2. • physical functioning generally peaks during young adulthood
(Aldwin & Gilmer, 2013). You’re as tall as you will ever be.
Physical strength, coordination, and dexterity in both sexes peaks
during the late 20s and early 30s, declining slowly throughout the
rest of life even when you maintain an active lifestyle
• Sensory acuity is also at its peak in the early 20s (Fozard &
Gordon-Salant, 2001). Visual acuity remains high until middle age,
when people tend to become farsighted and require glasses for
reading. Hearing begins to decline somewhat by the late 20s,
especially for high-pitched tones.
Growth, Strength, and Physical
Functioning
3. Lifestyle Factors in Health
In emerging and young adulthood, three behaviors
set the stage for health across the rest of
adulthood: smoking, alcohol use, and nutrition.
4. Lifestyle Factors in Health
SMOKING
• smoking during one’s lifetime has a significant negative impact on cognitive
functioning in adults over age 50
• most people who try to quit smoking relapse within six months.
• For most people, success is attained only after a long period of stopping and
relapsing.
BENEFITS OF QUITTING
• in less than a year after quitting, the lungs regain their normal ability to
move mucus out. The risks of stroke and coronary heart disease return to
normal after a period of roughly 15 years.
5. Lifestyle Factors in Health
DRINKING
• About 60% of women and 70% of men in the United States drink alcohol at
least occasionally
• For the majority of people, drinking alcohol poses no serious health problems
as long as they do not drink and drive. Evidence suggests that moderate
drinkers (one or two glasses of beer or wine per day for men, one per day for
women) have a 25% to 40% reduction in risk of cardiovascular disease and
stroke than either abstainers or heavy drinkers, even after controlling for
hypertension, prior heart attack, and other medical conditions.
• However, moderate drinking also increases the risk for certain types of
cancer, so whether moderate drinking is an appropriate health behavior
depends on the balance between lowering cardiovascular risk and increasing
cancer risk.
6. Lifestyle Factors in Health
DRINKING
• About 60% of women and 70% of men in the United States drink alcohol at
least occasionally
• For the majority of people, drinking alcohol poses no serious health problems
as long as they do not drink and drive. Evidence suggests that moderate
drinkers (one or two glasses of beer or wine per day for men, one per day for
women) have a 25% to 40% reduction in risk of cardiovascular disease and
stroke than either abstainers or heavy drinkers, even after controlling for
hypertension, prior heart attack, and other medical conditions.
• However, moderate drinking also increases the risk for certain types of
cancer, so whether moderate drinking is an appropriate health behavior
depends on the balance between lowering cardiovascular risk and increasing
cancer risk.
7. Lifestyle Factors in Health
DRINKING
• About 60% of women and 70% of men in the United States drink alcohol at
least occasionally
• For the majority of people, drinking alcohol poses no serious health problems
as long as they do not drink and drive. Evidence suggests that moderate
drinkers (one or two glasses of beer or wine per day for men, one per day for
women) have a 25% to 40% reduction in risk of cardiovascular disease and
stroke than either abstainers or heavy drinkers, even after controlling for
hypertension, prior heart attack, and other medical conditions.
• However, moderate drinking also increases the risk for certain types of
cancer, so whether moderate drinking is an appropriate health behavior
depends on the balance between lowering cardiovascular risk and increasing
cancer risk.
8. Lifestyle Factors in Health
Nutrition.
• Experts agree nutrition directly affects one’s mental, emotional, and physical
functioning
9. Cognitive Development
How Should We View Intelligence in Adults?
We can view intelligence in three concept: multidirectionality, interindividual
variability, and plasticity
• Multidirectionality = Some aspects of intelligence improve and other aspects
decline during adulthood.
• Interindividual variability = These patterns of change also vary from one
person to another
• Plasticity = They are not fixed, but can be modified under the right conditions
at just about any point in adulthood.
10. Cognitive Development
Primary and Secondary Mental Abilities
• Primary mental abilities = Groups of related intellectual skills (such as memory or spatial
ability).
• Secondary mental abilities = Broader intellectual skills that subsume and organize the
primary abilities.
Fluid and Crystallized Intelligence
• Fluid intelligence = consists of the abilities that make you a flexible and adaptive thinker,
allow you to make inferences, and enable you to understand the relations among concepts.
• Crystallized = intelligence is the knowledge you have acquired through life experience and
education in a particular culture.
11. 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 areas of the brain.
• 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.
Going Beyond Formal Operations: Thinking in Adulthood
• Postformal thought = is characterized by recognition that truth (the correct answer) may vary from
situation to situation, solutions must be realistic to be reasonable, ambiguity and contradiction are the
rule rather than the exception, and emotion and subjective factors usually play a role in thinking.
• reflective judgment = way adults reason through dilemmas involving current affairs, religion, science,
personal relationships, and the like.
12. Cognitive Development
Integrating Emotion and Logic in Emerging and Young Adulthood
The basic goal of the social cognition approach is to understand how people make sense of themselves,
others, and events in everyday life.
• Emotional intelligence (EI) = refers to people’s ability to recognize their own and others’ emotions, to
correctly identify and appropriately tell the difference between emotions, and use this information to
guide their thinking and behavior.
Emotional intelligence consists of two aspects:
• First, EI can be viewed as a trait that reflects a person’s self-perceived dispositions and abilities.
• Second, EI can be viewed as an ability that reflects the person’s success at processing emotional
information and using it appropriately in social contexts.
• Impression formation is the way we form and revise first impressions about others.
