Adolescence: Psychosocial Development

1
Part V
Chapter Sixteen

• Adolescence Psychosocial Development

Identity Relationships Sexuality Sadness and Anger
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Identity

• A consistent definition of ones self as a unique
  individual, in terms of roles, attitudes,
  beliefs, and aspirations.

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Identity

• identity versus diffusion
• Eriksons terms for the fifth stage of
  development, in which the person tries to figure
  out Who am I? but is confused as to which of
  many possible roles to adopt.

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Identity, cont.

• identity achievement
• Eriksons term for the attainment of identity, or
  the point at which a person understands who he or
  she is as a unique individual, in accord with
  past experiences and future plans.

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Identity, cont.

• Not Yet Achievement
• identity diffusion is the opposite of identity
  achievement
• it is a situation in which an adolescent does not
  seem to know or care what his or her identity is.
• Whatever.

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Identity, cont.

• Not Yet Achievement
• Foreclosure
• Ericksons term for premature identity formation,
  which occurs when an adolescent adopts parents
  or societys roles and values wholesale, without
  questioning and analysis.
• short-circuit their search by not questioning
  traditional values

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Identity, cont.

• Not Yet Achievement, cont.
• moratorium
• A way for adolescents to postpone making identity
  achievement choices by finding an accepted way to
  avoid identity achievement.
• going to college is the most common example

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Identity, cont.

• Four Arenas of Identity Achievement highlighted
  by Erikson
• religious identity
• few teenagers achieve
• most religions expect young people to struggle
  with theological questions
• sexual or gender identity
• sex/sexual referring to biological male/female
  characteristics
• gender referring to cultural and social
  characteristics

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Identity, cont.

• Four Arenas of Identity Achievement
• political or ethnic identity
• political, identifying with a party
• ethnic, identifying with a person
• vocational identity
• few teenagers can find meaningful work
• most available jobs are different from in the
  past
• the required skills for many vocations take years
  to attain makes it premature to select at age 16

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Relationships

• Adults and teenagers
• Conflicts at home
• bickering repeated, petty arguments
• What do you see in the body position of these two
  that suggests a generational conflict?

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Relationships

• Closeness with the family
• Communication
• talk openly with one another
• Support
• rely on one another
• Connectedness
• emotionally close
• Control
• encourage or limit autonomy
• parental monitoring parent knowledge about
  childs whereabouts

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Relationships

• Ongoing influence
• Peer Support
• Cliques and Crowds
• Clique
• A group of adolescents made up of close friends
  who are loyal to one another while excluding
  outsiders
• Crowd
• A large group of adolescents who have something
  in common but who are not necessarily related

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Relationships

• Choosing friends
• peer pressure
• social pressure to conform to peer activities
• deviance training
• destructive peer support in which one person
  shows another how to rebel against authority or
  social norms
• peer selection
• ongoing, active process whereby adolescents
  select friends based on shared interests and
  values
• peer facilitation
• encouragement adolescents give one another to
  partake in activities or behaviors they would not
  otherwise do alone constructive or destructive

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Relationships

• Friends of Both Sexes
• parents sometime worry about boy-girl contact..
• Immigrant Youth
• millions of immigrants born abroad or those whose
  parents were born in another nation
• one-third in Frankfurt
• one-half in Amsterdam
• two-thirds in Los Angeles and New York

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Sexuality

• Before Committed Partnership
• groups of friends, exclusively one sex or the
  other
• a loose association of girls and boys, with
  public interactions within a crowd
• small mixed-sex groups of the advanced members of
  the crowd
• formation of couples, with private intimacies

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Sexuality

• Romances
• first appears in high school

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Sexuality

• Homosexual Youth
• complications slow down the formation of
  friendships and romantic bonds
• Learning About Sex
• parents and societies continue to be concerned
  about adolescent sexual relationships
• Peers
• sexual behavior is strongly influenced by
  information, and examples of other adolescents

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Sexuality, cont.

• Parents
• play a pivotal role in teenagers sexual decisions
• Sex Education in School
• U.S. began a massive experiment in 1998
• Sexual Behavior
• not all adolescents are having sex
• rates vary from nation to nation
• teen births overall have decreased dramatically
  in every nation
• the use of protection has increased
• the abortion rate is also down

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Sadness and Anger

• Comorbidity
• a situation in which two or more unreleated
  illnesses or disorders occur at the same time
• Depression
• Clinical depression
• Suicide
• Suicidal ideation
• Parasuicide
• Cluster suicides

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Sadness and Anger, cont.

• More destructiveness
• Breaking the law
• Incidence
• Prevalence

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Sadness and Anger, cont.

• Cause of delinquency
• Life-course-persistent offender
• Adolescence-limited offender