Emotional and Social Development in Adolescence

Emotional and Social Development in Adolescence

Emotional and Social Development in Adolescence

As adolescents spend less time with family members, peer groups become more tightly knit into cliques. Mixed-sex cliques prepare teenagers for dating by providing models of how to interact and opportunities to do so without having to be intimate.

chapter outline

· Erikson’s Theory: Identity versus Role Confusion

· Self-Understanding

· Changes in Self-Concept

· Changes in Self-Esteem

· Paths to Identity

· Identity Status and Psychological Well-Being

· Factors Affecting Identity Development

· ? CULTURAL INFLUENCES Identity Development Among Ethnic Minority Adolescents

· Moral Development

· Kohlberg’s Theory of Moral Development

· Are There Sex Differences in Moral Reasoning?

· Coordinating Moral, Social-Conventional, and Personal Concerns

· Influences on Moral Reasoning

· Moral Reasoning and Behavior

· Religious Involvement and Moral Development

· Further Challenges to Kohlberg’s Theory

· ? SOCIAL ISSUES: EDUCATION Development of Civic Engagement

· Gender Typing

· The family

· Parent–Child Relationships

· Family Circumstances

· Siblings

· Peer Relations

· Friendships

· Cliques and Crowds

· Dating

· Problems of Development

· Depression

· Suicide

· Delinquency

Emotional and Social Development in Adolescence

· ? BIOLOGY AND ENVIRONMENT Two Routes to Adolescent Delinquency

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Louis sat on the grassy hillside overlooking the high school, waiting for his best friend, Darryl, to arrive from his fourth-period class. The two boys often had lunch together. Watching as hundreds of students poured onto the school grounds, Louis reflected on what he had learned in government class that day. “suppose I had been born in the People’s Republic of China. I’d be sitting here, speaking a different language, being called by a different name, and thinking about the world in different ways. Wow,”Louis pondered. “I am who I am through some quirk of fate.”

Louis awoke from his thoughts with a start to see Darryl standing in front of him. “Hey, dreamer! I’ve been shouting and waving from the bottom of the hill for five minutes. How come you’re so spaced out lately, Louis?”

“Oh, just wondering about stuff—what I want, what I believe in. My older brother Jules—I envy him. He seems to know more about where he’s going. I’m up in the air about it. You ever feel that way?”

“Yeah, a lot,”Darryl admitted, looking at Louis seriously. “I wonder, what am I really like? Who will I become?”

Louis and Darryl’s introspective remarks are signs of a major reorganization of the self at adolescence: the development of identity. Both young people are attempting to formulate who they are—their personal values and the directions they will pursue in life.

We begin this chapter with Erikson’s account of identity development and the research it has stimulated on teenagers’ thoughts and feelings about themselves. The quest for identity extends to many aspects of development. We will see how a sense of cultural belonging, moral understanding, and masculine and feminine self-images are refined during adolescence. And as parent–child relationships are revised and young people become increasingly independent of the family, friendships and peer networks become crucial contexts for bridging the gap between childhood and adulthood. Our chapter concludes with a discussion of several serious adjustment problems of adolescence: depression, suicide, and delinquency.

Emotional and Social Development in Adolescence

image4 Erikson’s Theory: Identity versus Role Confusion

Erikson ( 1950 , 1968 ) was the first to recognize identity as the major personality achievement of adolescence and as a crucial step toward becoming a productive, content adult. Constructing an identity involves defining who you are, what you value, and the directions you choose to pursue in life. One expert described it as an explicit theory of oneself as a rational agent—one who acts on the basis of reason, takes responsibility for those actions, and can explain them (Moshman, 2005 ). This search for what is true and real about the self drives many choices—vocation, interpersonal relationships, community involvement, ethnic-group membership, and expression of one’s sexual orientation, as well as moral, political, and religious ideals.

Although the seeds of identity formation are planted early, not until late adolescence and early adulthood do young people become absorbed in this task. According to Erikson, in complex societies, teenagers experience an identity crisis—a temporary period of distress as they experiment with alternatives before settling on values and goals. They go through a process of inner soul-searching, sifting through characteristics that defined the self in childhood and combining them with emerging traits, capacities, and commitments. Then they mold these into a solid inner core that provides a mature identity—a sense of self-continuity as they move through various roles in daily life. Once formed, identity continues to be refined in adulthood as people reevaluate earlier commitments and choices.

Erikson called the psychological conflict of adolescence identity versus role confusion . If young people’s earlier conflicts were resolved negatively or if society limits their choices to ones that do not match their abilities and desires, they may appear shallow, directionless, and unprepared for the challenges of adulthood.

Current theorists agree with Erikson that questioning of values, plans, and priorities is necessary for a mature identity, but they no longer describe this process as a “crisis” (Côté, 2009 ; Kroger, 2007 ). For most young people, identity development is not traumatic and disturbing but, rather, a process of explorationfollowed by commitment. As young people try out life possibilities, they gather important information about themselves and their environment and move toward making enduring decisions. In doing so, they forge an organized self-structure (Arnett, 2000 , 2006 ; Moshman, 2005 ). In the following sections, we will see that adolescents go about the task of defining the self in ways that closely match Erikson’s description.

