Youth Development: Childhood to Adulthood

Lecture 1 - Transition from Childhood to Adulthood

• Youths are in a transitional phase from childhood to adulthood. In many cultures, globally, and are vulnerable to risk-taking behaviors.
• Youth identity forms through a journey influenced by biological, social, and psychological factors.
• Stereotypes about youths include the perceptions of being immature, inexperienced, and emotional.
• Erik Erikson's psychosocial development theory states psychological crisis is the source of learning and growth. Failure to resolve crisis will yield negative impact. Improved resolution of crisis yields healthier individual development.
• The lifespan is expanding due to extended education leading to a longer adolescence

Erikson's Stages of Psychosocial Development

• Stage 5: Identity vs. Role Confusion (Adolescence, 13-19 years). Key events are social relationships/identity. Key question is "Who am I, and where am I going?" Positive outcome is ability to stay true to yourself while failure results in role confusion and a weak sense of self.
• Stage 6: Intimacy vs Isolation (Young Adulthood, 20-40 years). Key events are forming intimate relationships. Key question is "Am I loved and wanted?". Positive outcome is strong relationships, while failure results in loneliness and isolation,

The Interplay of Nature and Nurture

• Nature refers to biological inheritance
• Nurture comes from life experience.
• Identity comes from both nurture and biological factors.
• Many biological, psychological, social, and cultural factors affect individuals. Individuals experiences varies.
• Learning involves a change in an individual due to experience according to Mayer.
• Behavior is the movement of an organism by external elements, or an organism's interaction with the environment that involves movement.

Defining and Understanding Behavior

• Skinner defines behavior as the movement of an organism/parts using frame of reference from organism or various external objects/fields.
• Behavior is that portion of an organism's interaction with its environment that involves movement of some part of the organism.
• Environment: The complete set of physical circumstances in which an organism exists, where relevant factors contribute to behavior.
• Stimulus: An energy change affecting an organism through receptor cells.
• Stimuli includes: Form (physical feature), Temporal aspect (antecedent/consequences), and Function (effects on behavior).
• Antecedent: what comes before.
• Behavior: The action.
• Consequence: the result.

Elements of Behavioral Analysis

• Response topography: The physical form of the behavior, including the movements involved.
• Response class: A set of actions producing the same effect on the environment, sharing a common function.
• Repertoire: All the behaviors an individual can perform in different situations.

Conditioning Types

• Classical conditioning (Ivan Pavlov): Animal behavioral modifications. With a neutral stimulus repeatedly paired with food, dogs began to salivate at the stimulus alone
• Habituation is when the eliciting stimulus no longer triggers the behavior.
• Operant Conditioning (B.F. Skinner): Modification of behavior based on consequences. The frequency of a behavior is modified by the consequences attached to the behavior.
• Reinforcement strengthens desired behavior via positive stimuli, increasing behavior frequency.
• Punishment weakens undesired behavior via negative stimuli, decreasing behavior frequency.
  • Positive reinforcement: giving something pleasant to strengthen behavior.
  • Negative reinforcement involves strengthening behavior by removing something unpleasant.
  • Positive Punishment: presenting something unpleasant.
  • Negative Punishment: involves removing something pleasant
• People grow through behavioral changes by rewards and punishment according to Skinner, not emotions/thoughts.

Social Learning

• Social learning theory: involves learning through observation.
  • Phase 1 (Attentional): paying attention to the model.
  • Phase 2 (Retention): imitating and rehearsing.
  • Phase 3 (Reproduction): matching behavior.
  • Phase 4 (Motivational): being motivated to reproduce the behavior.

Puberty

Lecture 2 - Puberty

• A neuro/endo/crine process in early adolescence that stimulates rapid physical changes.
• Changes in endocrine system affect weight/body fat Other factors include brain weight, rapid weight gain in infancy, obesity, and sociocultural factors.
• Heredity: Puberty is not determined by the environment and happens between ages 9-16 for most individuals. Its onset/duration can be influenced by environmental factors.
• Hormones: Chemicals secreted by endocrine glands, carried through bloodstream causing whisker in boys, hips widening in girls.
• Androgens (male sex hormone) and estrogens (female sex hormone), are present in both sexes. Male bodies rises is testosterone level, females rises estradiol level
• Testosterone level increases increase in weight, and cause voice changes in males
• Estradiol level increases, causing breast and uterine development, and skeletal changes in females

Determinants of Puberty

• Weight and Body Fat: A critical body fat mass is required for puberty, higher BMI leads to earlier puberty, and underrutrition may delay puberty.
• Leptin and Kisspeptins: Metabolic gatekeepers to reproduction

Hormone Leptin

• Leptin is secreted by fat cells and regulates puberty
• Stimulates the brain to increase metabolism and reduce hunger, regulates puberty in females. Increased leptin inhibits food intake which delays triggers treatment restore.

