This document contains my lecture notes for the adolescent development course. This concerns the first seven lectures, which are material for the first partial exam.
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Adolescent Development lecture notes
Lecture 1 – Introduction
Defining adolescence -> the period between the onset of sexual maturation (puberty) and
the attainment of adult roles and responsibilities.
The transition from child status to adult status.
Age boundaries
- Early adolescence (10-13 years)
- Middle adolescence (14-17 years)
- Late adolescence (18-21 years)
- Young adulthood (22-30 years)
Three primary changes:
1. Biological: puberty (body and brain)
2. Cognitive: abstract thinking, executive functions, social cognition
3. Social: redefinition of an individual from child to an adult
Developmental tasks:
1. Accepting one’s physical. Body and keeping it healthy
2. Achieving new and more mature relationships with age mates of both sexes
3. Achieving (emotional) autonomy from parents and other adults
4. Achieving a satisfying gender role
5. Preparing for a job or career (e.g., through education)
6. Making decisions about marriage and family life
7. Becoming socially responsible
8. Developing a workable philosophy, a mature set of values, and worthy ideals
Puberty = maturational process during which primary (e.g. testes, ovaries) and secondary
(e.g. breasts, pubic hair) sex characteristics mature resulting in capacity to reproduce.
Five areas of change
1. Maturation of reproductive organs, secondary sex characteristics
2. Nervous and endocrine system
3. Skeletal growth
4. Body composition, change in distribution of fat and muscle
5. Circulatory and respiratory systems
Factors influencing puberty
- Genetics
- Increase kisspeptin (via leptin and melatonin)
- Nutrition
- Health Care
- Environmental stress -> puberty happens early, because you may live shorter so you
need to reproduce quick
- Unrelated family members of opposite sex
,Measuring pubertal development
- Tanner Staging
- Self-report
- Visual inspection by researcher
- Hormone levels
Early maturation – boys
Emotional effects
- Increased popularity
- Improved self-concept + self-esteem
- Though: increase internalizing problems?
Behavioral effects
- Deviant friends (less supervision)
- Risk-taking, substance use
Why differences?
- Maturational deviance hypothesis. Girls are younger in early maturation than boys.
- Developmental readiness hypothesis: young adolescents struggle to cope with
challenges of early maturation. Early boys are relatively older and psychologically
more mature.
- Cultural desirability of body types: tall and muscular (boys) vs increase in body fat
(girls)
, Lecture 3 – Cognitive & brain development during adolescence
Brain measuring methods:
- Structural MRI
- Functional MRI
- DTI is focused on how parts of the brain are connected to each other.
Changes during adolescence
Grey matter. First increase, but eventually a decrease in grey matter. We’re keeping the
most important pathways and we can process information more efficiently.
- Synaptic profileration -> the number of connections increases. After synaptic
profileration, pruning starts.
- Pruning -> we lose the connections we don’t need.
White matter
- Myelination
Changes in adolescence
- Social cognition
- Cognitive control = network of regions (largely in the prefrontal cortex) involved in
inhibition, controlling emotions, planning and organization.
- Reward processing
Socio-emotional network = network of regions (largely in limbic regions e.g. nucleus
accumbens, part of the striatum and amygdala) involved in emotion processing,
motivation and reward sensitivity -> pubertal influence.
Dual-systems models leads to the conclusion that…
Differences in developmental trajectories between the networks leads to a maturation gap,
with specific effects on adolescent behavior.
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