This document discusses several key aspects of emerging adulthood including cognitive, physical, and social-emotional development. It covers topics like role transitions into adulthood through rites of passage, changes in the brain and behaviors during this period, achieving education and career milestones, physical health behaviors and their impact, types of intelligence and cognitive changes, personality development through creating life stories and possible selves, different types of relationships including friendships and romantic relationships, and family dynamics including decisions around having children and impacts of divorce.

1. EMERGING ADULTHOOD
Role Transitions Marking Adulthood
- Role transition is movement into the next stage of development marked by assumption
of new responsibilities and duties.
- Rites of passage: rituals in marking initiation in adulthood and involves important events.
- Rites of passage differ depending on culture.
- One of the most important rites of passage is marriage.
Neuroscience, Behavior, and Emerging Adulthood
- Major development in the brain where it develops interconnections with other structures
in the brain.
- Significant changes in behavior.
- Emerging adults tend to think differently than adolescents.
- Emerging adults engage in more risky behaviors
Achieving Milestones: Education, Workforce, and Erikson’s Intimacy
- Going to college signifies the transition from an adolescent to and emerging adult/young
adult
- College students that return to college at around 25 years old are considered as
returning adult students
- Returning adult students are considerably more stressed because of work-family-school
conflict.
- Intimacy: young adults are likely to be afraid of committing to a long-term relationship
with another person.
- Men and women resolve identity and intimacy and identity issues differently.
- Early adulthood should be separated into emerging adulthood and early adulthood
(Robinson, 2015)
So When Do People Become Adults?
- It is evident that people in their late 20’s and early 30’s are considered to be adults.
- Rites of passage are key indicators of people becoming adults.
- Cultures without rites of passage depend on their perception whether or not they have
become adults.
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2. PHYSICAL DEVELOPMENT AND HEALTH
Growth, Strength, and Physical Functioning
- 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.
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.
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.
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.

3. NUTRITION
- Experts agree nutrition directly affects one’s mental, emotional, and physical functioning.
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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.
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.
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.

4. - 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.
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.
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PERSONALITY IN YOUNG ADULTHOOD
Creating Life Stories
Scenario = Manifestation of the life-span construct through expectations about the future
Life Story and McAdam's Life-Story Model = An internalized narrative with a beginning,
middle, and an anticipated ending. Identity is not just a collection of traits, nor is it a collection of
plans, strategies, or goals. Instead, it is based on a story of how the person came into being,
where the person has been, where he or she is going, and who he or she will become

5. Tagging future events with a particular time or age by which they are to be completed
creates a social clock. This personal timetable gives people a way to track progress through
adulthood, and it may use biological markers of time (such as menopause), social aspects of
time (such as marriage), and historical time (such as the turn of the century) (Hagestad &
Neugarten, 1985).
Possible Selves
Personal Control Beliefs - reflect the degree to which you believe your performance in a
situation depends on something you do
Primary Control - is behavior aimed at affecting the individual’s external world; working a
second job to increase one’s earnings is an example. One’s ability to influence the environment
is heavily influenced by biological factors (e.g., stamina to work two jobs); so it changes over
time—from very low influence during early childhood to high influence during middle age and
then to very low again in late life.
Secondary Control - is behavior or cognition aimed at affecting the individual’s internal world;
an example is believing that one is capable of success even when faced with challenges
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RELATIONSHIP TYPES AND ISSUES
Friendships
Friendship in adulthood: - From a developmental perspective, adult friendships can be
viewed as having identifiable stages (Levinger, 1980, 1983): Acquaintanceship, Buildup,
Continuation, Deterioration, and End
Three broad themes characterize both traditional (e.g., face-to-face) and new
forms (e.g., online) of adult friendship
1. The affective or emotional basis of friendship refers to self-disclosure and
expressions of intimacy, appreciation, affection, and support, and all are based
on trust, loyalty, and commitment.
2. The shared, or communal nature, of friendship reflects how friends participate in
or support activities of mutual interest
3. The sociability and compatibility dimension represents how our friends keep us
entertained and are sources of amusement, fun, and recreation.
Men’s, Women’s, and Cross-Sex Friendships - Men’s and women’s friendships tend
to differ in adulthood, reflecting continuity in the learned behaviors from childhood

