Invitation to the Life Span

Chapter 10 – Adolescence:
Psychosocial Development
 Identity
Identity versus Role Confusion:
– Erikson’s term 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.
Identity:
– A consistent definition of one’s self as a unique individual,
in terms of roles, attitudes, beliefs, and aspirations.
Identity achievement:
– Erikson’s 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.
 Not Yet Achieved
Role confusion (identity diffusion):
– A situation in which an adolescent does not seem to know
or care what his or her identity is.
Foreclosure:
– Erikson’s term for premature identity formation, which
occurs when an adolescent adopts parents’ or society’s
roles and values wholesale, without questioning or
analysis.
Moratorium:
– An adolescent’s choice of a socially acceptable way to
postpone making identity-achievement decisions. Going to
college is a common example.
 Four Areas of Identity
Achievement
1. Religious Identity
2. Gender Identity
– Gender identity: A person’s acceptance of the roles
and behaviors that society associates with the
biological categories of male and female.
– Sexual orientation: A term that refers to whether a
person is sexually and romantically attracted to others
of the same sex, the opposite sex, or both sexes.
3. Political/Ethnic Identity
 Four Areas of Identity
Achievement
4. Vocational identity: Rarely achieved until age 25 for
at least four reasons:
a. Few teenagers can find meaningful work.
b. It takes years to acquire the skills needed for many
careers (premature to select a vocation at age 16).
c. Most jobs are unlike those of a generation ago, so it
is unwise for youth to foreclose on a vocation.
d. Most new jobs are in the service or knowledge
sectors of the economy. To be employable,
adolescents spend years mastering literacy, logic,
technology and human relations.
 Relationships with Elders and
Peers
THE OLDER GENERATION
Conflicts with Parents
– Parent–adolescent conflict typically peaks in early
adolescence and is more a sign of attachment than of
distance
Bickering
– Petty, peevish arguing, usually repeated and ongoing.
Neglect
– Although teenagers may act as if they no longer need
their parents, neglect can be very destructive.
 Relationships with Elders and
Peers
Closeness within the family
– Communication: Do parents and teens talk
openly with one another?
– Support: Do they rely on one another?
– Connectedness: How emotionally close are
they?
– Control: Do parents encourage or limit
adolescent autonomy?
 Relationships with Elders and
Peers
Emotional Dependency
– Adolescents are more dependent on their
parents if they are female and/or from a
minority ethnic group.
– This can be either repressive or healthy,
depending on the culture and the specific
circumstances.
 Relationships with Elders and
Peers
Do You Know Where Your Teenager Is?
Parental monitoring: Parents’ ongoing awareness
of what their children are doing, where, and with
whom.
– Positive consequences when part of a warm, supportive
relationship
– Negative when overly restrictive and controlling
– Worst: Psychological control - a disciplinary technique in
which parents make a child feel guilty and impose
gratefulness by threatening to withdraw love and
support
 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 larger group of adolescents who have
something in common but who are not
necessarily friends.
 Peer Support
• CHOOSING FRIENDS
Peer pressure
– Encouragement to conform to one’s friends or
contemporaries in behavior, dress, and attitude; usually
considered a negative force, as when adolescent peers
encourage one another to defy adult authority.
Selection
– Teenagers select friends whose values and interests
they share, abandoning friends who follow other paths.
 Peer Support
Facilitation
– Peers facilitate both destructive and constructive
behaviors in one another.
– Makes it easier to do both the wrong thing (“Let’s all skip
school”) and the right thing (“Let’s study together”).
– Helps individuals do things that they would be unlikely to
do on their own.
Deviancy training
– Destructive peer support in which one person shows
another how to rebel against authority or social norms.
 Sexuality
• FROM ASEXUAL TO ACTIVE
Sequence of male–female relationships during
childhood and adolescence:
– 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
 Romance: Straight and Gay
Straight
– First romances appear in high school and
rarely last more than a year.
– Girls claim a steady partner more often than
boys do.
– Breakups and unreciprocated crushes are
common.
– Adolescents are crushed by rejection and
sometimes contemplate revenge or suicide.
 Romance: Straight and Gay
Gay
– Many do not acknowledge their sexual orientation.
– National and peer cultures often make the homosexual
young person feel ashamed.
