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 vs. Diffusion

• Eriksons terms for the fifth stage of
  development
• the person tries to figure out Who am I?
• confused as to which of many possible roles to
  adopt.

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Identity Achievement

• Eriksons term for the attainment of identity
• 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 Foreclosure

• Ericksons term for premature identity formation
• occurs when an adolescent adopts parents or
  societys roles and values wholesale, without
  questioning and analysis.

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Identity Moratorium

• A way for adolescents to postpone making identity
  achievement choices
• finding an accepted way to avoid identity
  achievement.
• going to college is the most common example

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Identity, cont.

• 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.

• 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

13
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