Hormone Kisspeptins

• Kisspeptins produce the kiss1 gene which regulates GnRH neurons and plays an important role in the onset and change of puberty.

Weight at Birth & Infancy

• Low-birth-weight girls experience menarche earlier and birth weight may lead to risk for small testicular volume during adolescence. Accelerated weight impacts puberty.

Sociocultural & Environmental Factors of Puberty

• Body image, hormonal change, sleep changes, risk taking behavior, and help seeking behavior all impact puberty.

Stress & Coping

• Stress stems from relationships appraised as significant, exceeding available resources.
• Coping involves applying cognitive and behavioral methods to manage demands. Coping can be problem focussed, or emotion focussed.

The Brain

Factors Regarding Coping & Intelligence

• Neuroconstructivist View biological processes and environmental experiences affect brain development
• Brain has plasticity, is context-dependent, and its development is linked to cognitive abilities.

Brain Structure

• Prefrontal Cortex: Judgment region that reins in emotions but continues developing until emerging adulthood.
• Corpus Callosum: Fibers connecting brain hemispheres thicken during adolescence to improve information processing.
• Amygdala: Limbic system structure that plays a large part in emotion.

Experience & Plasticity

• Corpus callosum thickens in adolescence.
• Prefrontal cortex is also heavily involved. The limbic system sits in the seat of emotion/develops more slowly as puberty occurs.
• Adolescents become more emotional as prefrontal cortex are yet to catch up/fully develop
• Reward seeking and risk taking can increase during this development.
• Neurogenesis occurs, in hippocampus (memory) and olfactory bulb (smell). The functions of the new brain cells are still unknown.
• Drugs, stress, and exercise, can inhibit or promote neurogenesis.
• Adolescents brains can recover from injury. High plasticity. Education should not be speculative statements, there is continuous development in adolescents’ brains.

Piaget's Theory

Chapter 3 - Cognitive Development

• Development refers to how people grow, adapt, and change.
• Development includes personality, socioemotional skills, cognition, and language.
• It stems from interplay between Nature and Nurture.
• Constructivism (Piaget): Children build meaning and understanding through experience, actively constructing knowledge by assimilating and accommodating new information to understand world due to being biologically adaptive
• Adolescents organize and adapt thinking and include new ideas.
• Schema: adolescents use schema to construct their world. They are a pattern of behavior and are able to interact with the environment.

Understanding & Using Schemas

• Assimilation involves understanding by connecting to to pre existing knowledge
• Accommodation is where new information modifies existing schemas, and an adjustment is required in response to new information
• Equilibration: shift in thought from one state to another because of a cognitive conflict being experienced.

Sensorimotor Stage (Birth to 2 Years)

• Construct understanding by coordinating experiences with physical/motoric actions and exploring with instincts. Objective permanence is developed where an object will exist even if out of sight.

Preoperational Stage (2-7 Years)

• Begin to represent the world with words, images, and drawings. Symbolic thoughts begin to be prominent and language develops. A lack of understanding and set reversibility exists still.
• Centration: Children only focus on one aspect.

Concrete Operational Stage (7-11 Years)

• Logical reasoning replaces intuitive thought with specific or concrete examples
• Concrete operational thought is actions that allow individuals to do mentally what they previously did physically
• Conservation skills of length numbers, mass, etc can be recognized
• Classification skills are increased as able to form concepts and relationships
• Unable to make assumptions.

Formal Operational Thought (11-15 Years)

• Can now think abstract.
• Full of ideals and possibilities
• Can think of hypothetical situations and deduce logic. Critical thinking has also emerged.
• Assimilation characterizes their early operational thought and accommodation characterized their operational thought

Critique of Piaget's Cognitive Theory

• Timing and the stages have their critiques
• Some adults do not even reach formal operational thinkers
• Culture and education effect
• Limited focus on attention and general strategy.

