Topics for Today

Cognitive Changes
0. Cognitive changes that characterize the transition
from childhood to adolescence
"0. adolescent egocentrism
"1. Piagetian and information processing perspectives on adolescent thinking
"2. Social cognition and the context of adolescent thinking
"3. adolescent risk-taking and decision-making
Social Changes
"4. Social redefinition of adolescence
"5. evolution of the adolescent
"6. primary changes in social status
Eating Disorders
"7. Film

Changes in Cognition of Adolescence

"0. adolescents know more than children
"1. adolescents think in ways that are more advanced and more effective than
children:
"2.
"3. better able to think about what might be possible instead of what is actual
"4. better able to think about abstract concepts
"5. able to think about the process of thinking itself
"6. better able to think multimensionally
"7. more likely to think in relative than in abstract terms

Thinking about Possibilities

"0. adolescents tend to think about what they are observing in terms of what
is possible.
"1. young children can be imaginative as well
"2. adolescents move more easily between real and possible realms
"3. when thinking about possibilities, do so in a systematic and playful way
"4. development of hypothetical reasoning: if-then
"5. example of the poker chip problem:
"6 imagine 4 poker chips, one red, one blue, one yellow and one green. Make
as many different combinations of chips of any number that you can

Thinking about Abstract Concepts

"0. adolescents thinking is less concrete and less tied to everyday observable
events than childrens
"1. can better understand conceptually based relationships and concepts
"2. puns, metaphors, analogies are easier to understand
"3. increased interest and concern with abstract social constructs such as
fairness, trust, democracy
"4. some consequences: scientific and logical problem-solving situations;
argument and debate;

Thinking About Thinking

"0. metacognition: process of thinking about thinking itself

"1. teenagers can think about the strategies they use to solve problems and to
think about their own thoughts and feelings
"2. learn how to manage their thinking
"3. are able to express this to others more easily than younger children
"4. a byproduct of metacognition is a kind of egocentrism characterized by an
intense preoccupation with the self
"5. David Elkind: some of the intellectual advances of adolescence can also
create temporary problems in thinking
"6. imaginary audience - sense of extreme selfconsciousness and belief that
everyone is watching and evaluating the teens actions
"7. personal fable - beliefs about their own uniqueness and sense of
infallibility
Imaginary Audience vs. Personal Fable
1. Sally is going to a party and is sure that everyone can see the pimple on her face
2. John is arguing with his parents at a restaurant when the girl he likes walks in
3. Sylvia and Gerald decide to have sex even though they did not have any birth control
4. Molly is having her class picture taken and she just got braces the day before
5. Elise broke up with her boyfriend, and when her Mom tries to comfort her, Elise screams that
she just doesnt understand
6. Even though Cheryl is known for her reckless driving, Gordon decides to take a ride from her
anyway

Question: can these just phenomena of adolescence? Do adults ever experience these forms of
egocentrism?

Thinking in Multiple Dimensions

"0. adolescents can think about several dimensions of a situation at once
whereas children are more likely to think about one aspect at a time
"1. leads to a more complex and sophisticated understanding of events and
relationships
"2. views of themselves become more differentiated (selfconcept for
example)

Cognitive Relativism
"0. adolescent thinking is characterized by relativism, the ability to see that
situations are not just good or bad, black or white, but can be interpreted in
many ways
"1. adolescents can question everything
"2. can lead to extreme skepticism

Theoretical Perspectives
"0. how to account for the fact that adolescents thinking is different and
more advanced than childrens
Piagets Theory of Cognitive Development
"0. cognitive-developmental view of intellectual development
"1. cognition proceeds through a fixed sequence of qualitatively distinct
stages
"2. sensorimotor (birth to 2)
"3. preoperational (2-5/6)
"4. concrete operations (6 - early adolescence)
"5. formal operations (adolescence through adulthood)
"0. transitions from one stage to the next occur when the childs biological
readiness and the demands of the environment bring about a state of
disequilibrium that is resolved by a shift in thinking style
"1. formal reasoning is the end point of Piagetian thinking, ie, thinking in a
system of formal principals of logic (if A or B is true, then C must be true)

"2. develops in two steps:

"3. emergent and episodic
"4. consolidated and integrated
"5. while potential exists in all adolescents to develop formaloperational
reasoning, not all do so, and not all the time
"6. competence vs performance (capable of vs. actually does in assessment
situation)
"7. Critique: changes appear to be continuous and gradual rather than stagelike; does not specify exactly what it is that is changing

Information Processing View of Cognition

"0. attempts to address limitations of cognitive-developmental perspective
"1. what is it that makes adolescents better able to solve problems than
younger children?
"2. what are the basic components of cognition and how to they change in
adolescence
0. attention to the stimulus
1
encoding the stimulus (working memory)
2
processing speed
3
organization
4
metacognition
"0. advanced thinking results from better strategies for the input, storage,
manipulation and use of information
"1. attention improves,
"2. both selective (attend to one thing and ignore a competing thing) and
"3. divided (attend to two things at once)
"4. memory improves,
"5. both working (immediate) and
"6. long-term

"7. speed of processing improves

"8. organizational skills improve (planful; use of strategies for learning
"9. knowledge about thinking processes improves

Adolescent Thinking in Context - Social Cognition

"0. how do the cognitive developments of adolescence influence how
teenagers interact with their social environments
"1. actual effects on day-to-day thoughts and actions
"2. what do we mean by social cognition? Thinking about social events,
relationships, social institutions, and people
"3. gains in social cognition are necessary for the changes in psychosocial
functioning (intimacy, autonomy, achievement, identity, sexuality)
"4. variation in social cognition can account for differences in social
adjustment

"5. three areas of investigation

"6. impression formation:
"7. impressions of other people become more differentiated, less egocentric,
more abstract, more inferential, more organized
"8. develop an implicit theory of personality
"9. ability to view events from the perspective of others
"10
"11. social perspective taking
"12. Robert Selman: with age, children and adolescents become better able to
step back from their own perspective and take the other persons needs
and viewpoint into account as well.
"13. social cognition proceeds through stages
"14. impulsive thinking
"1.unilateral thinking
"2.cooperative thinking
"3.collaborative thinking
"0. conceptions of morality (Kohlberg)
"1. shift from conventional to morally principaled
"2. conceptions of social conventions (social norms that guide everyday
behavior)
Social Transitions of Adolescence
"0. social redefinition of adolescence - time of change in social roles and
social status
"1. in all societies adolescence marks the period of time during which the
individual ceases to be viewed as a child and comes to be recognized as an
adult
"2. social transitions vary widely across time and culture
"3. in contemporary western society, the period of time between childhood
and adulthood has lengthened
"4. puberty comes earlier and school lasts longer
"5. adolescents are caught between two worlds

Adolescence as Social Invention

"0. adolescence may be more of a social invention than either a biological or
cognitive one
"1. other cultures and other historical periods have not recognized
adolescence or else view it very differently
"2. many of the problems of adolescence have to do with how it is defined,
rather than being a inevitable part of the other changes of adolescence
"3. adolescence as we know it did not exist until the industrial revolution of
the 19th century
"4. prior to that, distinctions were not made among children of different ages
"5. industrialization brought new patterns of work, schooling and family life.
"6. adolescents were among those most affected by these changes
"7. adolescence redefined as a time of preparation rather than a time of
increasing participation