– Many gay youth date members of the other sex to hide
their true orientation.
– Past cohorts of gay youth had higher rates of clinical
depression, drug abuse, and suicide than did their
heterosexual peers.
– True number of homosexual, heterosexual, bisexual,
or asexual youth is unknown.
 Sex Education
Learning from peers:
– Adolescent sexual behavior is strongly influenced by
peers.
– Specifics of peer education depend on the group: All
members of a clique may be virgins, or all may be sexually
active.
– “Virginity pledge” in church-based crowds. If a group
considers itself a select minority, then virginity.
– Only about half of U.S. adolescent couples discuss issues
such as pregnancy and STIs and many are unable to
come to a shared conclusion based on accurate
information.
 Sex Education
Learning from parents
– Parents often underestimate their adolescent’s need
for information.
– Many parents know little about their adolescents’
sexual activity and wait to talk about sex until their
child is already in a romantic relationship.
– Gender and age are the most significant correlates of
parent–child conversations.
• Parents are more likely to talk about sex to daughters than to
sons and to older adolescents (over 15) than to younger
ones.
 Sex Education
– Parents tend to underestimate adolescents’
capacity to engage in responsible sex.
• Proper condom use is higher among
adolescents than among adults.
– Parental example may be more important
than conversation.
 Sex Education
Learning in school
Abstinence-Only Programs:
– 1998: U.S. government decided to spend about $1
billion over 10 years to promote abstinence-only sex
education in public schools.
– Goal: To prevent teen pregnancy and STIs by waiting
until marriage before becoming sexually active.
– No information about other methods of avoiding
pregnancy and infection was provided.
– Abstinence-only curriculum had little effect
 Sex Education
Starting Early
The most effective programs:
1. begin before high school
2. include assignments that require parent–child
communication
3. focus on behavior (not just on conveying information)
4. provide medical referrals on request
5. last for years

Important: Some school programs make a difference!

 Sexual Behavior
Selected examples
– In 2007, more than half of all U.S. teenagers had had
sexual intercourse by age 16.
– The rate of teenage pregnancy in the United States
has declined dramatically since 1960.
• Higher than in any other developed nation because
of American teenagers use less contraception.
– 86% of new teenage mothers are unmarried
– About 20% of teenage couples use the pill and
condoms, to prevent both pregnancy and infection.
Sexual Behavior
 Sadness and Anger
Depression
– Self-esteem for boys and girls dips at puberty
– Signs of depression are common
– 2007 Youth Risk Behavior Survey of ninth- to twelfth-
graders:
• 36% of girls and 21% of boys experienced
depressed symptoms within the past year
Clinical depression
– Feelings of hopelessness, lethargy, and
worthlessness that last two weeks or more
 Sadness and Anger
Gender Differences
– 20% of female and 10% of male teenagers
experience clinical depression.
– Cause for the gender disparity may be
biological, psychological, or social.
Cognitive explanation
– Rumination: Repeatedly thinking and talking
about past experiences; can contribute to
depression and is more common in girls.
 Suicide
• Suicidal ideation:
– Thinking about suicide, usually with some
serious emotional and intellectual or cognitive
overtones.
– Adolescent suicidal ideation is common,
completed suicides are not.
– Adolescents are less likely to kill themselves
than adults are.
 Suicide
• Misconceptions about adolescent suicide
rates
1. The suicide rate for adolescents, low as it is, is
higher than it was in the early 1960.
2. Statistics on “youth” often include emerging adults,
whose suicide rates are higher than those of
adolescents.
3. Adolescent suicides capture media attention.
4. Suicide attempts are relatively common in
adolescence.
Suicide
 Suicide
• Cluster suicides
– Several suicides committed by members of a
group within a brief period of time.
• Parasuicide
– Any potentially lethal action against the self
that does not result in death.
– Parasuicide is common, completed suicide is
not.
 Suicide
• Completed suicide:
Four risk increase risk:
1. Availability of guns
2. Use of alcohol and other drugs
3. Lack of parental supervision
4. A culture that condones suicide
 Suicide
• Gender Differences in Suicide
– Suicide rate among male teenagers in the U.S. is four
times higher than the rate for female teenagers.
