Anthropology Discussion post

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Chapter Ten

Becoming an Adult: Physical, Cognitive, and Personality

Development In Young Adulthood

10.1 Emerging Adulthood

When Do People Become Adults?

• Quarterlife crisis: similar to a midlife crisis, but occurs in one’s 20s – A relatively new term for a period of self-

exploration, search for meaning, and adjustment to daily hassles or life challenges

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Emerging Adulthood

• No definitive criteria for marking when one becomes an adult, especially in the West

• Emerging adulthood: a relatively new term referring to the period when people are not adolescents but are not fully adults – Encompasses the years between late

adolescence and early 30s – Social and demographic trends since the

1970s have created this new developmental period

Role Transitions Marking Adulthood

• Role transitions: new responsibilities and duties that mark movement into the next developmental stages

• Rites of passage: important rituals marking initiation into adulthood

Erikson

• Intimacy vs. isolation: major psychosocial conflict during young adulthood (Erikson’s 6th stage)

• Intimacy involves creating a shared identity with another

• Stronger sense of one’s own identity is needed to achieve this intimacy

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10.2 Physical Development & Health

Growth, Strength, and Physical Functioning

• Height is at its tallest during young adulthood • Physical strength, coordination, and dexterity

in both sexes peaks in the late 20s and early 30s

• Most senses remain acute through to middle age or old age – Hearing begins to decline in the late 20s,

especially for high-pitched tones

10.3 Cognitive Development

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How Should We View Intelligence in Adults?

• Most theories are multidimensional, though there is disagreement as to the dimensions

• Baltes et al.’s three dimensions – Multidirectionality: some aspects improve

while others decline during adulthood – Interindividual variability: patterns of

change vary between people – Plasticity: abilities can be modified under

the right conditions

Primary – and Secondary Mental Abilities

• Primary mental abilities: groups of related skills organized into hypothetical constructs – Number – Verbal meaning – Inductive reasoning – Spatial orientation – Word fluency

• Secondary mental abilities: clusters of related primary abilities used as a framework for describing intelligence’s structure; difficult to measure directly

Fluid and Crystalized Intelligence

• Fluid and crystallized intelligence are secondary mental abilities

• Fluid intelligence: being a flexible, adaptive thinker, who can make inferences, and understand concepts’ relationships – Declines throughout adulthood

• Crystallized intelligence: knowledge of facts, definitions, language, etc., acquired by life experience – Improves throughout adulthood

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Fluid and Crystalized Intelligence

Integrating Emotion and Logic in Life Problems

• In postformal thinking, decision-making and problem-solving emphasize: – Change and context-dependent principles

instead of conformity and context-free principle

– Pragmatics of the situation, emotion, and social facets more than logic alone

– The relative rather than absolute nature of rules and norms

Going Beyond Formal Operations: Thinking in Adulthood

• Postformal thought • Reflective judgment

– Prereflective reasoning – Quasi-reflective reasoning – Reflective reasoning

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10.4 Personality in Young Adulthood

Creating Scenarios and Life Stories

• Life-span construct: one’s unified sense of the past, present, and future

• Scenario: expectations of how one’s future life will play out – Helps people formulate a game plan and a

way to track progress • Social clock: a personal timetable tagging the

time or age by which future goals or events are to be completed

McAdams’s Life-Story Model

• Life story: a personal narrative organizing past events into a coherent sequence reflecting one’s identity, ideology, and goals – Agency and communion are themes – Attitudes toward one’s story are conveyed

through emotions (e.g., optimism) – Begins forming in late adolescence – From middle age onward, reshaped to form

generativity

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Possible Selves

• Possible selves: representations of one’s hoped-for-selves and feared-for-selves

• With increasing age, important possible selves concern personal matters more than family ones

• Young and middle-aged adults are more optimistic about achieving hoped-for-selves

• Much older adults perceive the self as remaining stable – Physical health is an important feared self

Personal Control Beliefs

• Personal control beliefs: extent to which performance depends on one’s own effort or ability rather than outside forces – Greatly affects personality, social, health,

intellectual, and career outcomes • Results of research on development of personal

control beliefs are inconsistent • Control beliefs vary depending upon the domain

in which they are studied (e.g., intelligence versus health)

Personal Control Beliefs: Domains

• Examples of domain-specific findings: – People’s perceived control of marital

happiness increasing with age – One’s development declining with age

• One domain-nonspecific finding is that satisfaction is greater for: – Younger adults who attribute success to

their effort – Older adults who attribute success to their

ability

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Personal Control Beliefs: Primary and Secondary Control

• Primary control: modifying the external environment to fit one’s needs and goals (e.g., asking a teacher for tutoring)

• Secondary control: modifying one’s cognitions, goals, or behavioral standards (e.g., attributing failure on a test to task difficulty instead of ability)

• Primary and secondary control operate in parallel during first half of life; primary declines in midlife