Week 5

For the test: bring in a list of 7 questions from the list for the test (one from each of the chapters)

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10

• Describe Erikson's stage of industry v inferiority
• Discuss the impact of divorce or blended families on children

11

• Discuss the psychological impact of puberty
• Describe Piaget's formal operations stage

12

• Discuss identity development in adolescents
• Summarize moral development in adolescence OR the importance of peers in adolescence

13.

• Describe How thinking may change in adulthood
• Describe the psychological impact of attending college

14

• Describe either Erikson's stage of intimacy v isolation or one of the other theories of adult psychosocial development
• Discuss the diversity of modern adult lifestyles

Week 5 Day 2

492-end career development

Notes

• Adulthood
• more difficult than earlier time periods (Holmes and Rahe stress inventory)
• brings change and new choices (banana george blair exhibition at 85)
• Many historical patterns for adults are changing
• Young adults today are different from previous generations
• Are attitudes towards marriage changing? -- seen as a party celebration not a union
• When/if people have children
• When/if buying a house
• Start a lifetime career
• For many, transitioning into adulthood is a longer process
• Jelly experiment
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• Cognitive changes in early adulthood
• Piaget
• Adulthood comes more experience and increased use of formal operations
• Perry
• Epistemic cognition
• Change from dualistic thinking to relativistic thinking
• Contributing factors:
• Opportunities to tackle challenging ill-structured problems (no clear right or wrong)
• peer interaction (other intelligent people who may disagree)
• metacognition 
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• Labouvie-Vief
• Pragmatic thought
• Cognitive-affective complexity
• Development of pragmatic thought
• Adulthood brings...
• Increased experience with real-world problems
• New ways of thinking that thrive on contradiction and compromise
• Increase in cognitive-affective complexity....
• Adult roles often evoke a mixture of positive and negative feelings
• More roles one takes on, the more complex the mixture of thoughts and feelings
•  
• How information is used: Schaie's Stages
• childhood - acquisitive stage
• Young adult - Achieving
• Middle adult - Executive / Responsible stage
• Late adulthood - Reintegrative stage
•  
• Life events and cognitive development
• Major life events may lead to cognitive growth
• Think about the world in novel, more complex, sophisticated, and often less rigid ways
•  
• Post-formal thinking
• Young adults less egocentric than adolescents
• Young adults more relativistic but ideally capable of making commitments in their relativistic world
• Cognitively healthy adult is more willing to compromise and cope with the world as it is
• No scientific agreement is there is a stage past Piaget's formal operations
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• College: Pursuing Higher Education
• Nationwide, a minority of students enter college immediately after graduation
• Only 40% of those who start, graduate college in 4 years
• Race and gender variables influence
•  
• Who goes to college?
• More older, returning students than in the past
• Average age of community college students is higher than 4 year
• College degree is becoming increasingly important in obtaining and keeping jobs
•  
• Dropping out of college
• 44% 2 year, 32% 4 year (us)
• Personal reasons (preparation, motivation, skills, financial, low SES)
• Institutional factors (few support services)
• Early support crucial
• Lack of college graduates can negatively impact communities

Chapter 15

• Erikson's view of young adulthood
• Intimacy v Isolation
• Intimacy - relationship based on strong emotional connection to others
• Isolation - feelings of loneliness and fearful of truly intimate relationships
• Young adults often worry that being in a relationship will result in the loss or negative evaluation of identity (fear of closeness)
• Failure to develop intimacy lead to promiscuity
• or exclusion rejecting relationship and those who have them
•  
• Religion in Emerging adulthood
• Religious practice falls in late teens, tweens, twenties: 1 in 4 US 18-29 unaffiliated with a particular faith
• Religion remains more important to American young people than in other Western nations
• Many construct individualized faith, weaving together diverse traditions
•  
• Levinson
• Men have a sequential mindset - school, work, marriage, kids
• Women are more in simultaneous mode: not one thing at once - do it all
• Older women look for older men
• Men look for younger women -- towards age early 20s
• Shift around 40-45 for women in plastic surgery -- mostly same surgeries (make skin look younger)
• "Why no 'touch of gray' for women?"
•  
• Identity Development in emerging adulthood
• -adulthood that starts later
• Gives individuals the opportunity to expand on their self exploration
• Results in higher self esteem well-being and adjustment
• Too much results in poor adjustment, anxiety, depression, deviancy
•  
• Are young adults happy?
• Happiest memories occur when needs for independence competence and positive self esteem are satisfied
• Not dependent on material goods
• Relationships become a larger factor in one's overall happiness
•  
• Social Clock
• Age-graded expectations for life events
• Less rigid than in earlier generations
• Following clock lends confidence, contributes to social stability
•  
• Selecting a mate
• Physical proximity
• Distance significant complicating factor in maintaining a relationship
• When thinking long-term most select partners who are more similar to how they see themselves
• More dissimilarity, more conflict, more likely relationship will end
• Gender differences
• Women look for intelligence, ambition, financial status equal or above, and morals
• Men look for physical attraction*, domestic skills (cooking, raising children) --ignore profiles without picture
• This is why women take more pictures than males
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• Sternberg's triangular theory
•