Developmenta
l Psychology
Chapter Eight
Personality Development
In young adulthood
EMERGING ADULTHOOD
❑ A. Role Transition Marking Adulthood
❑ 1. Emerging adulthood is the period when people are not youths, yet not yet completely grown-ups. It is the
unmistakable period from the late teenagers to the mid-to-late 20s.
❑ The most generally utilized criteria for choosing whether an individual has arrived at adulthood are role transitions,
which include accepting new responsibilities and obligations.
❑ Cultures in the developing world will, in general, be clearer about when an individual turn into a grown-up.
❏ a) A few societies use rituals, called rites of passage, to check this progress obviously.
❏ (1) Rites of passage may include profoundly expand steps that take days or weeks, or they might be packed into a
couple of moments.
❏ (a)Religious rituals: confirmation, bar and bat mitzvahs, American Latin quinceanera
❏ (b) Marriage
❏ (c) Tribal rituals denoting the change to
❏ adulthood will, in general, be open and may include pain or mutilation.
❏ b) Western culture has not many formal or obviously characterized rituals, which makes it hard to utilize any one
event as the marker for turning into a grown-up.
❑ B. Role Transition in Western Cultures
❑ 1. The most broadly utilized criteria for choosing whether an individual has arrived at adulthood are role transitions,
which includes accepting new responsibilities and duties. 3
EMERGING ADULTHOOD
❑ a) Voting, completing one’s education, beginning full-time employment, leaving
home, financial independence, getting married, becoming a parent
❑ b) Cohort effects show increasing average levels of education are leading to later
marriages and children living with their parents longer
❑ c) Western society has no clear age-constant rituals that clearly mark the transition
to adulthood, so less defined markers are employed
❑ (1)Initiation into a fraternity or sorority (2)Choosing to drink alcohol (3)Romantic
involvement
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EMERGING ADULTHOOD
❑ Neuroscience, Behavior, and Emerging Adulthood
❑ 1. The prefrontal cortex is not completely evolved or developed until the mid-20s.
❑ 2. Higher-level reasoning is not possible before early adulthood.
❑ 3. Young adults are more able than adolescents to take different points of view.
❑ 4. Emerging adults engage in more risky behaviors than do any other age group of adults.
❑ a) Edgework is the desire to carry on with life more on edge through physically and
emotionally threatening circumstances or situations.
❑ (1) Base jumping, waterfall kayaking, free solo climbing
❑ (2) Well planned, applications of expertise as opposed to reckless behavior
❑ (3) Gender difference in edgework:
(a)Men tend to be highly confident and use
❑ less rehearsal.
(b)Women tend to have more qualms and use
❑ more rehearsal.
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EMERGING ADULTHOOD
❑ D. Achieving Milestones: Education, Workforce, and Erikson’s Intimacy
❑ 1. Education and Workforce Attainment
a) One of the most common markers of adulthood in the
❑ United States is completing education.
(1)Almost 70% of all secondary school graduates set off for college.
(a) The rates in upper-income groups are higher than in lower-income groups.
❑ (b)The rates of attending college vary across racial and ethnic groups.
❑ (2) Research has documented how students develop while in college.
❑ (a)Advances in intellectual development and personal and social identity help students start thinking like adults.
❑ (b)Social interaction supported within an active learning process can facilitate the development of one’s sense of
identity.
❑ (i) Campus discussions and joining social movements are examples of this process.
❑ (3) College campuses are changing with an increase in the number of returning adult students (over age 25).
❑ (a)Returning adult students tend to be problem solvers, self-directed, and pragmatic.
❑ (b)They have relevant life experiences they can integrate with their course work.
❑ (c)They tend to experience more stress, but support from family and the positive effects of continuing one’s education
act as stress reducers.
❑ (d)Many express a sense of self-discovery 6
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EMERGING ADULTHOOD
❑ Establishing Intimacy
a) A significant task for adults is to deal with Erikson’s sixth
❑ stage, intimacy versus isolation.
(1)Men and career-oriented women solve identity issues before intimacy issues, while some women resolve intimacy
issues before identity issues.
