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Cognitive-field psychologists make a sharp distinction between psychological adolescence and physical pubescence. To them the social-psychological aspect of adolescence is its major feature. They recognize that change in behaviour which are supposed to characterize the adolescent period seem at first sight to provide excellent support for a biological view, and that adolescence is related to sexual hormones and to certain periods of bodily growth.
However, they are not that, even though biological development as such is relatively the same in different societies, recent anthropological and sociological studies indicate that behaviour typical of adolescent age differs from culture to culture. Consequently, there is little value in attempting to describe generalized adolescent behaviour patterns.
When we view adolescent experience as an interactive process, we emphasize the relationships between person and groups during the adolescent age of individual youth in their respective social situations. The patterns of persons-group relationships vary greatly from society to society.
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Adolescents accomplish their psychological development into adulthood through experiencing six types of changes: 1. Shifts in Group Belongingness or Identification 2. Conflicts in Motivation 3. Cognitive Differentiation 4. Intensification of Self-Awareness 5. Perplexity in Regard to Bodily Appearance and Functions 6. Modifications of Time and Reality Perspective.
1. Shifts in Group Belongingness or Identification:
A social group is a dynamic whole based on the interdependence of its members. It is composed of two or more people who bear explicitly psychological relationship to one another. Often people in a group are similar, but not always- it is their interdependence that makes them a group. Members of a family group-husband, wife, and children of, say, ages 9 months, 2 years, and 10 years-are less similar to each other than is a man to another man or a baby to another baby.
High school boys of different racial and national background often wed themselves into a group on the basis of a feeling of similarity, which constitutes their measuring stick for group belongingness. Note that it is feeling of similarity in itself, which makes a group. A youth’s identifying himself with a social group means that he and other members of that group form dynamic inter-relations.
Any change in belongingness from one group to another is of great importance. A shift from a child group to an adult group makes possible certain activities which previously were forbidden but now are socially permitted. It also brings to the forefront certain taboos which exist for adults but do not apply to children in the same culture. A child does not smoke cigarettes or drink beer, and most adults do. In turn, a child, when he feels like crying, may do so; and adult, according to his group standards, may cry rarely, if ever.
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An adolescent may not wish to belong to a children’s group any longer and at the same time realize that he is not really accepted in an adult group. The inverse condition also may exist—he may want to continue his identification with a children’s group and at the same time feel himself being “pushed” into adult status. In either case he has a position similar to that of what sociologists call a marginal man.
A child entering adolescence or an adolescent entering adulthood stands on shaky ground, never sure he is doing the “right” thing. The adolescent no longer wishes to belong to a group which he now recognizes as less privileged than a group of adults, but at the same time he knows he is not fully accepted by adults as one of them. Thus, he tends to be oversensitive, he easily shifts from one extreme to another, and he is particularly cognisant of shortcomings of his younger companions who are still “children”.
2. Conflicts in Motivation:
In modern western society there is a more or less permanent conflict between various attitudes, values, ideologies, and styles of living of children and adults. Adolescents are caught midway in this conflict. Consequently, they have experience great difficulty in defining their roles. In turn, uncertainty of their roles creates ambiguity in their motivations.
They do not know when they should behave and be treated as adults and when they should continue as children. When they desire to behave like adults, they lack understanding of the adult world they are entering. Particularly if youth have been excluded from surrounding adult worlds, they are in the dark concerning them.
They have little idea of consequences of various kinds of adult behaviour. Thus, broadening of life spaces to include both childhood and adult roles brings with it ambiguous situations which they often are ill-equipped to handle. These conflicts and inadequacies in motivation lead adults to feel that adolescents manifest inadequate appreciation of values, emotional instabilities, tendencies to take extreme positions, and from time to time, undue shyness and aggressiveness.
Adolescents are magnified by the basic nature of the society within which they find themselves. What they learn from books, as well as adult precepts about what they should accomplish, is laden with contradictions. A youth is urged to develop the habit of doing free reading at home; simultaneously he goes home from school loaded with busy work to be done. A boy is told that honesty always is the best policy, then hires out part-time and sees the “tricks of the trade.” In experience like these, children’s find a great variety of conflicting religious political, economic and occupational value beings fostered with the groups with which they identify themselves. These conflicting principles often become personalized as individual conflicts in motivation.