• Reasons for this difference
– Availability of lethal means
– Male culture that shames those who attempt suicide but
fail
– Methods: Males tend to shoot themselves; females
swallow pills or hang themselves
– Girls tend to let their friends and families know that they
are depressed, but boys do not.
 Suicide
• Drugs and depression
– Some adolescents self-medicate with drugs and
alcohol.
– Decreased rates of adolescent suicide in the United
States because of antidepressants.
– Some antidepressants (e.g. Prozac) may increase
suicidal ideation.
– Untreated depression may be worse than potentially
hazardous drug treatments.
 Anger and Aggression
• Increased anger during puberty is normal but most adolescents
express their anger in acceptable ways.
• Steady aggression throughout childhood and adolescence (7%)
is warning sign.
Juvenile delinquent
– A person under the age of 18 who breaks the law
Life-course-persistent offender
– A person whose criminal activity typically begins in early
adolescence and continues throughout life; a career criminal
Adolescence-limited offender
– A person whose criminal activity stops by age 21
 Drug Use and Abuse
• VARIATIONS AMONG ADOLESCENTS
Age Differences
– Drug use becomes widespread from age 10 to 25 and
then decreases
– Drug use before age 18 is the best predictor of later drug
use
National Differences
– Nations have markedly different rates of adolescent drug
use, even nations with common boundaries.
– These variations are partly due to differing laws the world
over.
 Drug Use and Abuse
• Cohort Differences
– Drug use among adolescents has decreased in the
U.S. since 1976.
– Adolescent culture may have a greater effect on drug-
taking behavior than laws do.
– Most adolescents in the U.S. have experimented with
drug use and say that they could find illegal drugs if
they tried.
– Most U.S. adolescents are not regular drug users and
about 20% never use any drugs.
– Rates vary from state to state.
Drug Use and Abuse
 Drug Use and Abuse
• Gender Differences in Drug Use
– Adolescent boys generally use more drugs
and use them more often.
– Gender differences are reinforced by social
constructions about proper male and female
behavior (e.g., “If I don’t smoke, I’m not a real
man”).
 Drug Use and Abuse
• HARM FROM DRUGS
Tobacco
– Slows down growth (impairs digestion,
nutrition, and appetite)
– Reduces the appetite
– Causes protein and vitamin deficiencies
caused
– Can damage developing hearts, lungs, brains,
and reproductive systems
 Drug Use and Abuse
• Alcohol
– Most frequently abused drug among North American
teenagers
– Heavy drinking may permanently impair memory and
self-control by damaging the hippocampus and the
prefrontal cortex.
– Alcohol allows momentary denial of problems 
when problems get worse because they have been
ignored, more alcohol is needed
– Denial can have serious consequences.
 Drug Use and Abuse
Marijuana
– Adolescents who regularly smoke marijuana
are more likely to drop out of school, become
teenage parents, and be unemployed.
– Marijuana affects memory, language
proficiency, and motivation.
 Drug Use and Abuse
Occasional use of any drug
– Drug use is progressive and the first use usually
occurs as part of a social gathering.
– Few adolescent drug users are addicts but occasional
drug use can lead to addiction.
– The younger a person is when beginning drug use,
the more likely addiction will occur.
– Occasional drug use excites the limbic system and
interferes with the prefrontal cortex  drug users are
more emotional and less reflective.
 Preventing Drug Abuse: What
Works?
Generational forgetting
– The idea that each new generation forgets what the
previous generation learned. As used here, the term
refers to knowledge about the harm drugs can do.
Project DARE
– Drug Abuse Resistance Education
– Features adults (usually police officers) telling
students about the dangers of drugs
– DARE has no impact on later drug use
 Preventing Drug Abuse: What
Works?
Scare tactics: May increase drug use because
1. The advertisements make drugs seem exciting
2. Adolescents recognize the exaggeration
3. the ads give some teenagers ideas about ways to
show defiance
Advertising campaigns against teen smoking:
– Antismoking announcements produced by
cigarette companies increase use
 Preventing Drug Abuse: What
Works?
Important:
– Prevention and moderation of adolescent
drug use and abuse are possible.
– Antidrug programs and messages need to be
carefully designed to avoid a backlash or
generational forgetting.