❑ (2)Some women deal with both identity and intimacy issues simultaneously or intimacy before identity.
❑ 3)Thus, Erikson’s idea that identity must be resolved before intimacy is most applicable in the cases of men and career-
oriented women.
❑ b) Quarter-life-crisis
(1)The struggle of finding one’s way into the “real world.”
(a)Financial debt from education costs (b)Networking and time management
(c) Searching for meaning and self-exploration
❑ (2)The locked-out form is feeling unable to enter adult roles
❑ (3)The locked-in form is feeling trapped in adult roles
❑ (4)Commitment – independence reflects the longer time it takes more recent generations to traverse the challenges of
early adulthood
❑ So When Do People Become Adults?
(1) The proof is evident that a phase of developing emerging adulthood
(a)Achieving adulthood takes any longer today
❑ (b)Shedding of formal soul rites of passage (religious ceremonies) leaves less lucidity forthright at which a youngster
turns into a grown-up
❑ (c)Defining oneself as a grown-up lays on one's impression of whether critical key criteria have been met
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PHYSICAL DEVELOPMENT AND HEALTH
❑ A. Growth, Strength, and Physical Functioning
❑ Young adulthood is the point at which a few physical abilities peak: tallness or height, quality
or strength, muscle improvement, coordination, ability, and sensory acuity.
❑ The majority of these abilities start to decrease in middle age.
❑ B. Lifestyle Factors in Health
❑ Young adults are at the peak of health. Death from disease is relatively rare, especially during
the 20s.
❑ The leading cause of death is accidents.
❑ There are significant gender and ethnic differences:
❑ a) Men are more likely to die than women.
❑ b) African American and Latino young adult males are 2 to 2.5 times more likely to die than
European Americans
❑ c) Asian and Pacific Islander young adult males are likely to die at half the rate of European
Americans
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PHYSICAL DEVELOPMENT AND HEALTH
❑ Smoking
❑ Smoking is the single most significant contributor to medical issues or health problems.
❑ a) Nonsmokers who breathe secondhand smoke are at considerably higher risk for smoking-related diseases.
❑ b) Although challenging, quitting smoking has many health benefits.
❑ Drinking Alcohol
❑ 1. For the vast majority, drinking liquor acts hardly any health risks as they do not drive under the influence.
❑ Nutrition
❑ a) One type of drinking that is particularly troublesome among young adults, especially college students, is binge drinking.
❑ (1)For men, hitting the bottle hard or binge drinking is characterized as devouring at least five beverages in succession inside the
previous fourteen days. For women, the definition is consuming four or more drinks in a row within the past two weeks.
❑ b) Rates of alcohol problems are highest among adults aged 18 to 24
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PHYSICAL DEVELOPMENT AND HEALTH
❑ c) Problems related to binge drinking (1)Alcohol-related date rape
❑ (2) Assaults
(3)Death from drinking too much alcohol
(4)Alcohol use disorder: a drinking pattern that results in significant and recurrent consequences that
reflect the loss of reliable control over alcohol use.
❑ (5) Excessive long-term drinking can drain or increment the degrees of certain chemicals, making the body
need liquor to reestablish good feelings or to stay away from negative emotions.
❑ d) Several treatment approaches have been used for problem drinkers, including Alcoholics Anonymous,
treatment centers, medication, and counseling.
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PHYSICAL DEVELOPMENT AND HEALTH
❑ Nutrition
❑ Nutritional necessities change to some degree across adulthood, for the most part, because of differences in
metabolism, or how much vitality or energy the body needs.
❑ a) There is an immediate connection between diet one's psychological, enthusiastic or emotional, and physical
functioning.
❑ b) Nourishments high in immersed or saturated fat are connected to cardiovascular illness or disease
❑ c) Healthy diets should consist of foods that lower the level of cholesterol.
❑ (1)Low-density lipoproteins (LDLs) cause greasy or fatty deposits to amass in courses, hindering bloodstream.
❑ (2)High-density lipoproteins (HDLs) help keep arteries clear and separate LDLs.
