Ch. 10 power point Life span Psychology

1. Chapter Ten
Becoming an Adult: Physical,
Cognitive, and Personality
Development In Young Adulthood

2. 10.1 Emerging Adulthood: Learning
Objectives
• What role transitions mark entry into
adulthood?
• How does going to college reflect the
transition to adulthood?
• What behavioral criteria mark the transition to
adulthood?
• How does achieving financial independence
reflect the transition to adulthood?

3. Emerging Adulthood
• No definitive criteria for marking when one
becomes an adult, especially in the West
• Emerging adulthood: a relatively new term
referring to the period when people are not
adolescents but are not fully adults
– Encompasses the years between late
adolescence and early 30s
– Social and demographic trends since the
1970s have created this new
developmental period

4. Role Transitions Marking Adulthood
• Role transitions: new responsibilities and
duties that mark movement into the next
developmental stages (e.g., marriage)

5. Cross-Cultural Evidence of Role
Transitions
• Rites of passage: important rituals marking
initiation into adulthood (e.g., college
graduation or marriage ceremonies)
– May last for hours or days
• Many cultures employ religious rituals (e.g.,
bar mitzvahs or bat mitzvahs)
• Rituals in non-Western cultures change little
with time and provide continuity
– Some tribes’ rituals involve pain or
mutilation

6. Going to College
• College attendance: ±10% in early 1900s, but
±67% today
• Increasing age, racial, and ethnic diversity
– Returning students: over age 25
• Problem-solvers, self-directed,
pragmatic, stressed; middle-aged
females report self-discovery
• College success: increases with student’s
psychological well-being and when all parties
take responsibility and are supportive

7. Behavioral Changes: Risk-Taking
• Edgework: living on the boundary between
life and death in physically or psychologically
risky situations
• Gender differences in dealing with edgework
– Men do not rehearse these; are highly
confident
– Women rehearse to ease their initially
lower confidence

8. Behavioral Changes: Establishing
Intimacy
• Intimacy vs. isolation: major psychosocial
conflict during young adulthood (Erikson’s 6th
stage)
• Intimacy involves creating a shared identity
with another
• Stronger sense of one’s own identity is
needed to achieve this intimacy
• Conflicting results
– Only some research shows stronger
identities to predict higher intimacy

9. Launching One’s Financial
Independence
• Financial independence
– A major marker of becoming an adult
– Gained earlier for 1/3 of high school
graduates or those not finishing high
school
– Facilitated by finding a niche through full-
or part-time jobs and the military
– May start later for college graduates,
because many return to live with parents
after graduation

10. So When Do People Become Adults?
• Quarterlife crisis: similar to a midlife crisis, but
occurs in one’s 20s
– A relatively new term for a period of self-
exploration, search for meaning, and
adjustment to daily hassles or life
challenges

11. 10.2 Physical Development & Health:
Learning Objectives
• In what respects are young adults at their
physical peak?
• How healthy are young adults in general?
• How do smoking, drinking alcohol, and
nutrition affect young adults’ health?
• How does the health of young adults differ as
a function of socioeconomic status, gender,
and ethnicity?

12. Growth, Strength, and Physical
Functioning
• Height is at its tallest during young adulthood
• Physical strength, coordination, and dexterity
in both sexes peaks in the late 20s and early
30s
• Most senses remain acute through to middle
age or old age
– Hearing begins to decline in the late 20s,
especially for high-pitched tones

13. Health Status
• 94% of young American adults say their health is
good or better
• Leading cause of death in early 20s: accidents
• Gender and ethnic-related prevalence
– Young adult men 2.5 times higher than
women
– 2-2.5 times higher for African- and Latino-
American than European-American men
– 2 times higher for European-American than
Asian- or Pacific-Islander-American men

14. Lifestyle Factors
• Smoking
– Nicotine is a known potent teratogen
– Smoking is the leading contributor to health
problems in smokers
– Quitting smoking is usually beneficial,
regardless of how or when it happens
• Nonsmokers also at high risk for diseases
– Over 40% are exposed to second-hand
smoke

15. Drinking Alcohol
• Occasional drinking, while not driving, is not
known to seriously affect health
– ≤ 2 glasses of wine or beer/day
• Heavy or “binge” drinking is costly to health,
hampers productivity, and can promote
victimization (e.g., assaults, rape)
• Binge drinking: consuming ≥5 (men) or ≥4
(women) in a row within 2 weeks
• Binge drinking is a major international health
concern, especially among college students

16. Drinking Alcohol: Alcoholism
• Alcoholism: an addiction involving physical
dependence on alcohol and withdrawal
symptoms when not drinking
• Excessive, long-term drinking affects brain
– Important neurotransmitters become
dangerously depleted or increased
• Causes alcohol cravings meant to
reduce negative, or increase, positive
feelings
• Treating alcoholism long-term is challenging

17. Nutrition
• Metabolism: how much energy the body
needs; slows down with age
• Should limit intake of saturated and trans fats,
cholesterol, added sugars, salt, and alcohol
• Obesity: growing health problem
• Body mass index (BMI): ratio of body weight
to height, related to total body fat
– ≤ 25 is healthy
– Health risks increase the higher one’s BMI

18. Nutrition: Cholesterol
• Low density lipoproteins (LDL): cholesterols
impeding blood flow by causing fatty deposits
to accumulate in arteries
• High density lipoproteins (HDL): cholesterols
that keep arteries clear and break down LDLs
• LDL/HDL ratio is important to health
– LDL should be < 160 mg/dL
– HDL should be > 40 mg/dL in men
– HDL should be > 50 mg/dL in women