6. Four characteristics of same-sex friends do not appear to differ between men and
women and are similar across cultures and age groups:
● geographic proximity,
● similarity of interests and values,
● Inclusion,
● and symmetrical reciprocity
Three characteristics that distinguish female same-sex friendships from males’
same-sex friendships are:
● communion and self-disclosure,
● greater effort and expectations from friends in general,
● a greater risk of corumination
Love Relationships
Love through adulthood -
● Research shows the development of romantic relationships in emerging
adulthood is a complex process influenced by relationships in childhood and
adolescence
● Early in a romantic relationship, passion is usually high whereas intimacy and
commitment tend to be low. This is infatuation: an intense, physically based
relationship when the two people have a high risk of misunderstanding and
jealousy.
● Infatuation is short-lived. As passion fades, either a relationship acquires
emotional intimacy or it is likely to end. Trust, honesty, openness, and
acceptance must be a part of any strong relationship; when they are present,
romantic love develops
● Research shows people who select a partner for a more permanent relationship
(e.g., marriage) during the height of infatuation are likely to support the notion of
“love at first sight” and are more likely to divorce.
● If the couple spends more time and works at their relationship, they may become
committed to each other. By spending much of their time together, making
decisions together, caring for each other, sharing possessions, and developing
ways to settle conflicts, they increase the chances that their relationship will last.
Such couples usually show outward signs of commitment, such as wearing a

7. lover’s ring, having children together, or simply sharing the mundane details of
daily life, from making toast at breakfast to following before-bed rituals
Falling in love
● Assortative Mating: states people find partners based on their similarity
to each other
○ occurs along many dimensions, including education, religious
beliefs, physical traits, age, socioeconomic status, intelligence,
and political ideology, among others
○
Developmental forces, Neuroscience, Love relationships
● Love is one of three discrete, interrelated emotion systems (the sex drive
and attachment are the other two; Fisher, 2016; Pfaff & Fisher, 2012; see
also Helen Fisher’s series of TED Talks
● The brain circuitry involved in romantic love, maternal love, and long-term
attachment overlap
● Aron and colleagues (2005) reported that couples who were in the early
stages of romantic love showed high levels of activity in the dopamine
system, which is involved in all of the basic biological drives. Once the
relationship settles into what some people might call long-term
commitment and tranquility, the brain processes switch neurochemically
to substances related to morphine, a powerful narcotic
● Additional research indicates that the hormone oxytocin may play an
important role in attachment. In men, it enhances their partner’s
attractiveness compared to other females
Violence in Relationships
● Abusive relationship - Sometimes relationships become violent; one person
becomes aggressive toward the partner
● Battered woman syndrome - occurs when a woman believes she cannot leave
the abusive situation and may even go so far as to kill her abuser

8. LIFESTYLES AND RELATIONSHIPS
Singlehood
● Men and women are single—defined as not living with an intimate partner
Cohabitation
● People in committed, intimate, sexual relationships who live together but are not
married.
LGBTQ Relationships
● The current generation of adults in the LGBTQ community have largely experienced
various forms of oppression and discrimination throughout their adult lives
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FAMILY DYNAMICS AND THE LIFE COURSE
The Parental Role
● Nuclear family: most common in Western societies; only parents and children
● Extended family: most common globally; grandparents, relatives, parents, and children
Deciding Whether to Have Children

9. ● Potential parents don’t think deliberately about when to have a child
● For career-oriented people and those who like their freedom, parenting does not readily
cross their minds
● Couples without children have advantages but deal with societal expectations
● Parenting skills must be acquired
Diverse Family Forms
● Single parents face considerable obstacles
○ finances and integrating work with parenting
○ divorced single parents report complex feelings toward their children
○ single mothers are hit hardest
● Step-, foster, adoptive, and same-sex couple parenting
○ an issue is the parents’ bond with their children
○ children of same sex parents do not experience problems differently than those
of heterosexual couples
Divorce
● men and women agree on reasons for divorce; with infidelity being the most common
reason
● divorce touches every aspect of relationships
● the lack of positive emotions can take a toll and result to divorce
● covenant marriage: expands marriage contracts into a lifelong commitment
○ centers on religious and cultural values
● young adults face a great deal of emotional vulnerability
● the effects of experiencing parents’ divorcing can be long-lasting
Remarriage
● the trauma of divorce does not always deter getting into new relationships
● remarriages tend to be less stable than first marriages
● may be less tolerated by adult children