Vygotsky's Theory

• Emphasis on culture
• Social constructivist approach emphasizes learning through social interaction.

Zone of Proximal Development

• The range of tasks too hard to do alone but that can be done with help.
• Scaffolding supports further knowledge acquisition, while collaboration learning occurs.

Intelligence Testing

Psychometric View

• Binet introduced mental age.

Binet Testing

• William Stern intelligence quotient (IQ), a person's mental age divided by chronological age (CA), multiplied by 100. Formula: IQ = MA/CA × 100
• These revisions are called Stanford-Binet tests. (5 content areas are examined: fluid reasoning, knowledge
• Wechsler Scales overall IQ shows verbal comprehension, working speed/visual ability. The scales exist in 3 forms for adults.

Types of Intelligence (Gardner)

• Spatial: visualizing the world in 3D.
• Bodily-kinesthetic: coordinating mind with body
• Linguistic: finding the right word
• Intra personal: understanding yourself
• Interpersonal intelligence: Sensing feelings and motives.
• Logical-mathematical: Quantifying things
• Musical: recognizing tones

The Self

The Self, II

• Encompasses sense of identity, emotional development and understanding, and overall personality.
• Self understanding: the individual's cognitive representation of who they are.

Abstraction, Idealism, The Self:

• Use abstract descriptions, differentiate themselves, experience a fluctuating experience fluctuations, contradictions in multiple roles, comparing real to ideal self can cause great discrepancy.

Positive & Negative Self Perception

• Positive/negative self evaluation
• Scholastic competence
• Athletic competence
• Social acceptance
• Physical appearance
• Behavior

Gender (Sexuality)

Chapter 4 - Gender

• Puberty intensifies the sexual aspects of adolescents' gender attitudes and behavior.
• Freud and Erikson suggest gender is destiny + anatomy define gender (critics: more freedom of choice exists).
• Evolutionary psychology states adaptation during evolution made differentiation more apparent.

Social Theory and Constructs of Gender

• Social Role Theory: Gender differences mainly result from roles of each in terms to less power and status in most cultures -> less co-opportunity
• Social Cognitive Theory impacts gender development
• Observation & imitation
• Rewards and punishments

Influences on Gender & Social Development

• Parents and siblings can influence gender.
• Peers can influence/ adolescents spend increasing time with peers.
• Observed a strong predictor due to perception, especially with approval and disapproval
• Schools and Teachers can have influences as well.
• Teachers can be biased against male and female. Single sex are + less distraction or reduction in harassment - opportunities to work together

Mass Media Effects

• The portrayal of sexes on television is stereotyped
• Music videos can showcase the world is aggressive, dominant.
• More social media equals lower self esteem
• Early adolescence may be a period of heightened sensitivity.

Observations, Rewards, and Punishment

• Observation, imitation, rewards, and punishment are mechanisms that increase gender developing to social expectations
• Children and adolescents perceive the world motivate
• The gender stereotypes boys use are often rigid while there are few cognitive differences
• Bodies are shaped as body images continue to develop.

Moral Identity

Value, Religion, Spirituality

• Kohlberg moral code and the importance of value laden discussion.
• 15% adults have no stigma attaching masturbation.
• Abstain from sex early on.
• The more you see social media, the less self esteem. It’s less realistic.

Moral Behavior

Topic 1: Moral Development

• Definition: A standard of right and wrong involving changes in thought in the context of rules. Principles that give lives meaning through adversity
• Moral Thought: The 3 levels of development by cognitive influences
• Moral Behavior: influenced basic process of actions that cognitive
• Moral Feeling: theory of action that moral are feeling or action

Development of Moral Thought

• Moral Personality, Self understanding, Moral character, and integrity

Ethical Responsibility

• Self awareness
• Self reflection
• Goal setting in society
• Understands social standards and what each mean.
• Culture affects morality
• Family influence
• Empathy
• All connect and have aspects.
• Understand importance.

Parental Discipline

• Parental Discipline
• Love & Withdrawal
• Power Assertion
• Induction is most effective

Value & Spiritual Development

• In schools
• Hidden Curricula (rules, moral)
• Character Ed (literacy to help)
• Ethical Sensitivity (connection to help diversity)
• Focus + Action + Judgement.
• Ethics, Values + Service helps to have a good impact.