19. Social, Gender,
and Ethnic Issues in Health
• Social factors
– People in poverty are less likely to obtain
adequate healthcare and are more often in
poor health
– People with better income as a result of
education are less likely to be ill and less
likely to die from chronic illness
• Gender
– U.S. women live longer than men and are
less likely to die from homicides

20. Ethnic Group Differences
• In the U.S., the residents of inner-city
neighborhoods have the poorest health
conditions
• African-American men in large urban areas
have lower life expectancy even than men in
developing countries
– Poverty plays a major role
– Lesser likelihood of being treated for
chronic diseases

21. 10.3 Cognitive Development:
Learning Objectives
• What is intelligence in adulthood?
• What are primary and secondary mental
abilities? How do they change?
• What are fluid and crystallized intelligence?
How do they change?
• How has neuroscience research furthered our
understanding of intelligence in adulthood?

22. 10.3 Cognitive Development:
Learning Objectives (cont’d.)
• What is postformal thought? How does it
differ from formal operations?
• How do emotion and logic become integrated
in adulthood?

23. How Should We View Intelligence in
Adults?
• Most theories are multidimensional, though
there is disagreement as to the dimensions
• Baltes et al.’s three dimensions
– Multidirectionality: some aspects improve
while others decline during adulthood
– Interindividual variability: patterns of
change vary between people
– Plasticity: abilities can be modified under
the right conditions

24. Primary – and Secondary Mental
Abilities
• Primary mental abilities: groups of related
skills organized into hypothetical constructs
– Number – Word fluency
– Verbal meaning – Inductive reasoning
– Spatial orientation
• Secondary mental abilities: clusters of related
primary abilities used as a framework for
describing intelligence’s structure; difficult to
measure directly

25. Fluid and Crystalized Intelligence
• Fluid and crystallized intelligence are
secondary mental abilities
• Fluid intelligence: being a flexible, adaptive
thinker, who can make inferences, and
understand concepts’ relationships
– Declines throughout adulthood
• Crystallized intelligence: knowledge of facts,
definitions, language, etc., acquired by life
experience
– Improves throughout adulthood

26. Neuroscience Research and
Intelligence
• Parieto-frontal integration theory (P-FIT):
intelligence comes from distributed and
integrated networks of neurons in the parietal
and frontal lobes
• Research supports the P-FIT model
• Still controversial

27. Going Beyond Formal Operations:
Thinking in Adulthood
• Postformal thought
• Reflective judgment
• Prereflective reasoning
• Quasi-reflective reasoning
• Reflective reasoning

28. Integrating Emotion and Logic in Life
Problems
• In postformal thinking, decision-making and
problem-solving emphasize:
– Change and context-dependent principles
instead of conformity and context-free
principle
– Pragmatics of the situation, emotion, and
social facets more than logic alone
– The relative rather than absolute nature of
rules and norms

29. Implicit Social Beliefs
• Implicit social beliefs (ISBs): emotionally
laden mental representations of beliefs, rules,
and values
– Representation in memory is usually
outside of conscious awareness
– Differ in content, strength, and likelihood of
being activated in a particular situation
– Activation is likelier when the ISB is very
strong

30. 10.4 Personality in Young Adulthood:
Learning Objectives
• What is the life-span construct? How do
adults create scenarios and life stories?
• What are possible selves? Do they show
differences during adulthood?
• What are personal control beliefs?

31. Creating Scenarios and Life Stories
• Life-span construct: one’s unified sense of
the past, present, and future
• Scenario: expectations of how one’s future
life will play out
– Helps people formulate a game plan and a
way to track progress
• Social clock: a personal timetable tagging the
time or age by which future goals or events
are to be completed

32. McAdams’s Life-Story Model
• Life story: a personal narrative organizing
past events into a coherent sequence
reflecting one’s identity, ideology, and goals
– Agency and communion are themes
– Attitudes toward one’s story are conveyed
through emotions (e.g., optimism)
– Begins forming in late adolescence
– From middle age onward, reshaped to form
generativity

33. Possible Selves
• Possible selves: representations of one’s
hoped-for-selves and feared-for-selves
• With increasing age, important possible
selves concern personal matters more than
family ones
• Young and middle-aged adults are more
optimistic about achieving hoped-for-selves
• Much older adults perceive the self as
remaining stable
– Physical health is an important feared self

34. Personal Control Beliefs
• Personal control beliefs: extent to which
performance depends on own effort or ability
rather than outside forces
• Greatly affects personality, social, health,
intellectual, and career outcomes
• Inconsistent research results
• Control beliefs vary depending upon the
domain in which they are studied (e.g.,
intelligence vs. health)

35. Personal Control Beliefs: Domains
• Examples of domain-specific findings:
– People’s perceived control of marital
happiness increasing with age
– One’s development declining with age
• One domain-nonspecific finding is that
satisfaction is greater for:
– Younger adults who attribute success to
their effort
– Older adults who attribute success to their
ability

36. Personal Control Beliefs: Research
• Some research shows four types of control
experience
– Control from within oneself
– Control over oneself
– Control over the environment
– Control from the environment
• Other research distinguishes two types of
control
– Primary versus secondary control

37. Personal Control Beliefs: Primary
and Secondary Control
• Primary control: modifying the external
environment to fit one’s needs and goals
(e.g., asking a teacher for tutoring)
• Secondary control: modifying one’s
cognitions, goals, or behavioral standards
(e.g., attributing failure on a test to task
difficulty instead of ability)
• Primary and secondary control operate in
parallel during first half of life; primary
declines in midlife