❑ (3)The ratio of LDLs to HDLs in serum cholesterol is a significant risk factor in cardiovascular disease.
❑ d) Obesity is a growing health problem related to diet. (1)Body mass index (BMI) is a ratio of body
❑ weight to height and is related to total body fat.
❑ (2)BMI is related to the risk of severe medical conditions and mortality.
❑ (a)The higher one’s BMI, the higher one’s risk for several diseases.
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PHYSICAL DEVELOPMENT AND HEALTH
❑ Socioeconomic, Ethnic, and Education Issues in Health
❑ 1. The three most important social factors in health are socioeconomic status,
ethnicity, and education.
❑ a) Being poor is a major predictor of health challenges.
❑ b) In the United States, ethnic differences exist in the quality of health care
received.
❑ (1)Even when poor minorities in the United States have access to health care, they
are less likely than European Americans to receive treatment for chronic disease.
❑ c) The educational level also matters
❑ The risk of dying increases as education level decreases
❑ Lower quantity and quality of health care are outcomes of lower educational levels
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COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT
❑ How should we view intelligence in adults?
❑ Most modern theories of intelligence are multidimensional – they identify several types of intellectual abilities.
❑ a) Sternberg emphasized multidimensionality in his theory of successful intelligence.
❑ Baltes and colleagues introduced three other concepts as vital to intellectual development in adults:
❑ a) Multidirectionality – a few parts of knowledge or intelligence improve, and other aspects decay during
adulthood.
❑ b) Interindividual changeability – examples of progress differ, starting with one individual then onto the
next.
❑ c) Plasticity – different abilities are not fixed, yet can be changed under the right conditions at pretty much
any point in adulthood.
❑ How do we study intelligence?
a) The psychometric approach studies how interrelationships among intellectual abilities are organized
❑ (1) The structure of intelligence is the organization of interrelated intellectual abilities.
❑ (2)Testing and factor analysis lead to a factor or the relationship between the performance on one test and
the performance on another test being identified as a natural ability.
❑ (3)Most psychometric theorists believe intelligence consists of several factors.
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COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT
❑ B. Primary and Secondary Mental Abilities
❑ Intellectual abilities can be studied as groups of related skills called primary mental abilities.
❑ Secondary mental abilities are broader intellectual skills that are measured indirectly and help
organize the primary mental abilities.
❑ C. Fluid and Crystallized Intelligence
❑ Fluid intelligence consists of abilities that make people flexible and adaptive thinkers. Fluid abilities
generally decline across adulthood.
❑ Crystallized intelligence reflects the knowledge that people acquire through life experience and
education in a particular culture. Crystallized abilities improve until late in life.
❑ a) Individual differences in crystallized intelligence increase with age because maintaining crystallized
intelligence depends on being in situations that require its use
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COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT
❑ Neuroscience Research and Intelligence
❑ Parieto-Frontal Integration Theory (P-FIT) proposes that intelligence comes
from a distributed and integrated network of neurons in the parietal and frontal
lobes of the brain.
❑ a) P-FIT accounts for individual differences in intelligence as having their origins in
individual differences in brain structure and function.
❑ The neural efficiency hypothesis states intelligent people process information
more efficiently, showing weaker neural activations in a smaller number of areas
than less intelligent people.
❑ a) Evidence is mounting that with greater intelligence does come demonstrably
increased efficiency in neural processing.
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COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT
❑ Going Beyond Formal Operations: Thinking in Adulthood
❑ 1. Postformal thought is described by an acknowledgment that fact may shift starting with one
circumstance then onto the next, that solutions must be realistic, that ambiguity and contradiction,
and that feeling or emotion and subjectivity play a role in speculation or thinking.
❑ a) Postformal thinking has its causes in youthful adulthood.
❑ b) One portrayal of the improvement of intuition in adulthood is reflective judgment – a manner by
which grown-ups reason through issues including current issues, religions, science, individual
connections, and so forth.
❑ c) There is a systematic progression of reflective judgment: (1) Prereflective reasoning – people do
not acknowledge and may not even perceive that knowledge is uncertain. Understanding is gained
through the word of an authority figure or by
❑ firsthand observation.
