less happiness, more extreme emotion.

Delayed Phase Preference

-shift in sleep patterns
-staying up and sleeping in
-associated with hormonal changes of pubery

rumination
-repeated focus on negative mood and cognition
-ineffective emotional regulation
-avoidance of emotional experience

distraction
-coping style, focusing on neutral or pleasant thoughts
-activities that engage and divert attention toward + experience
-attenuate depressive episodes

adrenarche
-point just before puberty
-increased adrenal activity
-showing of sexual attraction
seduction hypothesis
-Freud
-psychopathology from infantile molestation

personal fable
-distorted view of uniqueness
-feature of ego-centrism in adolescence

ideals
-imagined
-logically organized
-perfect systems that do not fit reality

diffusion
-Marcia
-1 of 4 identity development processes.
-individual is not actively involved in life choices, nor firm commitment.

moratorium
-Marcia
-1 of 4 identity development processes.
-active life choices
-no firm commitments.
foreclosure
-Marcia
-1 of 4 identity development processes.
-commitments with little exploration.
-incorporate values of others without reflection
-conferred identity

acheivement
-Marcia
-1 of 4 identity development processes.
-constructed identity by own efforts, after exploration.
-shape and transform earlier selves.

ego identity
-Erikson
-dimensions of self-knowledge
-foundation for behavior/affect/cognitive commitments to career, relationships, belief systems in
adulthood
-ego identity interview-Marcia/assess core domains of identity: vocation, religion, political
ideology, gender role attitudes, sexual expression. General to specific questions.

constructed identity
-identity not based on predetermined expectations.
-personal redefinition of childhood and adolescent goals/values
-can be drastically different.