3. Cognitive Differentiation:
The relative difference in degree of cognitive differentiation of life spaces of adolescents and adults causes adults to feel that adolescents often go to extremes. Differentiation refers to the functional separation of a life space into regions and subregions; subregions become regions differentiated into more subregions. Although any child’s development naturally leads to experiencing previously unknown subregions in his life space, a period of transition, such as adolescence, is characterized by more than usual impact of the emergence of subregions.
However, in a new situation with its emergent subregions, the subregions are differentially structured but little, and what differentiation does exist is not as yet firm. This means that changes come relatively easily in life space of adolescents. Since, the adolescent’s life space tends to have comparatively little clear-cut differentiation into subregions, what appears to an adult to be a major shift covering many steps of restructurization may, to an adolescent, involve only one step of change. In addition, the boundaries of the subregions of an adolescent’s life space are less rigid than those of an adult’s life space. This makes restructurization less difficult; an adolescent is less “set in his ways.”
4. Intensification of Self-Awareness:
Self-awareness involves who and what a person is and what he does about it. From birth, a self is in constant process of emergence and development. However, one’s awareness of himself is sharpened as he becomes more cognisant of groups with which he associates. Personalization and socialization are complementary processes. A group, although different from the persons of which it is constituted is dependent upon those persons for its very existence. In turn, a human organism without association with any social group probably would continue merely as a biological organism; no self or person would emerge.
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An adolescent is very much aware of himself. At time he experiences agonies of self-consciousness as he attempts to come to terms with a new constellation of meanings. Some evidences of adolescents’ intensification of self-awareness are proneness to religious conversion, sense of futility of it all, idealism, rebellion and cynicism.
An adult might view a sloppily dressed and conclude that the youth does not care about anything. However, should he gain the complete confidence of that same adolescent, he would probably find him deeply concerned with many things, but most of all with the enhancement of a self of which he is very much aware but does not understand.
5. Perplexity in Regard to Bodily Appearance and Functions:
Although psychological change in itself is not enough to account for the turmoil of an adolescent, his changing body with its new potential for feeling and behaving is a significant part of his life space. Body constitutes a region which is particularly close and important to an adolescent.
Although people sometimes speak of their bodies and themselves as if they were identical, psychologically their bodies also are parts of their environments and are treated as such. A youth structures his body into a region of his life space in the same way that he perceives other parts of his environment. His psychological body is that which he makes of his biological body.
Just prior to adolescence, a child generally knows his body quite well. He knows what he can expect from it, and how it will act under given circumstances. Then come the glandular and primary sexual changes of pubescence with accompanying secondary sexual changes. The individual becomes somewhat disturbed by his own body. The strange new bodily experiences cause this part of his life space, which is so close and vital to him, to become enigmatic and unknown.
The kind of perplexity arising from a change in an old environment which had been stabilized is quite different from that experienced when one enters a new environment that has never been structured.
Such changes of his body tends to shake his faith in the stability of the psychological ground upon which he stands, and perhaps, even undermines his confidence in the world he lives in. Since one’s body is a region of the life space which is very important and central for him, doubts in regard to its stability are crucial for adolescents.
6. Modifications of Time and Reality Perspective:
Adolescence is a period of particularly deep changes in respect to time perspectives and of sharper distinction of ‘reality’ from ‘irreality’. Man’s ‘time-binding’ ability is one of this most unique features. It grows from birth to adulthood, but at adolescence there is a definite expansion of its scope, paralleling that of physical growth. Whereas children it considers days, weeks, or months in their goals, adolescents consider years. As one develops, more memories of a ‘past’ and anticipations of a ‘future’ figure in the motivation for present behaviour.
Adolescents are a part of a present life space and they influence present ‘reality’ behaviour. A child tends to make no sharp distinction between reality and irreality. In a sense, since very young child cannot distinguish between the reality of things and the irreality of his imagination, he cannot tell a lie. However, by the time he reaches adulthood such a distinction is fairly well developed.
An adolescent, being a ‘marginal man’ in this regard too, fluctuates between making the sharper distinctions of adults and that with late childhood even though he wanted to. He would encounter great difficulty in trying to make himself believe in Santa Claus.
However, this does not mean that adolescents, or adults, completely cease attributing reality to figments of the imagination. Expansion of a person’s time perspective and his discrimination of reality from irreality cannot adequately be described bodily as either or situations; rather they are a continuum of relationships.