Emotional and Social Development in Adolescence

image5 Self-Understanding

During adolescence, the young person’s vision of the self becomes more complex, well-organized, and consistent. Compared with younger children, adolescents engage in evaluations of an increasing variety of aspects of the self. Over time, they construct a balanced, integrated representation of their strengths and limitations (Harter, 2003 , 2006 ). Changes in self-concept and self-esteem set the stage for developing a unified personal identity.

Changes in Self-Concept

Recall that by the end of middle childhood, children can describe themselves in terms of personality traits. In early adolescence, they unify separate traits (“smart”and “curious”) into more abstract descriptors (“Intelligent”). But these generalizations are not interconnected and are often contradictory. For example, 12- to 14-year-olds might mention opposing traits—“Intelligent”and “dork,”“extrovert”and “Introvert.”These disparities result from the expansion of adolescents’ social world, which creates pressure to display different selves in different relationships. As adolescents’ awareness of these inconsistencies grows, they frequently agonize over “which is the real me” (Harter, 1998 , 2003 , 2006 ).

From middle to late adolescence, cognitive changes enable teenagers to combine their traits into an organized system. Their use of qualifiers (“I have a fairly quick temper,”“I’m not thoroughly honest”) reveals an increasing awareness that psychological qualities can vary from one situation to the next. Older adolescents also add integrating principles that make sense of formerly troublesome contradictions. “I’m very adaptable,”said one young person. “When I’m around my friends, who think what I say is important, I’m talkative; but around my family I’m quiet because they’re never interested enough to really listen to me”(Damon, 1990 , p. 88).

Compared with school-age children, teenagers place more emphasis on social virtues, such as being friendly, considerate, kind, and cooperative—traits that reflect adolescents’ increasing concern with being viewed positively by others. Among older adolescents, personal and moral values also appear as key themes. As young people revise their views of themselves to include enduring beliefs and plans, they move toward the unity of self that is central to identity development.

Emotional and Social Development in Adolescence

Changes in Self-Esteem

Self-esteem, the evaluative side of self-concept, continues to differentiate in adolescence. Teenagers add several new dimensions of self-evaluation—close friendship, romantic appeal, and job competence—to those of middle childhood (see Chapter 10 , pages 330 – 331 ) (Harter, 1999 , 2003 , 2006 ).

Level of self-esteem also changes. Though some adolescents experience temporary or persisting declines after school transitions (see Chapter 11 , page 391 ), self-esteem rises for most young people, who report feeling especially good about their peer relationships and athletic capabilities (Impett et al., 2008 ; Twenge & Campbell, 2001 ). Teenagers often assert that they have become more mature, capable, personable, and attractive than in the past. In longitudinal research on a nationally representative sample of U.S. youths, an increasing sense of mastery—feeling competent and in control of one’s life—strongly predicted this age-related rise in self-esteem (Erol & Orth, 2011 ).

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During adolescence, self-esteem rises for most young people, who feel especially good about their peer relationships and athletic capabilities.

As in middle childhood, individuals with mostly favorable self-esteem profiles tend to be well-adjusted, sociable, and conscientious, whereas low self-esteem in all areas is linked to adjustment difficulties. But certain self-esteem factors are more strongly related to adjustment. Teenagers who feel highly dissatisfied with parental relationships often are aggressive and antisocial. Those with poor academic self-esteem tend to be anxious and unfocused, and those with negative peer relationships are likely to be anxious and depressed (Marsh, Parada, & Ayotte, 2004 ; Rudolph, Caldwell, & Conley, 2005 ).

In adolescence, authoritative parenting continues to predict high self-esteem, as does encouragement from teachers (Lindsey et al., 2008 ; McKinney, Donnelly, & Renk, 2008 ; Wilkinson, 2004 ). In contrast, teenagers whose parents are critical and insulting have unstable and generally low self-esteem (Kernis, 2002 ). Feedback that is negative, inconsistent, or not contingent on performance triggers, at best, uncertainty about the self’s capacities and, at worst, a sense of being incompetent and unloved. Teenagers who experience such parenting tend to rely only on peers, not on adults, to affirm their self-esteem—a risk factor for adjustment difficulties (DuBois et al., 1999 , 2002 ).

Emotional and Social Development in Adolescence

Paths to Identity

Adolescents’ well-organized self-descriptions and differentiated sense of self-esteem provide the cognitive foundation for forming an identity. Using a clinical interviewing procedure devised by James Marcia (1980) or briefer questionnaire measures, researchers commonly evaluate progress in identity development on two key criteria derived from Erikson’s theory: exploration and commitment. Their various combinations yield four identity statuses, summarized in Table 12.1 : identity achievement ,commitment to values, beliefs, and goals following a period of exploration; identity moratorium ,exploration without having reached commitment; identity foreclosure, commitment in the absence of exploration; and identity diffusion, an apathetic state characterized by lack of both exploration and commitment.