❑ (2)Quasi-reflective reasoning – Recognition that knowledge contains elements of uncertainty
without understanding how evidence entails a conclusion.
❑ (3) Reflective reasoning – accepting that knowledge claims cannot be made with certainty and
must be re-evaluated in view of new evidence.
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COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT
❑ F. Integrating Emotion and Logic in Emerging and Young Adulthood
❑ 1. Adults understand that there is more than one right answer. This type of thinking is characterized by the
integration of emotion with logic. ) As they age, adults tend to make decisions and analyze problems not so
much on logical grounds, but rather on pragmatic and emotional grounds.
❑ b) The integration of emotion with logic provides the basis for decision making in the very personal and
sometimes difficult areas of love and work.
❑ 2. Evidence from neuroimaging research indicates that emotion and logic processing is integrated into the
prefrontal cortex, the anterior insula, and the amygdala.
❑ G. Emotional Intelligence (EI)
❑ 1. EI refers to people’s ability to recognize their own and others’ emotions, to correctly identify and
appropriately tell the difference between emotions, and to use this information to guide their thinking and
behavior
❑ a) A trait that reflects a person’s self-perceived dispositions and abilities
❑ b) An ability that reflects the person’s success at processing emotional information in social contexts
❑ c) Emotional intelligence increases with age and may contribute to higher subjective well-being.
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COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT
❑ Impression Formation is the Way we Form and Revise First Impressions about Others
❑ Hess and Pullen (1994) found that older adults modify their impression of a person from positive to negative
when negative information follows positive.
❑ Older adults modify their impression less when positive information follows negative.
❑ Younger adults make their impression based on the most recent information and do not show a difference in
their impression based on whether the new information was positive or negative.
❑ Older adults rely more on life experiences and social rules of behavior.
❑ Younger adults are more concerned with the situational consistency of the new information presented.
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WHO DO YOU WANT TO BE? PERSONALITY IN YOUNG ADULTHOOD
❑ A. Creating Scenarios and Life Stories
❑ 1. Young adults create a life span construct representing a unified sense of the past,
present, and future. This is manifested in two ways:
❑ a) Through a scenario that maps out the future based on a social clock, which includes
labeling future events with a specific time or age by which they are to be finished or
completed.
❑ b) A life story, which is a personal narrative that organizes past events into a coherent
sequence.
❑ (1)The life story begins to form in early life and is created and revised throughout adulthood.
❑ (2)Coherence in a life story begins with forming an identity; it is refined through intimacy and
refashioned in the wake of life changes throughout adulthood.
❑ (a) Agency: power, achievement, and autonomy
❑ (b) Communion: love, intimacy, and a sense of belonging
❑ (3) McAdams (2001, 2015) believes the model for change in identity over time is a process of
fashioning and refashioning one’s life story.
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WHO DO YOU WANT TO BE? PERSONALITY IN YOUNG ADULTHOOD
❑ Possible Selves
❑ 1. Individuals make conceivable selves by anticipating themselves into the future and figuring what
they might want to become, what they could become, and what they fear turning out to be.
❑ 2. Age differences in these projections rely on the measurement inspected.
❑ 3. Youths and young adults are unquestionably bound to have different selves and to accept all the
more unequivocally that they can really turn into the sought after self and effectively dodge the
feared self.
❑ C. Personal Control Beliefs
❑ 1. Personal control beliefs reflect the degree to which you believe your performance in a situation
depends on something you do.
❑ A high sense of personal control implies a belief that performance is up to you, while a low sense of
personal control implies that your performance is under the influence of forces other than your own.
❑ Schulz and Heckhausen (Haase, Heckhausen, & Wrosch, 2013; Heckhausen, Wrosch & Schulz, 2010)
proposed a lifespan model to describe the difference between primary and secondary control.
❑ a) Primary control is behavior aimed at affecting the individual’s external world.
❑ b) Secondary control is behavior or cognition that affects the individual’s internal world, believing
that one is capable of success even when faced with challenges. 24